Some (more or less random) thoughts

                                            

                            

Reflections. On science and religion and a bit of philosophy and on me and on: where I am, how I got there, what/who influenced me..    

Writing of these notes started in November, 2025, as I was less than four months away from my 88th birthday (and finished long after my birthday).

(For someone who does not know my background, I was born and raised in Hungary and immigrated to the United States as a refugee at age 18  in 1957, after a failed revolution against the Soviet Union.)

As I wrote in my first posted blog, I write this to myself, but with the idea that, anyone interested is welcome to read it. 

Introduction

While these thoughts have been with me for much of my life, their actual review and this writing were triggered by my daughter-in-law sending me a link regarding Bohmian quantum mechanics and the controversy with the Copenhagen school. In her email  that sent me the link, she proposed that we have a discussion. I was very surprised that she studied this subject and wanted to discuss it, but I was also fascinated and proceeded to review it. As it turned out she had not read up on it and also was not very familiar with it, but somehow she thought that it would be an interesting subject. - - Yes indeed, for me this is an interesting subject, not so much specifically the Bohmian argument, but more as it touches on many aspects of my training in science and general philosophy. Or putting it more simply, it is connected to and touches on many of my thoughts that have been with me throughout much of my life. - - Thus these notes do not provide any details of my evaluation of Bohm versus the Copenhagen school. David Bohm was a great physicist; he wrote my very first quantum mechanics textbook in Berkeley. (Also, my son told me that 40 years later he too studied from the same textbook in the same department at the same university.) - - My short summary of the Bohmian argument versus Copenhagen school is simply that it has no practical consequence, no clear guidance for further work, and thus not of great interest. It is simply the intellectual self satisfaction of a mathematically oriented theoretical physicist. (In the following I will provide some details on how I reached this conclusion, and who guided me to it.)

Where I come from

Science, religion, philosophy, and politics. These topics and their related concepts have all been in my mind from a very early age, driven by my environment, interests, and activity. 

My mother was a devoted Catholic. Thus the Catholic religion has been with me from before I was born. As I recall it, I received my earliest scientific lesson when I was about five years old. One afternoon my brother and I were with our father in our father's study; he reached up to the top of his bookshelf, picked up a compass and showed it to us. It was a small circular device with a wobbling needle in the middle; one end of the needle was dark, the other light. Our father then told us that the Earth has a magnetic field and the object he held is a magnetized needle that aligns with the earth's magnetic field; no matter how the base is rotated the dark needle always points to the North. From then on I knew that there were magnetic fields and magnets and they interacted in some predictable manner. - - That was probably the first step that took me in the direction of science. It certainly was the first step that I recall. During my many years of involvement with science there were several major events but none as groundbreaking for me as my first learning about the compass and magnetic fields.

I grew up in the strange combination of an extremely hostile external environment and a very warm family, or even more accurately a warmly supportive extended-family home-environment. Our core group lived in one large apartment with dinners regularly together. We were 12: 6 children and 4 parents, the combined group of my parents, and their 4 kids, and my mother’s sister and her husband and their 2 kids. Our dinners provided the foundation for the core elements of our education. The dinners were chaired by my father, but all participating members, including all children and adults, were free to participate in all conversations. All of us were allowed, even encouraged, to ask any questions or raise any subject as long as we did it politely and did not offend anybody. In the worst case our questions were not answered and possibly rejected (as it happened to me when around age 13 I asked about how children were born, to which my father answered “You already know the answer; don’t fool around”). Our dinners, especially on Sundays and holidays, also regularly included members of both my father’s and mother’s extended families.

The hostility of the external environment, which started with WWII, first included bombardments and rushing to air raid shelters, combined with persecutions. Life then moved towards more persecution and discrimination. The persecutions first included newspaper articles against my father, claiming that he was a hider of Jews (which was true) and then later on assigning us the enemy of the people identity. (During the Stalinist communist era in Hungary there were  five “people identities”, one of which was assigned to everyone: peasant, worker, intellectual, other (mostly merchants), and enemy of the people. These identifiers were included in all school and work registration documentations as well as personal ID documents. - - During my high school years I was engaged in a continuous struggle to retain an intellectual designation and to avoid that of class enemy.) 

I was born into a well off family. By the time I turned 12, things were beginning to change. At age 14 I started part-time work and since then I earned all I needed to cover all my own clothing and cash expenses. - - My paternal grandfather died when my father was 15 years old. My orphan father then immediately became a live-in teacher to someone whose father was three-times Prime Minister (Wekerle Sandor) of Hungary during the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As it turned out, my father was very lucky. The Prime Minister was not only his employer but also became more or less a de-facto sponsoring father to my father. As a result of this luck and of hard work my father not only finished high school but then finished law school, became a high-level employee of the government as well as an economist, and eventually a top manager in private industry. But then came communism; after age 60 and my father became an unskilled laborer.

My family was definitely intellectually oriented and showed a great degree of diversity. My paternal grandfather immigrated to Budapest from Austria at age 15, 100 years before I immigrated to the United States. First, he became a school teacher. Then he studied more, finished university and also earned a doctorate and became a natural scientist, eventually a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Hungary’s first Darwinist. At his funeral a fellow Academy member eulogized: “his heart became pure Hungarian but his tongue remained German”. His father, my paternal great grandfather, migrated from Switzerland to Austria after the Napoleonic wars. What led to his migration was the devastation of the family’s farming assets in Menzingen, Switzerland, caused by the occupying French army. (That was the last time Switzerland was invaded. He was born in Menzingen, in 1793, the invasion was in 1798,) As a young adult, he moved to Vienna and earned a law degree. Unfortunately, my grandfather never knew his father. His mother, my great-grandmother, who was close to 30 years younger than her husband, abandoned her husband when she was pregnant with my grandfather because she learned about a supposed affair my great-grandfather may have had years before they were married. Hthe er youthful heart was unable to cope with such mis-perceived infidelity. My maternal grandfather was born in what is today Slovakia. He too was orphaned early and was raised by an older sister in a village household without luxuries. Somehow he managed to earn an engineering degree and move to Budapest. He always considered himself Hungarian but summer-times in my mother’s childhood were spent in the old village where my mother learned Slovakian she spoke at the level of a native born. My paternal grandmother was born in Budapest; her father too was born there. He was a successful glass merchant, and judging by some details of the evolution of their family name, most likely they were of Jewish origin. My maternal grandmother was born in Budapest to parents who hailed from what is today Sombor, Serbia. - - Thus it is very clear that I come from a “pure” Hungarian line, which prepared me well to become an immigrant in the United States of America. No doubt: I am at home here!

Now back to the culture surrounding me growing up (very importantly) at the above mentioned family dinners.

As I stated above, my mother was a very religious Catholic. Her approach to life bordered on puritanity. I would characterize my father as a conservative liberal democrat. In his early years he was very much influenced by his fathers Darwinian views. In his later years he learned very much from the above-mentioned Prime Minister, whom he greatly admired,  who even though he served in a Royal Empire appears to have professed western democratic views. - - Our household was definitely Catholic, although our extended family also included Protestants; My maternal grandfather,  for example, was a strongly believing Evangelical. I often wonder whether my mothers puritanical Catholicism was not strongly formed by her father's puritanical Evangelism. - - My father was not very religious. But my mother’s rule (of religion) was accepted by all; there was never any conflict on this account.

I was aware of earlier conflicts between science and religion. I knew about Galileo, about the conflict between the religious Earth-centered (geocentric)  and the scientific Sun-centered (heliocentric) views. Also in my mind, there was a conflict between the God-created-man and the Darwinian evolutionary views. While in our household both views were definitely present they never appeared to come into any conflict. Not that it was reconciled, but somehow conflict was avoided, even though both views were present. - - It was only much later that I learned that the Vatican has never explicitly criticized Darwinism. While several Catholic organizations and influential individuals wrote and publicly spoke against Darwinism, no pope has ever come out against it. Some of the explanations I find difficult to comprehend; for example the teaching/explanation that the human body may have evolved, but the soul was given to humans by God to the evolved body, I find it very difficult to comprehend. Nevertheless, catholic schools do teach evolutionary theory. The modern Roman Catholic Church accepts science.

My road to science

I was very much raised definitely as an active Catholic. I was very much aware that my mother wanted me to become a priest, preferably a monk. I was also always good in mathematics and physics in school, which never presented a conflict. (Perhaps in my mother's view I was to become a science teaching monk in a Catholic School.) I served as an altar boy. I studied Latin. Back then the Catholic Mass was celebrated in Latin, with Latin the language of the church. I had my own confessor and advisor, a Benedictine monk who was also a high school teacher. Later on, as part of the systematic anti-church communist campaigns, he was arrested, probably tortured, and imprisoned. Prior to his arrest he was in partial hiding, wearing civilian clothes. During that period I remember that, to counteract his exposure to secret police surveillance, once I confessed to and obtained absolution from him while we pretended to be casually talking and walking the streets in the inner city of Budapest, gazing at shop windows.

For a while my Confessor also taught me both Latin and English. I was more interested in English. When I stopped studying Latin he told me that this will make it much more difficult for me to become a Benedictine monk. Clearly it was not only my mother who thought that I was heading in that direction even though I never said so. 

How did I wind up a scientist?  A short answer is that it evolved progressively as a simple practical matter. I became a scientist not in pursuit of philosophical questions, but driven by a need to find the best road for survival, and preferably not only survival, but attaining the best survival. Achieving a good life was the direction of my pursuit along my lifeline for many years. Seeking answers to reconcile some basic questions between science, religion, and possibly philosophy did not even occur to me for many years after I had completed my doctoral studies and earned my PhD at  the UC Berkeley College of Engineering, doing research in engineering physics.

In 1952 I wanted to have a radio. But we had no money and all radios had been turned in to the government during World War II. Somehow I learned that one can build a “potato radio". Such a radio would only work for AM broadcasts and in the vicinity of a very high intensity transmitter that dominated all other signals in the air. Under those conditions all one needs to build the radio is a potato cut into two halves, earphones, and a simple crystal rectifier. Also one needs a long wire oriented the correct way to serve as an efficient antenna and a shorter wire tying one of the potato halves to the water faucet that serves as a ground. The antenna wire is connected to one half of the potato while the ground is connected to the other half. Somewhere I found a pair of old earphones and also acquired a rectifier. The ear-phones and rectifier connect, or bridge, the two potato halves. I put it together and it worked. Not very well but it worked, with very low volume and a highly scratchy sound. This was a victory that highly motivated me to proceed. Back there then were no transistors, nor other solidstate devices. All consumer electronics worked with vacuum tubes that were pentods, tryodes,  and diodes. Somewhere I found some old discarded dysfunctional radios that still had working loudspeakers and some working vacuum tubes in them. I bought some books and talked to some people who knew more than I did. I built my own soldering iron and started building and designing radios. Our district's electricity supply was still the old-fashioned DC current. Thus I did not need transformers, voltage was simply adjusted by resistors. I had no instruments so I guessed. To test the presence or absence of voltage, sometimes I used my fingers. That was not very smart, but it worked and I survived.

I always wanted to study. At that time in communist Hungary there were only two learned professions that were realistic for people with my background. Either engineering, or medicine. I had no real interest in medicine, thus I focused on engineering. As I finished high school I received expert advice to apply only at a school in the country's eastern edge. I was told that if I applied anywhere else, I would be rejected and not admitted anywhere. But if I applied at the recently created new school, I would be admitted with no problem. Unfortunately, at that school there was no electrical engineering. But I followed the advice and applied, and was admitted to a machine-building mechanical engineering program. I started University. But, soon came the Revolution of 1956. I participated, we lost. Then I left, and with good luck wound up in California. By the beginning of February 1957 I was a student at UC Berkeley. I stayed there, starting as a freshman and ending with a PhD in the College of Engineering in 1964. I put myself through those 7 and 1/2 years by earning my living first as a dishwasher in a student dormitory, then as a technician in an electric heater manufacturing company in San Francisco, and finally as a teaching and research assistant at UC Berkeley.

For my bachelor's degree I passed through a standard electronics curriculum. For my master’s thesis I prepared theoretical physics calculations based on quantum mechanics, oriented towards the then emerging laser technology. For my PhD dissertation I worked in plasma physics and light emission; first I built a small plasma device and then did detailed spectroscopic measurements on the light it emitted under various experimentally adjusted plasma conditions.

With my new PhD, I went into industry. First I was a researcher and later on became a manager, first in research then in electronic display manufacturing oriented engineering. I filed and received many patents and published papers.

Science and religion meet and their interface is understood

The philosophical aspects of science, and the possible connection and/or conflict with religion started to interest me when I was about 40 years old. For anyone with a religious background who also studies Cosmology, it would be very difficult to avoid this conflict or question. How does the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe meet the religious view of creation? A long time ago we had Helio-centrism versus Geo-centrism. Then we had an evolution from macromolecules to Homo Sapiens. Now we have an expanding Universe, starting from an infinitesimally small space with infinite energy density, driven through millions of years of expansion by a mysterious force, derived from dark energy.

A simple resolution of this question for me came from father Stanley Jaki, a Templeton Prize winning Benedictine professor. He held a doctorate in theology from the Vatican University in Rome. Subsequently he earned a PhD in theoretical physics from Fordham University in New York. When we met he was a professor at Seton Hall and lived in Princeton, New Jersey, where I also resided at that time. He wrote dozens of books. I first became aware of him and his work through a book review published in Physics Today, a monthly journal of the American Physical Society. Later we met by chance through a social connection, and then we became friends. We spent many hours together sipping some wine and having long conversations.

Father Jaki taught me: Whatever is quantifiable observable and can be described and understood by numbers and equations, and independent researchers can verify the previous findings by repeating the experiments and the calculations, is science.

Whatever does not meet the above criteria is the proper domain for religion.

We know that most of the mass in theUniverse is dark mass and the growth of the Universe is driven by dark energy that exceeds all known energy. We observed the existence and effects of these dark entities some decades ago, but have no idea what they are; we have no theory, no understanding. 

We know a lot about our environment and our bodies. We also know quite a bit about how to at least partially control both. But we don’t know how/what we came from, what we are, nor where we are heading.

Where does this leave us?

Back to science 

And now I return to the email link that my daughter-in-law sent to me, which started this writing. (https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/10/david-bohms-pilot-wave-interpretation.html) The essay on that link was written by Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist, whose 2018 book “Lost In Math” I read a few years ago. Since then it served as a footnote to what Father Jaki taught me. In her book she describes how modern theoretical physicists, including herself, have gone astray. She states that there have not been any new groundbreaking experimental results recently. There is not much fundamental new to analyze and most of the theoretical work nowadays is nothing more than self satisfaction in mathematics by theorists. The unanswered questions have been known for a while and no recent attempt provided any useful  answers. My guess is that new experimental results are needed to guide us forward before new useful theories will be developed.

In 2012 the scientific community celebrated the discovery of the Higgs boson at LHC in Geneva. This discovery was the result of a major International Cooperative effort. It cost many billions of dollars, involved thousands of scientists from all over the world. I spent a considerable amount of time and effort trying to understand the details of this discovery.  I understand that for those who are deeply involved in particle physics and in the frontiers of theoretical research this result provided an understanding of mass. According to this teaching there is a scalar field covering the entire universe and the interaction between the Higgs bosons and this field is what explains the mass that particles exhibit. A problem is that not all experts are convinced that this particle in fact is the Higgs boson and also there are major issues related to the  Higgs field itself; specifically, its energy content is highly uncertain. From a practical point of view, mass is an intrinsic property of matter and with Einstein's relativity we also understand that while rest mass may be an intrinsic property but mass is also influenced by movement through space-time. Maybe in the future, with additional calculations and experiments, we will be able to explain some of the unknowns in today's world like dark energy and dark mass, and the Higgs boson may help in that. However, currently this is not the case: we have no proven connection between those unknowns and Higgs bosons. It is interesting to note that the above cited Sabine Hossenfelder’s book came out 6 years after the much celebrated discovery of the Higgs boson.

I do understand that sometimes basic discoveries may lead to practical applications in the future that are completely unknown at the time of the discovery. An interesting case in this regard is a gravitational time dilation, a discovery that is a consequence of general relativity. In the early part of the 20th century proof of general relativity was obtained through astronomical observations,  without any expectation of direct practical application. Late in the 20th century the GPS satellite system was installed in order to provide globally precise positioning capability. The GPS satellites fly about 20,000 km above the surface of the Earth and their design had to explicitly include corrections for the time dilation, as predicted by general relativity, in order to achieve the desired precision in their position  determination. 

Clearly, we do not know ahead of time the consequence of all discoveries. But knowledge we must advance. Maybe one day we will discover significant practical applications for the Higgs field and Higgs bosons too.

For me the theoretical basis for science is provided by classical mechanics, electromagnetism, Quantum mechanics, and Einsteinian relativity. 

So what is religion for me now? For me belonging to a religion is similar to that of belonging to a nation. It is good to belong somewhere, to share some values and thoughts (and even some rules) with others. Dogmas and exclusivisms I reject. Is there something supernatural out there or in us? Maybe. Make your own choice!

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A light-hearted end note where Everyday Life and Science meet

Most people have heard about the famous twin paradox that is a consequence of Einstein's special relativity. Likewise, most people have heard the encouragement not to sit but to move and  thereby avoid aging prematurely. But most people are not aware that the issues addressed by these two statements are closely connected. Following the teachings of special relativity, if two people, who could be twins but do not necessarily have to be, meet and  after synchronizing their watches one of them sits down, while the other one takes a walk and later on returns to his sitting friend, after they compare their watches again, irrespective of the speed of the walk they find that the person who sat has definitely aged more than the one who walked. This is a scientific fact that has been proven through mathematical formulas as well as multiple experiments. (If the walker’s speed would approach the speed of light, the age difference would be significant, one year walking would be equivalent to many years of aging  while sitting. At easily achievable speeds, whether walking or flying jet planes, the difference between moving and staying in one place is so small that it is practically impossible to measure. And this is why for centuries even scientists practicing Newtonian mechanics did not notice the elapsed time difference between staying stationary and moving. Nevertheless, by now the difference is a well proven fact.)

Change needed!

In the cost of manufacturing and services, automation leads to reduced use of  labor and increased use of machines. In an automated word the need for capital is huge. This increased need has led to an increased accumulation of capital, and globally to the birth of a new billionaire class. Limitless accumulation of capital is now leading worldwide to autocratic corruption aided by billionaires. Further increase in automation, aided by AI, may lead to nearly complete elimination of labor and a total collapse of society as we know it. Without change we face a world where no work is needed to provide for all, but human society is unable to function.

With the exception of some areas where systematic racial discrimination was entrenched, in 1957 life in the United States appeared to have been close to ideal. (I chose that year because that is when I arrived in the United States as a refugee from the communist Hungary.) The USA and the Soviet Union were engaged in a global competition. People in the USA were happier, better off, and worked fewer hours than those in the Soviet Union.  The communist world outside of the Soviet Union emerged after the end of World War II. All these new communist countries first followed the Soviet model. While maintaining nominal national independence, most of them were under direct Soviet rule as a result of the agreement reached between the west and the Soviet Union near the end of the war. As the communist parties took over political leadership, all of these countries came under a single party dictatorial ruler, led by a top party official who enjoyed a personality cult, an exact replica of that given to Stalin in the Soviet Union. All private property was nationalized, entrepreneurship

discouraged, and free speech prohibited. Party leaders were provided an aristocratic life. There were no real incentives for common people to try to improve their life. Stealing from the state rapidly became socially acceptable. All communist countries slid on a downhill economic slope.

In 1957 Capitalism was clearly superior to Soviet style communism.

The standard working week in the capitalistic United States was 40 hours five days. At the same time, in the Soviet dominated socialistic communist world it was 48 hours, six days per week. The USA-led western capitalist world was incomparably wealthier than were the Soviet led Warsaw Pact nations. The world was divided into two antagonistic sides; one rich and progressively getting stronger, while the other relatively poor and getting weaker, irrespective of the nuclear power that both sides processed. Clearly this situation could not continue forever.

The Soviet Union collapsed and disappeared around 1990. Around 1980 China abandoned its Soviet style socialism it had pursued during Mao’s rule which produced devastating economic results. While the one party communist state rule remained, China allowed the beginning of capitalistic private enterprise that progressively grew as China rejoined the global economy.

After these changes, first, globally, freedom, and democracy increased, some even predicted “the end of history”. (Through progression to global peace, freedom, democracy, and equality.)

But then things began to change. Why? Because of the overwhelming power of capital in modern society. More accurately; its power is post industrial society.

In the prehistoric era of humanity, when hunting and gathering dominated, only labor mattered. Even the concept of capital was unknown. 

During feudalism labor remained a dominant factor in the economy. Power was derived from natural resources, mostly land ownership, and from organizations managed with dictatorial powers (kings and emperors), frequently supported by religion.  Globally religion showed wide varieties, however locally everywhere it was monopolistic, maintained by joining in power with the ruler. Thus joint power to control the soul and body was typically achieved.

The concept of capital evolved during the industrial era. The value of natural resources, like land, became less important than capital. Once capital existed, capitalism eventually evolved. While certain forms of democracy were known in the classical period, the new era of capitalism required new and broadly applicable concepts and forms of government. Democracy in the early area was only local. Most of the world up until the 20th century was ruled by autocratic rulers who wielded absolute, or close to absolute, power.

Here a clarification is needed. What is capital?

Capital in general terms represents wealth, including a variety of assets:  land, corporate shares, cash, etc. For the purpose of these notes, I use the term capital to represent objects and assets that are easily convertible into other assets, especially into cash. For me cash means money: a legally defined object that can be exchanged for any available good, service, product, thing, and/or legal right (for example patent license) available for purchase by any interested buyer. 

The first assembly lines for mass production of affordable consumer goods were installed in the early 20th century, principally in the automobile industry. In contrast to earlier single-step production of goods by expert tradesmen,  assembly lines reduced the working steps to simple, short operations. The partially assembled product is passed down the line from workstation to workstation, from raw material to finished product at the end of the line.

As technology advanced, assembly lines became more automated. First the movement of the product along the assembly line was accomplished by  passing it manually down the line from assembly station to the next assembly station. Later on by putting it manually onto conveyor belts that carried the product from station to station. As technology advanced, transfer units started to be used for moving products between workstations and between the workstations and the conveyor systems. With further advances the workstations themselves started to be automated, robotics entered every phase of manufacturing. Early assembly lines were characterized by a long line of assembly workers. Modern factories frequently have assembly lines virtually devoid of people. Most assembly work is now fully automated.

Automation has not only changed manufacturing, but it also had a major impact on agriculture and services. Agriculture used to be all human work, aided by some working animals. Then came machines that combined plowing and planting. Later on the combine could accomplish all steps in one move down the field: harvesting, plowing, and planting. In the early phase of agricultural automation the combines were driven and directed by human drivers. Today, combines can be fully automated without a human driver, as they are directed through satellite dishes by remote control. Services are also undergoing significant automation. For example the delivery of goods in response to an online purchase request is significantly assisted by automated warehouses.

It has long been well known that the major cost component of all manufactured goods arises from quality issues. The cost of shipping a defective product from a manufacturing factory is very high; it may exceed the unit cost of manufacturing the shipped item. Thus manufacturers have long been motivated to eliminate defects and automate their production systems, because automation produces fewer defects than manual labor. (As it has been well known “to err is human”; machines do not err.)

The cost of all goods and services has three fundamental components: materials, labor, and capital. Most materials are supplied by other vendors. Following the materials supply chain leads back ultimately to: natural resources, labor, and capital. With further improvements in automation, combined with newly emerging artificial intelligence, the need for labor ultimately disappears. Therefore, ultimately most goods and services may be provided by/from natural resources and capital, without any labor.

We are not there yet but the world of no labor is rapidly approaching. Computer systems have significantly reduced the demand for secretarial services. Recent advances in AI have already impacted some online services. For example, job applications are increasingly processed by artificial intelligence systems. Also online chats, related to inquiries for details about products and services are increasingly AI

In a capitalist society the cost (and value) of everything is determined by supply and demand. This is where and how modern capitalism faces a contradiction and dilemma, and a major problem that demands some solution.

Because creating products and services requires less and less human participation, the demand for labor is progressively reduced, but availability remains unchanged. Thus the value of labor as reflected in wages is progressively becoming a smaller and smaller fraction of the total economy, as already indicated by the GDP trend.

But to maintain a healthy society and to maintain a growing GDP, the economy needs purchasers; products and services must be bought by someone.

With the continuous increase in automation the wealth of billionaires continues to increase because capital is becoming more and more important than labor.

According to Wikipedia virtually all countries in North America, South America, Eurasia and Australia have billionaires. Communist China is home to hundreds of billionaires. In Africa there are about half a dozen such countries. Worldwide there are a total of about 3,500 billionaires, whose total aggregate wealth is about $16 Trillion. Approximately 8 billion people live on earth and their total aggregate wealth in 2024 was between $450 and $500 Trillion; thus a few thousand people controlled several percent of the entire human wealth. Their share continues to increase together with their political power.

The power of money sways political power. In the past decade there has been a global increase of autocracy. Autocratic regimes are supported and given more and more power by their new class of billionaires. The autocrats became billionaires, as the billionaires got even more billions.         

A change is needed!

Most societies believe in work ethics. Irrespective of whether societies organize along communistic, socialistic, capitalistic, or some hybrid ideals; all believe that people should work. Not only believe, but also mandate it to be eligible to receive emergency support in case of need. (Unless they had the good fortune to inherit, or to accumulate sufficient wealth to provide for all their needs and desires; in that case the common norms and obligations of society do not apply.) All political, economic, and social systems are based on the notion that most people work most of their lives. In modern society some knowledge is needed to participate in work, such knowledge is obtained through education. Collectively accumulated wealth (created through taxes) is used to provide public education for most children. Social, political, and legal systems provide assistance and support for individuals to accumulate sufficient wealth during their working years to provide for their needs during retirement. 1000 years ago essentially all humans worked in agriculture. Later on, as technology evolved, manufacturing industries grew, and  most people moved to industrial work. In post-industrial societies, most people moved to service work. Now, with the birth of the AI age, service work is progressively eliminated, with no new known new option created.

To enable the much needed change, IDEAS are needed.

Capitalism, thus far the winning social and political economic system is entering a self-contradictory collapse phase. No one working means no one has money, therefore no one is shopping. No one shopping means that it makes no sense to grow or make anything, or to service anything; all investments are worth nil; the billionaires lose all their assets. In our current Capitalist World, thus, no work leads to total collapse. Nothing to grow, nothing to make, nothing to service. Everything stops, and society collapses. We humans need a fundamental new idea to organize our society in the rapidly approaching totally automated new world. Today we equate work with purchasing power. In a world with no work how will we maintain purchasing power?  We are headed to a world where no work is needed to provide for us all, but how should we organize our society in that new, abundant world?

Recalling the Past: my cherished memories of how/what/who made us to be who we became

                                                                                                                                             

Introduction

We are in May 2023. I am in my Twilight years. I have passed my 85th birthday. Memories are becoming more and more important. My life was enriched by the writings of my forebears. I am a happily married man, a happy father and grandfather. I think my descendants may be interested in my life experiences, just as I was appreciative of what I was given through my father's and grandfather's writings.

Looking back, I believe that I have been reasonably successful in my professional life. I worked in technology, both in research and development (R&D), and in the execution of the results of R&D. My inventions are well recorded in 47 issued US patents. I was invited  as a guest speaker in Budapest by the US ambassador to Hungary, to be honored as a Hungarian-American inventor at the signing of a US-Hungarian IP (intellectual property)  agreement in 2013. I wrote and presented many technical papers, built factories, managed engineering organizations globally, and my team's work at one point resulted in a product with multi-billion dollar sales that enjoyed such high demand that we had to put our customers on allocation because we could not meet all the demand.

Nevertheless, my proudest achievement in life is the American Gorog family. Judith and I have created a family that now enjoys three children, five grandchildren, and two children-in-laws.

For my descendants, the undoubtedly unique aspect of my life is my migration, of which the key elements were: where I came from, how I came to the US, and my assimilation into American life. These notes are part of that story. Without my migration my family would not have come into being.

About 5 years ago, in the summer of 2018, I prepared a brief set of notes titled “Our family, where I came from”. Gary, my son-in-law, prepared a small booklet from those notes, to which  he added photographs of me in my younger years and of our apartment building where I grew up in Budapest. About 10 years ago, in January 2013, I prepared a set of notes titled “1956 and Emmigration”, in which I described the roughly 9 months period of my life during which I was reborn: first from a class enemy in communist Hungary to a revolutionary against Hungarian communism,  then from a revolutionary against Hungarian communism to a refugee migrants student in America at the University of California Berkeley. Therein I summarized the reasons and the circumstances of my departure from Hungary. 

In the notes that follow here, I describe some aspects of my early life in California. The writing of these was triggered by a recently found  letter I wrote In the summer of 1958, about a year and a half after my arrival to the USA. This letter brought back old memories that I wanted to capture. Also, writing these notes gives me an opportunity to recognize some of the people who made my entry into the university in Berkeley possible and also some who helped me to integrate into American society and to assimilate some of the social customs in America that were distinctly different from those in Hungary. 

A glimpse into the past (via a long-ago letter to Erzsi)

After my sister Erzsébet's death, a part of her paper collection went to my sister Ágnes. In this collection was an old letter that I sent to Erzsi many years ago. I wrote this letter in the summer of 1958 and reading it now in May 2023, I unexpectedly got a glimpse into my life and my financial circumstances at that time.

  

That summer, I worked near the Nevada border in the White Mountains of California at a US federal government-run facility, managed by the University of California. Private industry was also welcomed to carry out research there at the High Altitude Research Station. I first spent several weeks around 3,800 meters and then a week at a level of more than 4,300 meters in a summit laboratory located in a small stone hut on the top of the mountain, completely alone. I had a radio connection from the summit to make my requests to the base station; they regularly brought up to me the needed food and, if necessary, other other items as well. On the way to the summit, even in August, the ice that covered the path had to be blown up with dynamite, and only the off-road vehicle could take me up to the summit laboratory then.

I worked there as a technician. A San Francisco company (Wesix Electric Heaters) sent  me there, together with the laboratory equipment necessary for my work. My task there was to measure the ion content of the clean high-mountain air for a few weeks. (The company was interested in this because they manufactured electric heaters for homes and they thought that maybe, if the ion content had an adequate effect on the improvement of urban air, then they would manufacture some kind of air ionization equipment that could be placed in homes together with the space heaters they were selling.)

At that time, I was still a relatively new American, I arrived in the USA on January 16, 1957, and then I started university in Berkeley, California at the beginning of February 1957. (I verified the exact date of my arrival in the USA on the Internet; I was transferred from Bremerhaven to New York on the Marine Carp US naval ship, and this ship only brought Hungarian refugees to the USA once and arrived in New York on January 16th. It took 11 days across the ocean.) 

For me, this long ago sent and recently found letter brought back some of my old memories and made me re-experience my emotions in a unique way.

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Below: The old letter, now in a translated and typed form; the original was handwritten in Hungarian, and also it is now hard to read.

                                                                       White Mountain Research Station

                                                                                       Mt. Bancroft  8 - 14 - 58

Dear Elizabeth! Dear family!

(Originally I wanted to write to the whole family, but your letter arrived in the meantime, I had a lot of fun with it. I liked it so much that I decided to write to you.)

But others can read it too. 

 It's a pleasant, calm evening (by the way, it's quiet all day up here on the top of the mountain). I was outside for a bit of air earlier, the clouds are creeping up from the valley, you can't see much in the light of the floodlights illuminating the area, you can only see the lazily wandering grayness, the experimental chickens and a reddish building that is especially owned by rats, guinea pigs and dogs. - After airing myself, I drank a hot tea (I can't say that it was good because the water here starts to boil very quickly, so the tea turned out to be quite pale). I don't know if I already wrote to you how tea is made here: a bunch of tea leafs enough for a cup of tea is wrapped in a small paper bag that hangs from a thread, at the end of the thread there is a little piece of paper tag that you can hold on to - well, you can also put some advertising on it. One pours the hot water into the cup, hangs the bag in the water, and when it is brown enough, then we pull the bag from the tea, holding on to the thread and/or to the advertising tag - after that we'll throw the bag with its thread and tag away. (We would put it on the saucer, in a cultured place.) - After drinking tea, I wrote a couple of greeting lines to a graduate student. A graduate student is a student who has already graduated from university and received his diploma, but is still doing further studies for a higher academic title. Usually, it is possible to obtain the "Master Degree" in 1-2 years and approx. in another two years, or in four years from graduation, you get your PhD ("Doctor of Philosophy"). He was here last semester and he went home to Helsinki a few weeks ago to get married. (He also lived in the International House, apart from that we had a common circle of friends.)

It was very kind of Tobias's wife to offer to recommend me to his relatives; it's okay if people are known from several sides. As you may not know, I know both Tobias professors well. However, neither one of them teaches in the College of Engineering. The biophysicist Cornelius T. (he gave us the polio vaccines that I sent you) is a very smart but overly scientific man. - Charles T.  is a physical chemist (I have never seen a more skilled and refined person than him). Both helped me a lot. (I got my job in San Francisco last summer through Cornelius T. and Charles T. helped me to get a $200 scholarship for the last school year from an elderly lady's club.)

It's slowly approaching 11:00 p.m., and I'm starting to get sleepy. I had a rather tiring day today: this morning when I went down to check my instruments, I saw that last night one of the amplifiers broke down. (It's a beautiful, expensive device, it costs more than 1000 dollars a piece.) I tried to fix it all day, but without much success, I'll try again tomorrow. (In the worst case, if I can't manage to get it into working order, I'll continue the work with three amplifiers instead of four.) - Well, good night (it's true that it's already mid-morning for you, I'll correct myself: good morning to you, and  good night for myself)!

August 15, 3:30 p.m. - there is a real winter landscape out here. There was a big hailstorm, the whole area is white, besides, there is such a dense fog that you can hardly see even a few steps. - Today we have a lot of visitors, four biologists came to visit, plus a journalist. (I spent an hour explaining to him what we were doing. I encouraged him to go to San Francisco as well. I hope he writes a good article that can be useful to me as well. His paper is one of the biggest in the San Francisco area. True that may not mean much, it's full of stories of murders and actresses.) – Anyway, I'm having a good day: I managed to get the device that I worked on all day yesterday into working order. It took a day and a half of thinking, but now it's finally done. – Your letter arrived today in which you report on the results (and lack of results) of the admission to the physical education college. So, you have two brothers, one of whom is studying at an engineering university. Hum, this is also something…!

Mama inquired about next year, whether there is a scholarship for me, etc... The details of the situation are as follows. Based on my academic results, I received $300 from the University, which I can withdraw in four installments. This will be good for quick help as may be needed during the year. The money I lent to my friends plus what I save in the summer adds up to approx. $5 to $600. Annually my tuition fee of approx. $560 is covered by this. As I predict it, during the fall semester I will be able to work 5 hours each on two afternoons a week, (I can't fit more because of my schedule), which is 10 hours a week, and at the current hourly wage of $2.30, it amounts to $23 per week. Deducting tax plus travel to work expenses, I can earn approx. $75-80 a month. If I don't live in the International House (which is about $95), I can make do with it. I will not go to the Opera for the time being, and I will only ride a horse once a month. - There is one thing I still don't know how to do; I want to buy a vehicle, probably a scooter or a motorcycle. Without a vehicle, a person here is like a lame person. (Even in a small university town like Berkeley.) - Well, I think it's smartest if I finish writing now, because either tonight or tomorrow morning the visitors will be going back to the city, so this letter will be in the mail soon .

Kisses from your brother, 

Istvan

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Postscript and additional explanatory notes to the letter                                     

The government-assisted arrival of Hungarian refugees to the USA was perhaps America's most successful emigration program. The re-elected incumbent President Eisenhower already started supporting Hungarian refugees in October 1957 (that is, before his re-election in November) and in December 1957 established  the “President's Committee for Hungarian Relief”, with the aim that this committee coordinates the relationship between governmental and voluntary private organizations that offered various assistance programs to us. As a result, partly with the help of the media, a very popular assistance program was developed, in which many individuals and organizations participated in some way. The central US government transported the 1956-Hungarian refugees from Europe to America, partly on airplanes and partly on military transport ships ("Liberty Ships") left over from the Second World War. Thus, more than 30,000 Hungarian refugees arrived in America in late 1956 and early 1957. Everyone first arrived at Camp Kilmer, a World War II military camp opened by the government and then closed. There, everyone first spent a few days in a closed camp, where security investigations were conducted. For these investigations the Hungarian identity cards that most of us had were very important; whenever someone didn't show an identity card, it was assumed that his/her identity card was hidden because it might contain information that the individual does not wish to share with the American authorities. After the closed camp, everyone went to an attached open part of the camp, and those who had relatives who were willing to sponsor them could continue out of the camp right away. Those of us who did not have such contact opportunities, we stayed in the open camp where various external opportunities could be sought. Thus, our arrival in the USA was arranged by the central government, and the further steps took place with the help of various organizations and individuals. I found out about the opportunity to go to Berkeley in the open part of Camp Kilmer, I accepted it there, and from there, after sleeping one night in New York, together with another Hungarian student from the camp (later my friend Gyuri Egry), I flew straight to San Francisco, where four students were waiting for us at the airport and who took us from there by car to Berkeley.

I can thank the Tóbiás brothers, mentioned above, and Edward Teller, mostly known as the "father of the hydrogen bomb", for my Berkeley entrance. They convinced the necessary authorities to admit us to the world-famous University of California (owned and operated by the State of California) without any study certificates in our possession, with the only condition that, if we successfully complete the first semester for which we chose the level and subjects, then we can continue our studies there. Financial support for the first semester was provided by getting accommodation in the International House and working at a job in the dish-washing line serving the dining room there. After the first semester, we had to provide for ourselves. In those years, this option to go to school while earning a living through part time work existed in California.

I studied English for several years, in fact probably close to 8 years prior to my leaving Hungary. I first started English in 4th or 5th grade, but by the time of my 6th grade, in all Hungarian schools  English  was replaced by Russian. After that I continued privately. As I recall it now, I had at least four different instructors. Back then learning English in Hungary was mostly book studies, none of our instructors were native English speakers and there were no opportunities to hear spoken English. I may have had some periods without studying English, but by and large I continued it and by the time I turned 17  one of my  instructors advised me to start reading English books. Very wisely he told me not to worry too much about looking words up in the dictionary. “Keep reading and do a look-up only when you finish a page and you have no idea what you read”. Thereby, by the time I left Hungary I was reasonably fluent in reading, but not much accustomed to  speaking. In any case, my English was good enough that I could start Berkeley in the spring semester of 1957. Fortunately, I was allowed to explore which classes to take and for a very important introductory physics course on Newtonian mechanics there were several  parallel sessions taught by different professors. I selected the one whose English I understood best. Luckily enough, this session was taught by Professor Owen Chamberlain who in 1959, two years after that semester received a Nobel Prize. When I started Berkeley I only understood people who directly spoke to me, or delivered a lecture to the class. I remember it well that after a couple of months, as I was walking in the corridor of a lecture hall (Dwinelle Hall), passing  a group of students who were engaged in an animated conversation, to my great surprise I understood what they were telling each other. That was a Eureka moment, an Epiphany that I never forgot.

Not long after my arrival there, I also helped the professors in their efforts to bring more Hungarian refugee students to Berkeley. As part of this effort, accompanying Professor Charles Tobias, I visited several organizations. Everywhere our request was that we are not looking for money, but for part-time jobs for refugee students. Furthermore, I was also invited to a university assembly in the spring of 1957, where my task was to second the big thank-you speech given by Edward Teller with a few minutes of my authentic personal thanks. This happened in front of more than 10,000 students and thousands of professors. In the fall of 1958, more than 40 of us 1956-Hungarian refugee students were studying in Berkeley. When I arrived there were four of us; so the professors' efforts worked out well, they were successful. Many thanks to them forever!

A note on social integration, and a thank you to Joe and Betty Connors

During my heroic early years In Berkeley my closest friends and support community were the other Hungarian refugees who were studying in Berkeley. Another group of people with whom I regularly socialized were foreign students, mostly from Scandinavia and Germany. I had practically no social contact with American students during that early period. I owe a large part of my integration and assimilation into American society to Joe and Betty Connors. They contacted me after they had contacted Charles Tobias, whom they asked how they could help some Hungarian refugee students? Professor Tobias put them in contact with me.

Joe Connors was an  Oakie. Oakies were poor Americans who migrated from the middle of the country, frequently from Oklahoma, to California during the Great Depression. Joe's family settled in Sacramento. He studied chemistry in Berkeley and became a water chemist working for the municipal organization that supplied water to the East Bay communities of the San Francisco Bay Area. Betty Connors was born and raised in Montana.  She came to Berkeley to study music and eventually became  the head of the Arts and Lectures organization on the Berkeley campus. Her organization was responsible for bringing visiting lecturers and especially artists to the campus; she became quite well known and brought the Global top performers to present concerts on the University campus. Joe and Betty had no children, possibly because they were concerned about overpopulation. In any case, they showed great interest in putting their arms around me and teaching me some of the details of American life. They were not rich and made it clear to me when we first met that they are not offering to fund my education or my life, but they will be happy to invite me to their home and teach me some of the customs and social details that were not part of the University curriculum. Betty would provide me with concert tickets and on many occasions they invited me to fine restaurants in San Francisco. It is through these events that I was able to enjoy the San Francisco Symphony free of charge and I learned about American Cuisine.  Eventually we became quite close friends and many years later, after Joe died, Betty became a virtual grandmother to our Christopher. Betty invited Christopher to join her on several trips, including one to England. To this date Chris remembers very fondly the great times they had together. After Betty died, to our great surprise we found out that she named all of us Gorogs, Judith, me, and our three children as heirs to her estate. While her estate was not very large, it was still a nice gift, we all received meaningful sums of money, and I think the five of us inherited close to half of her estate.

Life in America in the 1950s was very different from what it is today in the 21st century. There are three examples that come to my mind that illustrate this difference. Public safety was unbelievable, unfortunately that is no longer so, but back then people could leave their wallets sitting on their car seats in unlocked cars without worrying about theft. Other examples from my memory were strangely restrictive. JC Beckett, my chief engineer at Wesix Electric Heater, where I worked full time in the Summers and part-time during the school year, was very fond of me and was my strong supporter. Nevertheless, when I was thinking of buying a motorcycle and mentioned that to him, he told me that I better make a choice: do I want to keep my job or do I want to ride a motorbike? The two are incompatible, he told me. Obviously I did not have much of a choice. I kept the job and never owned a motorbike. Another example comes from a conversation  with Joe Connors. This was early in the first year, when I did not understand the devastating effect that the violently anti-communist senator McCarthy had on American society. Having just recently escaped from communism, in a conversation I praised McCarthy to Joe, even though I knew that Joe was definitely a left of center Democrat. Joe's response to my comment was “if you were an American, I would kick you out of my house and would not allow you ever to enter again”; he did not kick me out, but I learned my lesson.

One more item that has significantly changed in the past half a century and one that had a significant impact on the evolution of my later life has to do with the continuously geographically evolving USA. Specifically, in the 1950s and also pretty much through the 1960s, the center of the USA was on the East.Coast. A few weeks after I arrived in the USA I headed out West and had the good fortune of getting my education at one of the best universities in the world, at UC Berkeley. When I was about to receive my PhD in 1964 and was looking for an appropriate job, I was only interested in the East. In my prior life I got to know  Hungary and Slovakia, where I went on a bicycle trip at the end of the summer of 1956. After coming West, I never crossed the Sierras. I got to know California and also some of Mexico, but I felt that I was a country bumpkin and I wanted to get to know the real USA: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington DC. Therefore I looked at jobs only at the three major R&D centers of the time, at Bell Labs, at GE Labs, and RCA Labs; they were all on the East. Silicon Valley, as it is known today, did not yet exist. Through some connection, partly because of the subject of my PhD dissertation, I was offered a job at Watkins and Johnson, an early pre Silicon Valley high-tech outfit on the Peninsula where later on Silicon Valley evolved, at a salary slightly higher than what I accepted at RCA Labs. Had I stayed in the San Francisco Bay Area,  probably I would have ended up financially much ahead of what I had actually achieved. Most likely I would have participated in the creation of the soon rapidly evolving Silicon Valley technology world and also would have benefited from the real estate boom that took place in the San Francisco area shortly after my moving to the East. I am not complaining, I followed my interest, but it is also interesting to recognize some possibilities that we did not utilize because they did not match our interest. Today the entire American Gorog Family lives in California. Because I pursued my interests, Judith and I, even though we met in Berkeley, got married in New York. We then lived for many years in Princeton, New Jersey and all three of our kids were born in New York and pretty much grew up in Princeton. Our youngest, Chris, finished high school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania to where we moved when he was finishing middle school. (In Berkeley I briefly met the Andy Grove of later Intel fame. He too was a Hungarian refugee in 1956, was 2 years older than I was. He got his bachelor's degree in New York and subsequently in 1963 his PhD at UC Berkeley in Chemical Engineering, where Charles Tobias was his thesis advisor. He clearly already had an East Coast experience prior to his  coming to California. From Berkeley he moved directly into the emerging electronics industry on the Peninsula that then became Silicon Valley and he was a key player in the evolution of what became the world-wonder Silicon Valley.)

Some concluding remarks that I added after I thought I had completed these notes.

Specifically, I felt that I needed to add here to these notes how much my university education and immigration were commingled. I come from a family where on my Y-chromosome line (father of father of father of father line), I am the fourth generation with a “Dr” (an entitlement based on having earned a doctorate at an institute of higher learning) in front of my name. Even though for four generations we all had to restart our lives due to a combination of causes: war (Napoleonic), personal conflict (poor young wife leaving much older well off husband), death (father dying before son finishes high school), and communism (reverse discrimination according to the pre-communism social class of parent), each one of us first succeeded before disasters hit. 

In my case, there was a strong external factor in selecting my profession. I had diverse interests, but I only saw science and technology as worthy to pursue. I was a teenager growing up in a Stalinist Communist dictatorship; I learned not to trust the government, and I saw well  educated lawyers and social scientists persecuted and not allowed to continue their professions. In the world around me I saw that only high achievers in science and technology were able to cross the boundaries of nations and social systems, and I was committed to secure for myself that path. Then later on, after I entered Berkeley I felt compelled to pursue studies as far as I was able to. I did not plan to enter academic life, I was always interested in industry, but I also felt that as long as there was still something ahead of me that the University offered, I wanted to take it. That is why I pursued engineering education till the end of my opportunities, through bachelors, masters, and doctorate degrees. And in fact, a few years after I entered industry, I realized that there was still a postgraduate study available that I did not pursue earlier and I applied and received a one year postdoctoral National Academy of Sciences and National Science Foundation Fellowship. This one year I spent in 1968 at a European research laboratory (ESRIN) in Frascati, Italy. That also allowed me to travel around and get to know much of Western Europe. Thereby I, the earlier country bumpkin, got to know, and feel at home in, not only the USA but also Europe. Thus for me immigration and assimilation are almost synonymous with securing my education, a process that I feel I successfully completed by January 1969, 12 years after I entered the USA. After that, for approximately 40 years until my retirement, I lived in the USA, voted in every election (I became a US citizen in 1962), worked in industry, and served  in academia only as advisor and industrial donor. And of course, along the way, together with  Judith we raised our family that I consider the proudest achievement of my life. Also, I was fortunate enough to be the first father in five generations, spanning over more than two centuries of Y-chromosome line, whose ability to execute his commitment to raising his family was not interrupted and negated by disastrous external events.