“I like visiting you. Your neighborhood is cool.”
 
“I hadn’t thought of it that way. It’s home, so I guess I took our lifestyle for granted.”
 
“No, not ‘cool’ as in ‘chic’; ‘cool’ as in temperature. Maybe it’s the occasional tree near the sidewalks.”
 
“Oh! There’s a takedown. And here I thought you were envying my way of life. The “cool”? Look down, man, look down.”
 
“What?”
 
“Look at the road. It’s been painted white to reflect sunlight. No more hot asphalt. The city of Los Angeles has an experiment running, painting reflective paint over streets. Supposed to diminish the heat island effect that makes cities warmer than the countryside. It’s like living on a farm with traffic. And to think, painting those streets white costs only $40,000 per mile. A bargain at any price, right? We’re fighting climate change at the ground level.”
 
“So, does the jogger or walker absorb the heat energy reflected from the road?”
 
Blank stare.
 
“Well, the energy has to go somewhere. If it reflects off the street and a person is walking along the street, wouldn’t some of that energy go into the person? And then, wouldn’t that person have to radiate that excess heat into the surrounding atmosphere to keep the body cool? Maybe it would be better to paint the roofs of all the houses and shops. The radiated energy would then start at a level higher than pedestrian traffic.”
 
“I’m sure there’s a reason for the street covering over roof painting. People in my neighborhood are pretty independent. I don’t remember when the street painting started, but it didn’t seem to generate much conversation. My neighbors and I just said we didn’t object to white streets. Heck, they’re more visible at night. They reflect street lights. I think the neighbors might object to the city coming in to paint their roofs. Some might object on the basis of property ownership; some might say white just doesn’t match the style and color of the house. Some might just not like white roofs, and some might say for no apparent reason, ‘Get lost.’ But painting roofs white does make sense. Aren’t most, if not all, roofs in Bermuda white?”
 
“Yes, Bermuda is a largely white-roofed island. And those roofs not only reflect sunlight, but they also are used to collect rain. But I just thought of another potential problem with painting whole street surfaces. What’s the composition of the reflective paint? Does it have those millions of microscopic glass beads in it. Those eventually get washed into the non-street environment. Does it have terpene phenolic resins, titanium oxides, any lead-chromate? How about barium sulfate, silica, mica, or other ‘extenders’? Alkyd resins? Chlorinated-rubber alkyd resins? Hydrocarbon resins? Polyester? Acrylic water borne emulsions? I’m just asking on behalf of the environment, both land and marine. LA is near the ocean.”
 
“I’m sure the city planners have taken into account all the ramifications of paint chemistry. Californians are known for their environmental awareness. So, painting the streets white isn’t going to harm the environment. It’s just an experiment, anyway.”
 
“Back in the 1990s I did a policy analysis for the Commonwealth of PA’s Department of Energy, and one of my recommendations was increasing the number of reflective roofs. Seems I was ahead of my time because I just read a 2019 study by Macintyre and Heaviside called “Potential benefits of cool roofs in reducing heat-related mortality during heatwaves in a European city” they published in Elsevier’s Environmental International.* Want a cooler neighborhood, paint your roof white. Of course, reflecting light off roofs doesn’t diminish the atmosphere’s greenhouse gases from absorbing it. So, there might be a cooling of the lowest level in the atmosphere in a city, but that has nothing to do with a general raising of temperature in the atmosphere. Painting streets doesn’t diminish the greenhouse effect. And if the atmosphere gets warmer, then warmer air settles over those ‘cooled’ neighborhoods. Painting streets might change the local temperature, but reflected energy has to go somewhere.”
 
“So, what’s your point? Just that my neighborhood is ‘cool’?”
 
“Actually, it’s a twofold point. First, no matter what we do, we cannot foresee all the consequences of our actions. Second, when we rely on bureaucracies to solve problems, we open ourselves up to impositions on personal freedom. I’m sure I can think of other points if you give me time. You might come up with a few of your own. What do you think?”
 
 
 
*Fedschun, Travis. Los Angeles painting city streets white in bid to combat climate change. https://www.foxnews.com/us/los-angeles-painting-city-streets-white-in-bid-to-combat-climate-change  Accessed May 6, 2020.  In fact, the article should more properly be titled “…in a bid to combat the local effects of climate change.”
 
**Volume 127. June 2019. Pp. 430-441. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2019.02.065Get   Article online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412018319627?via%3Dihub
Accessed May 6, 2020.

I’m not a Schopenhauer fan. Too bleak. Too down-on-the-world-as-is. But the guy used a term that captures the mood of our times: “Hopeful uncertainty.” He also wrote that humans have “an unshakeable certainty that we are the doers of our deeds.” Now the question for you is this: In this time of hopeful uncertainty as a virus stalks like a lion on the Serengeti while the herd of Wildebeest trudges by, do you think or even feel you are in control? Are you the lion or the Wildebeest?
 
And if your answer concerning control is “no,” “somewhat,” or “yes,” is it an answer you wish to further qualify?
 
NO: I’m unavoidably part of a human herd incapable of seeing the lion in the grass. Viruses are too small to see; they remain viable in places I cannot identify by my senses; and they operate 24/7. Only luck prevents me from being the lion’s victim.
 
SOMEWHAT: I’m aware of the dangers and have taken precautions that are reasonable, but life must go on, and I must go across my personal Serengeti in necessary daily migrations for food and water. I’m driven by the circumstances of my environment, by my subjective needs, and by my personal history of choices, but I can choose to walk a different path to avoid the potential attack by the lion. All of us can only hope that reason is a guide to certainty.
 
YES: I have total free will to act and to take responsibility for my actions. I am not dependent upon my previous life choices. I can also risk as I choose because I can reason about my alternatives. When one action seems better than another, I can take it; when necessity is worth encountering danger, I can choose that necessity. And if I choose, I can disregard reason entirely and act on feeling.
 
Yet, in each of the three, you can’t escape the fundamental hopeful uncertainty (or uncertain hope) of the times. Hope is always uncertain; certainty is always “hopeful.”
 
Have you noticed, however, that some act as though hope is a certainty?  

It’s a planet-wide phenomenon. Magnets stick to the sheet steel doors of refrigerators in Japan and the United States. Solar System-wide, too. If you had a refrigerator on the Mars rover, your magnet would work the same. Galaxy-wide, also. You could even affix preschoolers’ finger paintings all over a refrigerator door on Proxima b some four light-years away. Wouldn’t you be surprised if magnets adhered to sheet steel at one place and not at another? And what would that mean?
 
Why should we assume that magnets work the same everywhere? No. Let me rephrase that. Are the local physical laws universal as Einstein and so many others have said? Apparently, and contrary to what we have all come to accept as Law, the cosmos has something called “directionality.” Electromagnetism, claim Michael R. Wilczynska et al., appears to be slightly different in different parts of the universe.* That is, the Big Everything isn’t—or might not be—isotropic. The rules of the game aren’t universal. The fundamental force that makes Us possible might not allow other Us-es to exist elsewhere. The universe might be fine-tuned for our existence only if we live in this part of the universe. Sure, we can say the universe is a special place, but in this place it seems to be, at least for us, more special than it is in other places.
 
It’s a point of great importance to those who support the anthropic principle, the idea that the universe is fine-tuned for us to exist. Not that we’ll inevitably ever know for sure. However, when Wilczynska and colleagues looked at the redshift of a quasar’s light from just 800,000 years after the Big Bang, they found that the “weighted mean electromagnetic force in this location in the universe deviates from the terrestrial value.” Is that a significant finding?
 
We take for granted our ability to touch and know. After touching, you can say, “This knife is sharper than that knife. Your skin feels very smooth. The pineapple’s exterior is pinchy.” That sense of touch brings us knowledge, and it is dependent on the electromagnetic force just as our vision is likewise dependent on it. We’re largely electromagnetic beings as far as our daily lives go. Even at the level of our thinking, we seem to be electromagnetic as neurons operate in electromagnetic fields and signals course through our nerves. Look, for example, at what an electric shock from a taser does to muscles.**
 
Try going without sight or touch, both senses driven by electromagnetism; as photons carry the electromagnetic force, try changing the speed of light without affecting everything, particularly all those formulae that use “c-squared”; and try eliminating from the modern world that dependence on anything electric or magnetic. What if your refrigerator magnet didn’t stick? Certainly, your new Tesla electric car wouldn’t run.
 
I’m reminded of the fine-tuning argument made by John Leslie when he writes of “the strength of the coupling between charged particles and electromagnetic fields…The need for electromagnetism to be fine-tuned if stars are not to be all of them red, or all of them blue…”*** He also writes, “The electromagnetic fine structure constant gives the strength of the coupling between charged particles and electromagnetic fields. Increasing it to above 1/85 (from its present 1/137) could result in too many proton decays for there to be long-lived stars, let alone living beings who were not killed by their own radioactivity” (5). And changing the strength of electromagnetism would make all those chemical/biochemical processes we depend upon for life take less time or more time to occur; if less, then decaying faster; if more, then possibly postponing our existence by billions of years. If electromagnetism were ever so slightly stronger, “quarks would transform in to leptons or else repel one another strongly enough to prevent the existence of atoms even as light as…helium.” (4). You realize what that means? No more oxygen, carbon nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorous, the elements that with hydrogen serve as the fundamental chemical components of life. No more ATP at work in your cells. No more cells!
 
Now, with this finding by Wilczynska’s group, it seems possible that the physics we know here won’t work everywhere, dashing to bits the most avid UFO researchers’ hope that somewhere in those two trillion distant galaxies there’s life like ours. We then stand alone in a universe with “directionality.” Of course, the differences in fine-tuning are small, and maybe don’t equate to those numbers offered by Leslie, but they indicate that the current fine-tuning isn’t as fine as we might think. And thinking is the heart of this because in our existence the universe is conscious of itself.
 
But what’s the point of this? Is it just to say that we are refining measurements and discovering that those we relied on for understanding might not have led to the wisdom we believe we now possess? Is it just a lesson in physics? Not really. I can think of applying it to our understanding of one another and to the nature of cultural differences. Within any culture standard social measurements work. All the social forces are fine-tuned as a result of a shared history going back to a cultural “big bang.” But once we travel to a distant culture, we find the social physics don’t necessarily apply, that the fine tuning of our personal and group world isn’t the same elsewhere, and that across we might even perceive the world differently, even if in very fine-tuned ways. At least, that is the conclusion of Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan after they looked differences between Asians and members of WEIRD societies, that is societies defined as “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.” The universe it seems, isn’t really “universal.” What applies locally might not—and in certain instances, definitely not—apply at a distance. Yet, as Henrich et al. argue, psychology “Researchers often assume their findings are universal,” even though real evidence seems to exist that suggests occidentals are more likely to see the world egocentrically, whereas people in the oft-cited Guugu Yimithirr culture perceive matters allocentrically.
 
That there are so many differences among people here on this little planet isn’t so surprising when one considers that underlying differences might exist in one of the four fundamental forces in the physical universe. Fine-tuning, whether for a universe permitting life or for a culture permitting ways of living, is local.
 
Get used to it. You are a “local.” All those around you are “locals.” Elsewhere, different rules apply, and it doesn’t matter how one tries to homogenize because the differences lie in the “fine structure,” in the fine-tuning.
 
Yet, almost every culture has its advocates for universal rules. Empires have formed under such thinking, and they have fallen as they have expanded into different parts of the human universe. The process is ineluctable. Think of how Sumerians gave way to Babylonians, Babylonians to Assyrians, Assyrians to Persians, Persians to Greeks, Greeks to Romans, Romans to “barbarians,” all in a process that keeps demonstrating the “directionality” of the social universe just as the physical one appears to have different principles for fine-tuning.
 
It isn’t a lesson easily learned. Think of contemporary politicians who wish to homogenize their societies under an ever-refining bureaucracy. Think, for example, of the rising trend toward socialism. Think, too, of the imposition of “universal” rules and laws sought by those in one-world movements. They believe their social magnets will stick everywhere with the same force. But as history has shown, such magnets lose force and slide off the cultural sheet metal. Some don’t even stick initially, in which case the solution to sticking is to destroy the “refrigerators” in genocides or enslavement.
 
I know. You’re never going to look at a refrigerator magnet in the same way. You’ll see it more than you’ll see what it holds against the refrigerator door. Sorry for that.
 
 
 
*Michael R. Wilczynska et al. 2020. Four direct measurements of the fine-structure constant 13 billion years ago. Science Advances 6 (17): eaay9672; doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aay9672. Online at https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/17/eaay9672.full
 
**Svitil, Kathy. Neurobiologists Find that Weak Electrical Fields in the Brain Help Neurons Fire Together. Caltech. 2 Feb 2011. Online at https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/neurobiologists-find-weak-electrical-fields-brain-help-neurons-fire-together-1671  Accessed May 1, 2020.
 
***Universes. London. Routledge. 1989.
 
****Henrich, J., S.J. Heine, and A. Norenzayan. The weirdest people in the world? Behav Brain Sci. 2010 Jun;33(2-3):61-83; discussion 83-135. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X0999152X. Epub 2010 Jun 15. Online at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20550733   Accessed May 1, 2020. Full article at. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/weirdest-people-in-the-world/BF84F7517D56AFF7B7EB58411A554C17/core-reader  This is, for me, an interesting article on numerous levels. It certainly calls into question all those psychological studies that derive “universals” from WEIRD people, particularly university students recruited for those studies. As the authors point out about psychological research, American researchers obtained 68% of their subjects from their universities. In Europe, the representation has been even higher (80%).