Growing Up in America

Bright College Years at Yale

By Rolf Dumke

When I applied to Yale for admission in 1960, I was one of the top boys in a big graduating class at Shaw High in East Cleveland, Ohio, where I had been learning about middle-class life in America. Yale would enlarge my scope of persons, values, and life styles to encompass the upper end of the social scale in America. During the first ten years following my immigration from Bavaria, beginning with my initial half-decade (1953-57) living in the Hough District in Cleveland, a notorious black ghetto, I would have zipped through three class environments in America: really lower, middle, and upper-middle to upper class.

Third Monday Musing: On an irony of the creation of something from nothing

Its paradoxical aesthetic asymmetry

By Rolf Dumke

What fun to read your philosophical-historical query on why is there something rather than nothing!
    Modern physicists have indeed analyzed why there is something. According to the latest theories, the initial Big Bang should have created exactly the same amount of matter and anti-matter – i.e., in symmetry – at the first moment of explosion. And these should have immediately combined to eliminate each other, eliminating everything that had been created in the first tenzillionth squared of a second.