sed by the frequent, contradictory references to

Peronism, named for the ultimatnt, and that the forces are actually identical. T
here
are important historical precedents for this view. Isaac Newton gave us the firs
t
in the seventeenth century, whPublished in 1791, James Boswell s The Life of Sam
uel Johnson, LL.D. is still
the greatest biography in the English language and a gold mine of conspicuous
erudition. In fact, in the days, not so very long ago, when people aspired to
intellectual superiority the whis contemporaries, but making him accessible
was Boswell's mission in life.
Essentially a quick succession of close-ups of Johnson holding forth, the biogra
phy
is three-dimensional and so fast-paced that you mayrecession in the United State
s and the sheer unsustainability of pretending to be
a dollar when you're really a peso. Much of Argentina's once-robust working clas
s
had spent the last few years lining up at soup kitchens, and now the middle clas
s
crowded in behind them; more than half the population of Argentina was living
below the poverty level. In the winter of 2001, things came to a head when the
government froze bank accounts and people heading to their ATMs found
"Sorry" notices instead of cash. Thousands of people took to the streets banging
pots and pans, a couple dozen ay they currently yearn for vast real estate holdi
ngs,
the ability to quote Boswell quoting Johnson constituted the basic literacy test
in
some (admittedly preposterous) social circles.
Don't look for a story line; just think of the book as a talk show with a partic
ularly
entertaining guest and an interviewer who knows enough to shut up and
listen. And don't let the scholarly reputation scare you off; Johnson the eighte
enthcentury
savant seemed awesome even to people were killed, and the government collapsed.
Two weeks and five presidents later, the ruckus finally began to settle after th
e
former governor of Patagonia, Nestor Kirchner, assumed office and inherited,
along with a country in the midst of a nervous breakdown, the largest sovereign
debt default in the history of the world.
By the way, expect to be confuen he showed that the same force which, in your
backyard, causes an apple to fall to the ground also holds the moon and planets
in their orbits. In so doing, he caudillo, Juan Domingo Pern, and to the Peronist
Party, which dominated Argentine politics and defined a version of the Argentine
dream from the 1940s through theis part of our everyday experience. One of these
, the strong force, is what holds
all the elementary particles together in a nucleus. The other, the weak force, o
perates
in many situations in nature, the most familiar being the slow radioactive
decay of some unstable nuclei and particles. These four forces are a varied lot.
Some, like electromagnetism and gravity, act over long distances. Others, like t
he
two nuclear forces, act only ovrength, with the strong being the most powerful,
followed by the electromagnetic, weak, and gravitational forces.
Despite these apparent differences among the forces, the great advances in
physics over the last few decader distances about the width of a nucleus or less
.
They also differ markedly in stes have been made by theorists who believe that
the differences are only apparee reversed two millennia of Western thought, duri
ng
which scientists had seen no resemblance between earthly and celestial gravity.
Yet Newton's Theory of Universal Gravitation, which attributes the motions
of both planets and apples to a mutual attraction that exists between all object
s
possessing mass, says that despite apparent differences, the two forces are, at
bottom,
the same. We say that Newton unified the two forces of gravity and, because
of the term "gravitational field," we say that Newtonian gravity is an
example of a "unified field theory."
In 1968, Steven Weinberg (then at MIT) tookNationalists,
Stalin on the side of the Republicans who, by taking a local amateur
production and turning it into a dress rehearsal for bigger things, made sure th
e
civil war turned into chapter-length world-history-book stuff. The Germans and
Italians sent troops (the Italilso to be noted: the arrival on the world scene o
f
Generalissimo Franco, a brilliant military strategist and so-so politician, who,
far
from attempting to conduct Spaians over fifty thousand); the Soviets technicians
and
military advisors; both sides as much equipment tanks, planes, guns as they
couldhis research for For Whom the Bell Tolls.
But what really mattered was what the war had crystallized: the splitting of the
world into Fascist and anti-Fascist camps; the proof that Germany and Italy
could work nicely together in a Rome-Berlin Axis; the general belief that not ju
st
war, but War, was inevitable. Also to be noted: the arrival on the world scene o
f
Generalissimo Franco, a brilliant military strategist and so-so politician, who,
far
from attempting to conduct Spain into the twentieth century, would, over the
course of the next forty years, pack up, with the emphasis on those items that s
till needed to be tested on
the battlefield. The British and French, again, hung back, though plenty of Brit
s,
French, Americans, and others went to Spain as volunteers, usually on the Republ
ican
side.
A lot more happened in the course of the Spanish Civil War, which lasted
until 1939, by which time the Nationalists, led by Franco, had crushed the Repub
licans.
Guernica, in the Basque country, was bombed by the Nationalists, or
at least by the Germans (Picasso got it down on canvas); General Mola tossed off
his famous "fifth column" line (about how he had four columns of soldiers encirc
ling
Madrid, and a fifth column infiltrating and undermining it from within);
and Ernest Hemingway completed