Collin R. Skocik

We live in a world that tosses the word “hero” around rather casually. A girl falls down a well and gets pulled out again, and suddenly she’s called a hero. Private Jessica Lynch is taken prisoner in Iraq, held for a while, and then rescued…and she’s called a hero. I have nothing but sympathy for her plight and I harbor no ill thoughts toward her, but to call her a hero? A victim, I would say. The real hero would be whoever coordinated her rescue – I don’t even know who that was.

Of course, there are real heroes. The September 11, 2001, firefighters and police, the passengers on Flight 93 – actually a lot of heroes emerged that day. Catastrophe tends to do that.

But at the same time, even as we canonize any garbageman who has the sense to slam on the breaks to avoid hitting a little girl in the middle of the road, sometimes we seek to smear the reputation of real heroes.

In the past several days I have been arguing – with openmouthed astonishment – about the merits of Charles Herbert Lightoller, a sailor who lived from 1874 to 1952. My astonishment comes from the fact that I’ve come across numerous people who not only deny that Mr. Lightoller was a hero, but in fact refer to him as a coward and a moron!

It is impossible to cite in great detail the many adventures and courageous exploits of this old-time mariner, but here are some highlights. As soon as he went to sea at the age of 13, he distinguished himself quickly to his superiors, throwing himself into a job he loved, even though for four years he received no pay. When his ship, the Holt Hill, was shipwrecked on remote, inhospitable Saint George Island, Lightoller, the youngest and most inexperienced crew member on board, showed more endurance than many of his older shipmates, and provided much counsel to his despondent captain, the colorful Jock Sutherland, who had taken a liking to the enthusiastic young sailor.

Some years later, when he was assigned to the Pacifique, one of the first iron sailing ships, a fire broke out below decks after the cargo was jostled by a hurricane. For days it appeared the ship would not reach shore before pressure from the heat below would blow out plates and sink the ship. Lightoller went alone with the captain on a dangerous expedition into hostile territory in order the negotiate for an offload of the burning cargo.

After a bad bout of malaria he decided to leave the sea and go prospecting for gold in the American West. Though his expedition met with no success, he dynamically led his group as nature threw one obstacle after another in their way. Ingeniously he plotted a path through a raging, overflowing river, saving several of his friends from certain doom when they became trapped in the middle of the torrent.

Most famously, Lightoller was stationed as First Officer of the famous luxury liner Titanic in 1912. Though bumped down to Second Officer in a last-minute staffing shuffle, Lightoller was placed in charge of the evacuation of the ship’s port side after the Titanic struck an iceberg and began to sink. Lightoller has been criticized for his strict interpretation of the “women and children first” rule, which he interpreted as “women and children only,” and some allege that many lives were lost as a result. But Lightoller remained at his position until the ship sank under him, at which time he was dragged under against an engine grate. He was luckily blown free by an explosion below, and managed to grab ahold of a lifeboat floating upside-down nearby. About twenty men reached that upside-down boat, and as a swell blew up at dawn Lightoller led them in balancing the boat to keep it afloat until one of the other lifeboats spotted them and picked them up.

When the First World War broke out, the ships of the White Star Line were compelled into military service. The ship Lightoller was serving aboard by then, the Oceanic, ended up running aground on a reef. Once again Lightoller was in the position of loading and lowering lifeboats as the ship sank beneath him. After losing the Oceanic, his favorite ship, he joined the British Navy.

He ascended to command a small ship designated HMTB 117. During this tenure, he prevented an air attack on London by firing shells revealing the position of an enemy dirigible. After HMTB-117 was torpedoed by a U-Boat, and Lightoller once again had to evacuate a sinking ship, he was given command of the H.M.S. Falcon, where he undertook a single-minded quest to destroy German U-Boats. For over a year he was unsuccessful, but finally he did ram and sink a U-Boat that had torpedoed one of the ships in his convoy.

After the war he temporarily returned to the White Star Line, but resigned when it was apparent that the company intended to stonewall his career due to his association with the infamous Titanic. His family survived by running a boarding house; the effort was successful enough that Lightoller bought a yacht, the Sundowner. At the onset a World War II, Lightoller and his wife Sylvia undertook a spy mission, navigating the Sundowner through German waters to report what they saw to British intelligence.

But perhaps Lightoller’s most spectacular adventure was near the end of the war, when the Navy confiscated the Sundowner to evacuate soldiers from Dunkirk. Lightoller would not abide handing his beloved yacht over to someone else, so he elected to undertake the dangerous mission himself. His youngest son, Roger, accompanied him. Steering into heavy German gunfire, Lightoller eluded the bombs and shells by anticipating the enemy’s movements and using the boat’s small size to his advantage. He reached Dunkirk successfully and crammed the boat full to twice its capacity, then navigated his way out again though German gunfire. On reaching safety, Lightoller unloaded his human cargo . . . then turned the boat around to do it all again! Altogether he saved 131 British soldiers.

A coward and a moron? Well, if by moron you mean caution-to-the-winds determination to save lives, and if possible the ship too, yeah, Lightoller’s a moron. Coward?? Read the preceding paragraph.

Evidently Lightoller’s strict and inflexible behavior aboard the Titanic has made up people’s minds about him, notably filmmaker James Cameron, who has stated audaciously that Lightoller was NOT a hero. This attitude reflects a misconception about the man and indeed the time of the Titanic disaster. It’s important to remember that Lightoller was not aware that the ship was sinking. He knew it was damaged and flooding, but thought the watertight bulkheads would keep the ship afloat. It was only once he had launched most of the boats that he realized the ship was really going to sink. He was also unaware that the lifeboats were new and tested overweight, and didn’t want to risk buckling them by trying to lower them with a full load. Undoubtedly he would have acted differently had communication aboard ship been handled better. Furthermore, “women and children first” was the unwritten law of the sea at that time. He had very little difficulty keeping the men out of the boats. A gentleman simply did not save his own life until he was sure all the women were safe. Almost every man who survived the disaster was compelled to explain himself. Many, including company president J. Bruce Ismay, were effectively ruined by the mere fact of their survival. Lightoller was not among these, for he never left the ship. As he said at the disaster hearings, the ship left him. I challenge Mr. Cameron – and anyone else alive today, myself included – to live half as worthwhile a life as Mr. Lightoller.

In the past few days, I've heard some comments made on the news that really surprised me. I'm not going to name particular networks or anchors, but it seems to me the media has a responsibility to educate and inform accurately, and yet news networks mishandle the facts to the extent that I don't trust anything I hear.

For example, a meteorologist was describing how the rotation of the Earth causes the Coraolis winds, and how if the Earth were to stop rotating, we wouldn't have any weather. Then he joked that we wouldn't have any gravity either, which wouldn't be good, ha-ha. I know it's a common misconception that the Earth's rotation causes gravity, but it seems to me when you're a media personality upon whom people rely for accurate information, you'd take more care than to perpetuate such a flagrant scientific error -- ESPECIALLY if you're a meteorologist. I would have thought a meteorologist would know better.

If anyone reading this (if there IS anyone) is wondering what then is causing gravity, the answer is that any object with mass has gravity. It's fundamental to every atom. The more mass and density an object has, the greater its gravitational energy. Einstein deomstrated through general relativity that gravity and inertia are actually the same phenomenon, that if you're in a spaceship accelerating at the rate of one gee, the energy exterted on your body is identical to the energy exterted when you're on the surface of the Earth. As a matter of fact, if the Earth were to stop rotating, I would think the gravitational pull would become a bit stronger, because then you wouldn't have centrifugal force.

This morning they were reporting on Pluto having been voted out of its membership amongst the planets of the Solar System, and they were wondering, well, if it's not a planet, then what is it? And one of the anchors suggested, "A moon of Saturn?" I can only hope he was joking, though it's hard to tell sometimes. I would expect the rankest layman, let alone a news anchor, to know that Pluto is twice again the distance from the Sun as Saturn.

I'm not going to go too much into the media-wide mismanagement of the reports of the Korean scientist who faked his stem cell results. That issue has been tackled elsewhere, and more eloquently and knowledgably than I could. Suffice it to say, the media was clearly looking for a sensational story rather than accurately representing the facts.

And that's only issues related to science. Granted, that's a subject they're more likely to screw up than most others, since many people -- even scientists -- don't understand science. But there are other things. Anchors inject their opinions into their stories, sacrifice accuracy for the sake of puns, simplify for lowest-common-denominator viewer intelligence, and even sometimes neglect or modify facts in the face of mass ignorance. It's troubling.

But nothing beats something I heard the other day -- it wasn't a news network, but even so it still has me chuckling -- the dingbat host continually referred to "Ceylon, formerly Sri Lanka." Utterly fascinating. Well, I'm going to go take a walk down Pablo Beach, formerly Jacksonville Beach...

No, not the crazy starship design developed by Freeman Dyson in the 1960s which would detonate nuclear bombs behind a huge shock absorber and propel a spaceship. This is the new Moon ship which will be used by the next generation of lunar astronauts, previoously called "Apollo on steroids". Why NASA would use the name Orion is a mystery to me...NASA has historically been careful about not repeating names. But since the Orion starship was never built and will never be built due to the ban on nuclear weapons in space -- plus the fact that it's a bloody stupid idea -- and probably wouldn't have been a NASA project had it ever been undertaken, perhaps NASA management doesn't see this as a repeat of a name.

Anyway, whatever its name, next week NASA will announce who is going to build the thing. Naturally the contenders are Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Grumman. All three are reputable, and it's been too long since the days of Apollo to base any estimate on the past, so I'll trust NASA to make the right choice. Hopefully they've learned their lesson after the Challenger and Columbia disasters and will choose based on qualifications, not bureaucracy or politics. Fortunately in the wake of the Columbia disaster I think they're going to be very careful for a long time to come -- despite the fact that many of the problems that led to the disaster have STILL not been solved.

But at least we're moving along. After twenty years of nothing but low-orbit shuttle missions, we're on the move again, returning to the Moon, and Mars is back on the agenda. At least for now.

For many years, it has been assumed that Karl Gambolputty de von Ausfernschplendenschlittcrasscrenbonfrieddingledongledungleburstein von nackerthrasherapplebangerhorowitzticolensicgranderknottyschpelltinklegrandlich-grumblemeyerspeltervasslerkurstlichimbleeisenbaumvagungutenabendbitteinen-nuremburgerbratwustlegerschpurtlitzviemmacherknublehundsfutgumberaber-schonendiecherkaubfleichmittlereicher von haupkoft of Ulm, who died during a live TV interview in 1969, was the only surviving relative of the 19th century German composer Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfernschplendenschlittcrasscrenbonfrieddingledongledungleburstein von nackerthrasherapplebangerhorowitzticolensicgranderknottyschpelltinklegrandlich-grumblemeyerspeltervasslerkurstlichimbleeisenbaumvagungutenabendbitteinen-nuremburgerbratwustlegerschpurtlitzviemmacherknublehundsfutgumberaber-schonendiecherkaubfleichmittlereicher von haupkoft of Ulm, but now, through the magic of DNA testing, it has been confirmed that U.S. Senator David Gambolputty de von Ausfernschplendenschlittcrasscrenbonfrieddingledongledungleburstein von nackerthrasherapplebangerhorowitzticolensicgranderknottyschpelltinklegrandlich-grumblemeyerspeltervasslerkurstlichimbleeisenbaumvagungutenabendbitteinen-nuremburgerbratwustlegerschpurtlitzviemmacherknublehundsfutgumberaber-schonendiecherkaubfleichmittlereicher von haupkoft of Ulm is in fact distantly related to Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfernschplendenschlittcrasscrenbonfrieddingledongledungleburstein von nackerthrasherapplebangerhorowitzticolensicgranderknottyschpelltinklegrandlich-grumblemeyerspeltervasslerkurstlichimbleeisenbaumvagungutenabendbitteinen-nuremburgerbratwustlegerschpurtlitzviemmacherknublehundsfutgumberaber-schonendiecherkaubfleich-mittlereicher von haupkoft of Ulm.

It's certainly a fun possibility and fertile ground for science fiction stories. The farther you delve into the nether world of quantum mechanics, the less the world makes sense. Matter, energy, location, even time and causality, start to crumble. Parallel universes seem to simultaneously make too much sense and too little. They fit too neatly into an understandable niche that any Star Trek fan can appreciate, and yet how can there be more than one universe if all space-time is included in this one?

Many books have been written about parallel universes, both fiction and nonfiction, and I don't pretend to understand all the science. But since an atom is the smallest particle of matter, then a subatomic particle isn't really a particle at all, is it? It's a vibration, a wave in something that hasn't been defined. What is that something? Ether? A universe-wide zero-point field that runs far deeper than merely the energy of an atom resisting absolute zero? String theory suggests six higher dimensions which are wrapped up so tightly that they can't be observed, much as the third dimension of a sheet of paper can't be observed, and that tiny vibrations along that six-dimensional universe are perceptible to us as one dimensional strings, and depending on how a string is observed, it can take the form of any of the elementary particles. In other words, from a certain perspective a string can be observed as an electron, from another perspective a quark, from another perspective a neutrino, or a muon, or a photon, and so on. This is consistent with the principle of quantum indeterminancy, in which conscious observation is a neccesary additive to the establishment of a particle's location-momentum.

That by itself is a head-scratcher, and Irwin Schrodinger himself, who discovered the problem, hated the theory which he himself developed. In order to observe the location or momentum of an electron, you necessarily change the location or momentum of that electron. By observing you alter. Since Occam's Razor forbids unobservable variables in a scientific problem, it is assumed that therefore location and momentum are interchangeable, like space and time, and that therefore an electron exists at any and every point along its probability wave until it is directly observed and therefore collapsed into a particle. It sounds crazy, it even sounds like a lame attempt to cover for what's unknown, yet this principle has borne every scientific test, there are computer functions which would not work without it, and indeed a few years ago, under rigidly controlled conditions, an electron was in fact observed to be in two places at the same time without violating the law of conservation.

So what does that have to do with parallel universes? Well, if the electron is verified to be in one particular location...what happens to the rest of the probability wave? Why is the electron here, where it's being observed, rather than over there where it might have been? And building up from that, since all matter is made of electrons, why am I here at this computer rather than over there reading my book? Why am I male rather than female? Why did I marry who I married rather than that other cute girl? The collective probability wave of all the atoms in my body would suggest any one of these possibilities, but I verify every day through conscious observation that I am who I am, where I am, what I am, married to whom I'm married, and so on. So what about the rest of the probability wave? What happens to that probability? And if it doesn't describe reality, why is it there? It sounds more like philosophy than science, but it holds as long as 1+1=2. You are what you're made of, and if we're not sure what we're made of, where does that leave us?

It would all make sense if the me that I observe, which everyone around me observes...isn't the whole me. If the rest of me is hidden in other universes. If every decision splits the universe in order to house every conceivable possibility.

Here's another example. A simple experiment. Set up the beam of a flashlight to shine against a square of cardboard with two slits in it. How much light shines against the wall beyond the cardboard? Certainly less than hits the cardboard. It's as if the slits are admitting only a small percentage of the light. And yet if you look through the slits at the incoming light, the light is in fact intensified, magnified as it passes through the slits, like water sloshing through the pilings under a pier. The water has to slosh and bend and whirl, but it all gets where it's going. So all of the light is passing through the slits, waving and sloshing and whirling like water -- and yet so little of it strikes the wall beyond the slits. Where is all that light going? Why does it behave like a wave when travleing through space, but like a stream of particles as soon as it hits something? No one really knows the answer, but if there are parallel universes, that would explain it -- other walls, hidden in parallel universes, are receiving the photons that are not visible in this universe. The light wave itself is hyperspatial, multiversal, an absolute. But the individual photons, marking precise peaks and troughs in the wave, marking specific locations in a three-dimensional coordinate system, are isolated and perculiar to one universe.

But there are other possible explanations, any one of which could be more plausible, more mundane, and frankly not as fun. Perhaps fluctuations in vacuum -- zero point energy manifest -- could be enough to "feel" reality and collapse wave function before an observer is necessary. Or maybe we're just all wrong about particles and waves and there's a simpler explanation that some future uber-Einstein is yet to put together. Or maybe there really is an omnicient God observing and deciding reality independent of the universe -- though that sets up an infinite regress, a logical contradiction, and badly violates Occam's Razor.

The most likely scenario, in my opinion, is that zero-point energy, if it is in fact a universe-wide storehouse of energy, is actually a seething, bubbling mass of tiny wormholes, which by their nature would be extremely radiative. This might provide enough "room" in our own universe to absorb the unused energy of light, electrons, and so on. These tiny wormholes may lead to ultra-tiny, superhot universes, or to elsewhere in our own universe. It's not a particularly interesting hypothesis, but maybe for that very reason it rings truer than any other speculation I've read about. After all, zero-point energy indisputably exists, it's simply the energy that prevents a particle from being cooled to absolute zero, and if there is a zero-point field, it may also explain the existence of gravity and inertia. That's a bit hard to resist.

But until we know one way or the other -- which may be sooner than you might think, if the Large Hadron Collider lives up to its potential and leads to bigger and more powerful colliders in the vein of the sadly defunct SSC -- I still gladly embrace parallel universes as a viable possibility. At the very least, some great science fiction can come of the concept.