Today, the last Christmas Eve of the Second
Millennium. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
In a lifetime of Christmases,
I've never seen one quite like the Christmas of
1999. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure
out that the tension and buildup this time around
is in our heads. But that doesn't make the tension
go away. The tension is not about Y2K bugs,
terrorism, or the end of the world. It is, instead,
about a kind of responsibility. For Christmas and
the New Year impose a pair of nearly subliminal
demands upon us.
For the Eastern Church, Christmas is the first
major feast of the year. For the Western Church,
it's a season that begins on December 25th and
straddles the New Year. Either way,
Christmas and the New Year bring with them their
linked demands for reconciliation and
renewal. And this is only the second time
these demands have marked, not just a new year, but
a new millenium as well.
It was one thing to blow it in 1846 or 1983.
Somehow it seems to be a thousand times worse to
blow it in 2000. So tonight we begin a singular
Christmas season -- a seeming chance to get it all
right, not for one year, but for a thousand. (It'd
be a scary thing if that kind of responsibility
were really thrust upon us.)
Well, we're not apt to transform the world in the
next few days. The New Year will arrive, just as
all the others have. But this time, we'll walk away
from it knowing that we're in a new time zone,
whether we want to be or not. Try this exercise:
I'll say two phrases for you and ask what you see
when I do:
First, I'll say: Nineteenth Century. Second,
I'll say: Twentieth Century. When I
do that, I first see horses and buggies, bicycles
with big front wheels, hoop skirts, and cowboys and
Indians. Second, I see airplanes, hospital
operating rooms, chemistry laboratories, and
automobiles. Each century has a radically different
personality. That's why, this Christmas, you can
become a totally different creature in the eyes of
your yet-unborn great-grandchild.
When that child thinks about you, will she think
about your birth date or your death date? Will she
see you as a creature of the second millenium or
the third? When I think of
Max Planck, I think of the 20th century, even
though he was born in 1858. That's because Plank
was a formative agent of the century in which he
died. On Christmas Eve, 1899, Planck was about to
initiate the quantum revolution -- the great
revolution of the twentieth century.
Frederic Remington was
born three years after Planck. But he represents
the nineteenth century. Remington's art
defined the Wild West we all know.
So this Christmas Eve will separate two
human epochs. We'll wake up in January, not much
changed. Yet history will make a watershed of it
nevertheless. The very tension we invest in this
season will demand that it be a watershed. This is
the New Year none of us will forget. This is the
one in which the world will change simply because
we won't have it otherwise.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
