I've been reading Alan Guth's 'The Inflationary Universe' of late. I've been reading a lot of physics books of late actually. I've just started to get through Guth's formulation of Inflation, the process by which the early universe expanded at an exponential rate. Now, Inflation in itself isn't what interests me in a political context.
Guth leads up to inflation with perhaps the best description of the Higgs fields for laymen that I've read. I can't find a good graphical representation of a Higgs field, so I'll try to describe it. Trust me I'm going somewhere politically with this.
Imagine a bowl. The bottom of the bowl represents the minimum energy of a system. If a particle, let's represent the particle with a marble, if a marble is placed into the bowl it will seek the area of lowest energy, the bottom of the bowl.
The center of the bowl represents the lowest possible energy for the system, and it's where any marble will want to go. Say however we use a different bowl, something like an Angel food cake pan, which has a 'plateau' in the middle.
(I CAN find a picture of this)
If you place a marble in an Angel food pan (Let's assume that the bottom is curved, not flat) the marble will roll down to where the plateau starts. This does NOT represent zero energy. There will be energy imparted on the marble by the nature that it can't be in the very middle UNDER the plateau.
Well that's all well and good, but where are we going with all this talk of angel food pans and marbles? Well... what if the marble for some reason landed on the plateau? Better, what if the plateau were dimpled and the marble landed in it? It should stay there right? It would also have a large amount of energy. After all it's MUCH higher than the very center of the bowl, right? Unless something came along and gave the marble a shove (imparted energy on it) it would be stuck on the dimpled plateau. The marble really wants to be right where the plateau starts, but it can't be without a bit of help.
Sometimes though nature, as weird as she is when it comes to the physics of the very small, can give the marble a hand. Nature can let the marble go THROUGH the plateau, letting it spontaneously drop down to the plateau/bowl joint. The reasons for this are a bit technical and I won't go into them further here, but the process is known as 'Quantum Tunneling.'
So all that said, what in the name of Edwin Schrodinger does this have to do with politics. I read an article today that said that Iraq was in a 'tenuous stability'. When I read that I had a true moment of Zen (I tend to have a lot of Zen moments when dealing with physics). If the marble is the current state of Iraq, and the bowl is the potential for strife (enegry) then could the current situation represent that dimpled plateau? Personally I think that an undimpled plateau represents the current situation and the only thing keeping the marble in balance is the influence (energy) of the United States.
The thing is, and what Guth showed me, is that even the relative peace in the dimpled plateau is tenuous at best. While things may stay calm, with just a little bit of energy, or a helping hand by nature itself, and the situation will release a large amount of energy as the marble falls to the 'zero point' at the bottom of the pan.
We shouldn't be using our energy trying to keep the marble balanced. We should be spending our energy trying to find a way to get that marble down to the zero point gently. If we don't do it then Mother Nature will do it for us. Iraq will 'quantum tunnel' under the best efforts of the United States and it's allies and release the pent up energy that has been artificially preserved by our 'peace keeping' efforts.