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Quantum Leaps
| Article
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17388 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1990 |
2,905 Words |
| Author
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Ralph Benko
Ralph Benko, an attorney, is secretary of the Prosperity
Caucus, an international organization of supply-side
economists, and president of Cauldron Company, the proprietor
of the Engelsberg Process for the removal of micro-
contamination from surfaces in semiconductor fabrication. |
MICROCOSM
George Gilder
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989
426 pp., $ 19.95
George Bush, call your office! The Third Millennium has arrived, a shade early to be sure, in the form of a book I have delivered to your office, Microcosm. It has been inscribed:
For George Bush-
President of the Quantum Age.
Mr. President, do not resent Gilder's jumping the gun on the millennium, even though he's dragging it in on your watch. Gilder has always been way ahead of the curve. What's a dozen years out of a thousand?
As you will certainly recall from your days as vice president, President Reagan kept a copy of Gilder's last best-seller, Wealth and Poverty, on his desk in 1981, during the pitched battles on tax reform. If Wealth and Poverty by its actual political influence is arguably the most important book of the eighties, Microcosm stands an excellent chance of becoming the most important book of the nineties. It addresses the central policy challenges that fact America.
Message of the microcosm
It is hard to ignore a book starting with the statement: "In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth in the form of physical resources is steadily declining in value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things." Agree or disagree, here is a powerful proposition. And the rest of the book explores it, looking at what Gilder calls "the microcosm," actually, a series of small universes.
The first chapter is the most difficult; it is an account of the discoveries of quantum physics, but should not be skipped. "It is understandable," writes Gilder, "that humans resist the microcosm and even rebel against it…Defying the testimony of the human senses, the new physics is contrary to all human intuition and metaphor." Matter is not what it seems.
This point is critical because our technology, including ideology, is largely governed by the way we approach matter. It turns out that the revolution in physics
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