Battle Against The Bubble > IDEAS & IDEALS

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 "A man is a bubble."
                           - Greek Proverb
                
                 "The World's a bubble, and the life of man
                          Less than a span."
                                 - Francis Bacon (1561-1626)


      Bubble is a thin sphere of liquid enclosing air or another gas, and we can see it often around us without any difficulty. Because of its usually small, fragile, and ephemeral character or condition, the word is being often used figuratively to refer to a state or feeling that is unstable and unlikely to last. As shown in "the bubble economy," or in "Korean economy enjoyed too rapid expansion before the bubble burst," the word came quite closer to us with the IMF.

      Furthermore, along with such words as leaf, dew, vapor, foam, and dream, it has earned particular love from the poets and has become a strong as well as an appropriate metaphor for the life of man, for its brief duration, its futility, and hence even its meaninglessness. In other words, it is a poetically good and right word indeed, but a worthless and useless thing for our practical life. It has no substance in it.

      But, recently, to my great surprise and wonder, I came to learn there are people  in the world, not many, who devote their best time and energy, even their entire life to the study of it. For them it is more than just a flimsy liquid ball. Like the stars in the sky for the astrologers or astronomers, it is a concrete object to be watched, investigated, explored, and to be interpreted. For these handful of scientists it is like a newly discovered continent yet to be explored, and opens a door to an immense world of possibilities whose bound is unknown and unlimited. A silent but a fierce battle is being fought among them at present for the better understanding of it.

      What is more surprising and wonderful is that one of the most prominent and conspicuous figures in the scientific battle of the bubble is a Korean, and to my great honor and pride, he is a best friend of mine. His name is Kwak Ho-young, professor of fluid dynamics at the mechanical engineering department of Chung-Ang University in Seoul. I meet him almost everyday and have lunch with him. Imagine what it is like to have a close friendship with a great name in the field of science, such as Newton, Einstein, or Hawking. Dr. Kwak is a very humble man and he would blush a lot if he came to know my comparison and praise,  but I do not blush nor hesitate to put him in parallel with them. The following 3 facts alone will tell the world clearly and loudly that I am not a just naive and fond adulator of him.

      First of all, Dr. Kwak overturned the time-honored theory on the bubble formation propounded first by J. Willard Gibbs (1839-1903), an American physicist. This so-called Gibbs' Theory has been used, taught and applied for the last 100 years, unchallenged, and solidified into a classical theory, although the results of experiments and practical applications have not backed it up always. Dr. Kwak, my friend, is the first scientist in the world who challenged it, took a quite new approach to the problem with a different idea, and produced his own theory and equation that would and could replace the old one, and published it in the American Journal of Chemical Physics in 1983. Quite naturally the world was stunned, and slow and reluctant to accept his new theory, but slowly it was gaining its ground. From April 11 to 20 this year, he was cordially invited to a special symposium held at Moscow arranged by the Russian Academy of Science to discuss and decide who is right, the great Dr. J. Willard Gibbs or the obscure Dr. Kwak Ho-young, my friend. Dr. Kwak said to me over a cup of coffee, "I found there that I was not an obscure figure as I am here in Korea."

      Secondly, Dr. Kwak, my friend, solved the so-called Navier-Stokes' Equation on fluid dynamics that has been taken for granted by all the brilliant scientists in the world to have no solution for the last 150 years. He was simply the first man who did it. Until he came out with the exact solution, the world had to be satisfied with an approximation only, and later with more accurate approximation supplied by super-computers. One day, Dr. Kwak, my friend, sitting on the sofa, with a pencil and paper in his hand, saw the possibility of its solution in the spherical symmetry, found out the answer, and published the result in The Physical Review Letters, one of the most prestigious journal in America as well as in the world in 1996. "If such super-computers were freely available to me, I myself would not have attempted to solve the equation with my pencil on the paper," confessed my friend smiling. Definitely, want is not always a curse.

      Lastly, with the solution he found in the Navier-Stokes' Equation Dr. Kwak has developed a very simple and neat cosmological equation with which many of the problems concerning the planets in the solar system, so-called the Newtonian stars, including the earth, can be numerically measured accurately. According to his newly-created equation the age of the universe is 12 billion and 300 million years. Before Dr. Kwak, it was estimated approximately to be 10 billion years according to the Einstein's Standard Model, and 12 billion years by the recent computation with the use of Hubble telescope. Dr. Kwak and his co-researcher submitted their research paper to Nature in March 1999, undisputedly one of the most influential as well as popular journal of science in the world, but it was rejected for reasons the authors of the paper would not accept.

     With my scanty and shallow knowledge of science and mathematics I cannot not judge who is right, but I do know how to cheer him up. This is what a student of humanities, not of science, is for. "Look at Yukawa Hideki, Japanese physicist, who won the Nobel Prize in nuclear physics in 1949 for his discovery of mesons. The very paper of his nuclear theory was also flatly rejected by the same journal." He, my friend, of course, strongly and earnestly denies the possibility of the Nobel Prize for his work, but I would not be greatly surprised if the news came from the Swedish Academy to my friend one day. Then I would just say to myself, "I knew."
                                                                                                          (June 20, 1999)