DEAR EDITOR:

Hats off to the local high school teacher who reported her physics students said physics is hard in a televised report on a local competition for students.

Well, yes, I agree. Physics is hard. My physics and mathematics are way behind me, but not totally forgotten. So, when a leading physicist suggested A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime by Youngstown’s own, John Archibald Wheeler, as accessible to the lay reader, I nipped.

An Einstein for Dummies it wasn’t. I spent hours working through barely a few pages of text at a time. Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to struggle for class standing or a paycheck, so I could afford to throw up my hands when specific subjects proved beyond my understanding. The fault didn’t lie with Wheeler, who at his death was hailed as one of the greatest physicists and greatest teachers of physics of the last 100 years

What’s creepy about physics, and mathematics, too, is they can describe a world at odds with common sense. The Earth is not flat. The folks who demonstrated the Earth was curved had to overcome strongly held objections rooted in the feeling of flatness experienced in everyday life.There are numbers that refer to quantities that can’t be seen, touched, heard, or be ordered online by anyone, or delivered by Amazon to your doorstep the next day. Yet, they’re real.

Did physicists pull the trigger on the lockwork of evil when they signed up for the Manhattan Project? Director Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie, Oppenheimer, revived troubling questions about the relationship between technical knowledge and money and authority. Would Prof. Szilard have made the world a better place had he refrained from seeking the patronage of President Roosevelt, which resulted in $2 billion being diverted from the production of conventional weapons that may have ended World War II sooner?

I write about America’s group health insurance, a lamebrain idea that has eluded examination by competent authorities for many decades. Imagine an alternate-universe Manhattan Project in which the theory had been debunked, the bombs wouldn’t work as had been thought, but the scientific quackery is kept alive to maintain a stable political equilibrium. Genuine experts keep their mouths shut, fearing for their jobs and personal safety. Maybe Congress can change that and jump into the “physics” of group health insurance.

JACK LABUSCH

Niles