The Middle

Road trips to the western United States are perhaps my favorite pastime, however all great things come with a price. For those making the drive from east to west, that price is the midwestern United States, or what I have affectionately dubbed “the big flat middle.” You know that you have reached the middle when: a) you get excited when you see very small cliffs and/or road cuts, b) you open your hotel room window to see corn in every direction (see photo), or c) you can see your destination city in the distance, even though it is >500 miles away. I have crossed the middle at every interstate latitude possible (I-40, I-70, I-80, I-90) with the one exception being I-94 across Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota. Well, for those of you on the edge of yours seats, I-94 looks like the rest of them, so don’t go booking those travel plans to luxurious Fargo, ND just yet.

All gripes aside, there are two things that I love about this part of the country. Firstly, the weather is truly intriguing in these regions, where you can see forever. This particular trip is even better than previous ones, as my recently finished professorship at W&M gave me a whole new in-depth understanding of atmospheric processes. Second, the flat expanse, although quite boring, gives you much time to think, which in itself can be quite dangerous. In Wisconsin, I found myself surrounded by a panorama of large wind turbines and rapidly convecting cumulonimbus thunderheads. This, coupled with my close ties to the gulf oil spill, the heat wave along the north Atlantic, the current economic crisis, and recent Climategate revelations made me come to a newly defined understanding of some very stark truths. Namely, our society has gotten so complex and interwoven that our ability to understand the processes which govern it, including physical, economic, political mechanisms, etc may be rapidly moving out of our grasp. This at a time when the world will be looking to scientists, doctors, and engineers to overcome some of the largest and most difficult hurdles that we will ever face. Then, I found myself quickly realizing that most of these decisions, which are mostly over our heads, are actually made by politicians (read: idiots with no real job) who have even less ability to cricitically and rationally make the best decisions.

In science, we build “complex” finite element and numerical computer models in an often futile attempt to reproduce natural conditions in order to elucidate causal mechanisms and, perhaps more ambitiously, to form the basis of predictive reasoning. We plug in parameters and boundary conditions, hit enter, and then sit back while the black box chugs away. If we are fortunate enough to get realistic results, we must ask ourselves if they are real or merely coincidence. Put simply, we must wonder what they truly mean. Even if we choose to accept our results, we are then left with the realization that our “complex” models are actually a gross over simplification of the real world, and thus may not truly tell us anything. So if the best we can do at this point is a gross over simplification of the real world, and then we pass this information on to policy makers who do not have the technical expertise to analyze this for themselves, we are doomed from the word go. Okay, so maybe it’s better to fly out west, for then you will not find yourself lying in your bed in metropolitan Bismarck, ND unable to sleep because of the future that you see coming because you had too much time to think while driving. Or even better, maybe we should load the decision makers and their scientific/technical/economic advisors up in a few large school buses and drive them back and forth across the Midwest until they can offer some solutions that actually work.