Postmodern science began in the 1980s as postwar kids got tenure and became journal editors, society presidents, lab chiefs and department heads - replacing all those who were young adults during the heady war years of Big Science, Reductionism, Determinism and who were educated in the classical science of Newton, Dalton, Darwin and Lyell.
But why didn't these kids - call them Boomer kids if you wish - simply carry on the tradition as their scientific fathers and grandfathers had done for centuries before them ?
Why such an abrupt shift in a scientific worldview ?
What had these postwar children learned about the real - actual - world that led them to so disbelieve the explanations provided by the classical models of science being taught within the cloistered walls of their High School.
( And still are being so taught ! )
Showing posts with label newton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label newton. Show all posts
Thursday, April 9, 2015
Friday, March 20, 2015
Would today's schooling even be around - if teachers acted as if Quantum physics really exists ?
The big three of Modernity (the Nazis, Communism and Imperial Capitalism) were all given a helping hand up ... when the pedagogy of Reductionism muddled into pedagogical reductionism.
So if I were a high school teacher, I would stop all that pedagogical reductionism and stop lying to my students.
Stopping doing so, simply because this outdated set of science theories makes reality pedagogically simple for teachers to teach and grade students.
Stop doing so, simply because this outdated simple stable (Classic)(Modern) scientific view of reality remains very ideologically attractive to the powerful blocs of 'experts' and 'professionals', that ultimately determine the level of teachers' salaries and pensions.
Teachers who themselves view themselves as fellow 'experts' and 'professionals'.
If I were a teacher, I would freely tell pupils it is often good enough (even for grownup paid professional engineers) to simply subtract 30 from a temperature in Fahrenheit and then divide that result by two to get an approximate value in Celsius.
However, I would also add, that for true scientific accuracy, they must actually subtract 32 and divide by 1.8.
I would tell them that an adult paid professional engineer is usually safe in assuming the approximate atomic weight of an unknown sample of oxygen to be 16.
I would add that a true, scientifically accurate, atomic weight could only be determined by a painstaking chemical analysis of the actual percentages of the various oxygen isotopes contained in that sample, because each isotope has a different atomic weight.
I would tell my students that I would accept either answer on my upcoming exam - as long as the students explained what figure they are using and for what purpose.
I would stop lying to students in exchange for what seems to me, working at minimum wages, big pay ...
So if I were a high school teacher, I would stop all that pedagogical reductionism and stop lying to my students.
Pedagogical Reductionism : plenticiding inconvenient scientific truths ...
I would stop pretending that our real world is accurately conveyed by the theories of Newton, Lyell, Dalton and Darwin.Stopping doing so, simply because this outdated set of science theories makes reality pedagogically simple for teachers to teach and grade students.
Stop doing so, simply because this outdated simple stable (Classic)(Modern) scientific view of reality remains very ideologically attractive to the powerful blocs of 'experts' and 'professionals', that ultimately determine the level of teachers' salaries and pensions.
Teachers who themselves view themselves as fellow 'experts' and 'professionals'.
If I were a teacher, I would freely tell pupils it is often good enough (even for grownup paid professional engineers) to simply subtract 30 from a temperature in Fahrenheit and then divide that result by two to get an approximate value in Celsius.
However, I would also add, that for true scientific accuracy, they must actually subtract 32 and divide by 1.8.
I would tell them that an adult paid professional engineer is usually safe in assuming the approximate atomic weight of an unknown sample of oxygen to be 16.
I would add that a true, scientifically accurate, atomic weight could only be determined by a painstaking chemical analysis of the actual percentages of the various oxygen isotopes contained in that sample, because each isotope has a different atomic weight.
I would tell my students that I would accept either answer on my upcoming exam - as long as the students explained what figure they are using and for what purpose.
I would stop lying to students in exchange for what seems to me, working at minimum wages, big pay ...
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Henry Dawson vs Newton, Dalton & Darwin...
During his brief life, (Martin) Henry Dawson managed to have three seemingly wildly different careers : in the Military during WWI, in Academic Science in the interwar years, and in Popular Science during WWII.
His career in the Infantry showed him the distinct limits to the uses of Newtonian physics, just as his academic research in Horizontal Gene Transfer suggested Darwin's Vertical Gene Transfer was by no means the whole picture.
His career in the Infantry showed him the distinct limits to the uses of Newtonian physics, just as his academic research in Horizontal Gene Transfer suggested Darwin's Vertical Gene Transfer was by no means the whole picture.
And his support for the ultimately successful Naturally-produced Penicillin highlighted the spectacular failure of Daltonian Chemistry's claim to be able to synthesize anything and everything, including Penicillin.
Hubris is a terribly addictive drug and WWII turned out to be its largest, longest and most brutal clinical trial to date.
Only to date, because with Global Warming we appear headed to a rematch between Hubris and Reality, only with this time much worse than the last.
There are lessons - lessons unlearned - both good and bad - we can apply from WWII to the current rematch that might help us avoid the worst of it.
But only if we are prepared to listen.
But only if we are prepared to listen.
Henry Dawson can certainly give us some of the good lessons , while his many opponents can provide us with all the bad lessons, in spades.....
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
WWII:began optimistically as Science, ended tragically as Engineering..
WWII, in other words, began in Modernism and ended in post-Modernism.
It should be understood at the onset that Science's task is strictly pedagogical and that it doesn't have to provide answers that are true, in any realistic sense, merely ones that are correct.
In other words, an excellent science experiment also is an excellent exam question.
I am speaking here of course only of the physical sciences, those sciences that form a subset of human psychology.
Their main function in life is to boost the students' self esteem and make them willing and - God Bless 'Em ! - even eager to take on the world outside the High School or University as a non-physical science grad.
These science experiments are meant to give non-scientists and non-engineers, and probably a lot of engineers and scientists as well , the confidence-building illusion that the world outside the lab is as controlled and predictable as it is inside the university's "sheltered workshop".
As I have said before, philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright's key insight (aka the "Cartwright machine") is that the crucial component that Science, along with its machines, experiments and laboratories, requires to be a successful human activity is a metaphorical ROOF , to shelter those activities from messy Reality's wind, rain and dust.
And Frederick Christiansen argues that successful engineering often means adding yet more roofs to the designs-with-roofs coming out of the science labs, to make them robust enough to endure daily Reality.
So, for example, Newtonian ballistic equation solving (classical science at its purest) can take on a very different cast in actual battles of war.
Now our young university physics graduate is behind a gunnery rangefinder, high up on a heaving battleship in the dark of night, himself just barely awake.
His battleship is making a desperate turn, in high wind and waves, and at top speed, to dodge a possible incoming torpedo.
Meanwhile our young officer is trying his absolute best to get his 12 inch gun turret to score at least on hit on an heavily armoured (and armed) enemy battleship.
The enemy is also is bobbing up and down and turning left and right at high speed in equally heavy seas a dozen or so miles away in the dark.
The enemy ship is trying just as hard to land one or two shots on the superstructure of his own battleship - which if it happens, will likely kill him and render moot any success at getting his battleship's guns to hit the enemy.
This, despite the fact that both his battleship's hull and its gun turrets, both heavily armoured, remain totally undamaged.
He has been taught to use Newtonian ballastics to hit and destroy 60,000 ton ships, only to discover that what he is really aiming for with his massive one ton armouring piercing shell is the 150 fragile pounds of his counterpart gunnery officer.
Neither officer will ever hit what they were aiming for, but both are likely to end up dead --- when their ships make the wrong turn and run into an enemy shell equally off target.
Ballastics has descended in to a good old fashioned low tech infantry fire fight: fire as many shots as quickly as you can in the general direction of the enemy and hope some by mischance actually hit him.
Forget even that it is nighttime and in heavy seas, with two ships very far apart, moving at top speed in irregular weaving patterns while bobbing up and down in the water irregularly.
And that the eye on the rangefinder is hindered by all the bright flashes and dense smoke of real battles.
Or that in the minute or two it takes to set range and elevation, the gun to be fired and for the shell to travels to its target, the other ship will have irregularly altered what ever semi-predictable course,speed and elevation it was following at the time of 'set'.
Think about the intermittent winds across the path of that dozen or so miles - winds with different temperatures and density of air - all which affect how a shell deviates from its Newtonian path.
The gun barrel, its wearing-out with repeated shooting and even its changing temperature from shot to shot, all effect the accuracy of our departing shell.
Each new shell is never been machined as true to its designed shape as one would like - just as the bags of propellant each display a random slightly difference in the amount of force they provide.
Many of these factors, but not all, can be accounted on the naval battleship range and after a number of shots, gunnery officers do hit a target and retire to the wardroom.
But even the most lifelike gunnery range practise, far more real-world than the university lab, does not prepare the gunnery crews for a real-world battle.
In a real battle, it is far more likely that three battleships and heavy cruisers on each side are all trying to hit each other at the same time : what fans of Newton like to call "many-bodied problems" , the kind they'd rather not talk about in the physics classroom.
Yet battleship gunnery crews in WWII were the best trained, best equipped, most scientifically up to date gunners of all the war effort : none of the six nations that had modern battleships spared any expense or scientific effort to make their gunners topnotch.
But equally, all the odds against the various gunners hitting their targets had been equally up-gunned.
Faster and more agile opposing ships, heavier armour, longer and bigger guns, extreme firing ranges, night fighting, heavy weather fighting, submarines and dive bombers coming at them as well as big shells : it just never stopped.
Most of the (hugely expensive, manned by thousands of highly trained men) aptly named "capital" ships that were sunk in WWII, did not fall before the big guns, but rather to much smaller,cheaper, simpler weapons : sea mines, torpedoes, dive bombers, kamikazes.
Ballastics and science hardly entered into most of those losses : instead very brave men got within pointblank range and then eyeballed their way to success.
Engineers can understand that 'can-do' attitude perfectly well....
It should be understood at the onset that Science's task is strictly pedagogical and that it doesn't have to provide answers that are true, in any realistic sense, merely ones that are correct.
In other words, an excellent science experiment also is an excellent exam question.
I am speaking here of course only of the physical sciences, those sciences that form a subset of human psychology.
Their main function in life is to boost the students' self esteem and make them willing and - God Bless 'Em ! - even eager to take on the world outside the High School or University as a non-physical science grad.
These science experiments are meant to give non-scientists and non-engineers, and probably a lot of engineers and scientists as well , the confidence-building illusion that the world outside the lab is as controlled and predictable as it is inside the university's "sheltered workshop".
As I have said before, philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright's key insight (aka the "Cartwright machine") is that the crucial component that Science, along with its machines, experiments and laboratories, requires to be a successful human activity is a metaphorical ROOF , to shelter those activities from messy Reality's wind, rain and dust.
And Frederick Christiansen argues that successful engineering often means adding yet more roofs to the designs-with-roofs coming out of the science labs, to make them robust enough to endure daily Reality.
So, for example, Newtonian ballistic equation solving (classical science at its purest) can take on a very different cast in actual battles of war.
Now our young university physics graduate is behind a gunnery rangefinder, high up on a heaving battleship in the dark of night, himself just barely awake.
His battleship is making a desperate turn, in high wind and waves, and at top speed, to dodge a possible incoming torpedo.
Meanwhile our young officer is trying his absolute best to get his 12 inch gun turret to score at least on hit on an heavily armoured (and armed) enemy battleship.
The enemy is also is bobbing up and down and turning left and right at high speed in equally heavy seas a dozen or so miles away in the dark.
The enemy ship is trying just as hard to land one or two shots on the superstructure of his own battleship - which if it happens, will likely kill him and render moot any success at getting his battleship's guns to hit the enemy.
This, despite the fact that both his battleship's hull and its gun turrets, both heavily armoured, remain totally undamaged.
He has been taught to use Newtonian ballastics to hit and destroy 60,000 ton ships, only to discover that what he is really aiming for with his massive one ton armouring piercing shell is the 150 fragile pounds of his counterpart gunnery officer.
Neither officer will ever hit what they were aiming for, but both are likely to end up dead --- when their ships make the wrong turn and run into an enemy shell equally off target.
Ballastics has descended in to a good old fashioned low tech infantry fire fight: fire as many shots as quickly as you can in the general direction of the enemy and hope some by mischance actually hit him.
Forget even that it is nighttime and in heavy seas, with two ships very far apart, moving at top speed in irregular weaving patterns while bobbing up and down in the water irregularly.
And that the eye on the rangefinder is hindered by all the bright flashes and dense smoke of real battles.
Or that in the minute or two it takes to set range and elevation, the gun to be fired and for the shell to travels to its target, the other ship will have irregularly altered what ever semi-predictable course,speed and elevation it was following at the time of 'set'.
Think about the intermittent winds across the path of that dozen or so miles - winds with different temperatures and density of air - all which affect how a shell deviates from its Newtonian path.
The gun barrel, its wearing-out with repeated shooting and even its changing temperature from shot to shot, all effect the accuracy of our departing shell.
Each new shell is never been machined as true to its designed shape as one would like - just as the bags of propellant each display a random slightly difference in the amount of force they provide.
Many of these factors, but not all, can be accounted on the naval battleship range and after a number of shots, gunnery officers do hit a target and retire to the wardroom.
But even the most lifelike gunnery range practise, far more real-world than the university lab, does not prepare the gunnery crews for a real-world battle.
In a real battle, it is far more likely that three battleships and heavy cruisers on each side are all trying to hit each other at the same time : what fans of Newton like to call "many-bodied problems" , the kind they'd rather not talk about in the physics classroom.
Yet battleship gunnery crews in WWII were the best trained, best equipped, most scientifically up to date gunners of all the war effort : none of the six nations that had modern battleships spared any expense or scientific effort to make their gunners topnotch.
But equally, all the odds against the various gunners hitting their targets had been equally up-gunned.
Faster and more agile opposing ships, heavier armour, longer and bigger guns, extreme firing ranges, night fighting, heavy weather fighting, submarines and dive bombers coming at them as well as big shells : it just never stopped.
Most of the (hugely expensive, manned by thousands of highly trained men) aptly named "capital" ships that were sunk in WWII, did not fall before the big guns, but rather to much smaller,cheaper, simpler weapons : sea mines, torpedoes, dive bombers, kamikazes.
Ballastics and science hardly entered into most of those losses : instead very brave men got within pointblank range and then eyeballed their way to success.
Engineers can understand that 'can-do' attitude perfectly well....
Saturday, April 27, 2013
A hybrid between a billiard ball and a bowl of jelly : Modernity's 'the horror, the horror'
Hard to imagine Modernity ever being really comfortable at the Seaside : hard to ever imagine it capable of being relaxed and comfortable that close to such an un-modernist miscegenation of land and water.
This is because, starting with Newton, then Dalton and onto Darwin , Modernity's chief metaphor to describe Reality (both physical and mental) was as something built-up upon a collection of a few dozen different-sized and different-weighted hard, indestructible, impenetrable billiard-ball-like atoms.
So, too, Truth was one billiard ball and the non-truth another, life worthy of life was one billiard ball, life unworthy of life another and so on for ever more.
Living things (once formed into species) did not mix their genes ever again with members from other species said Darwin, adapting Newton's and Dalton's metaphor fruitfully to his re-casting of Biology.
By the 1930s, Modernity Science was under attack from people like Dirac and Pauling ,but only in the pages of Public (scientifically published) Science .
They had demonstrated that that those supposedly so hard, so dense and so impenetrable billiard ball atoms of classical physics and chemistry were actually mere flashing smears of probability roaming around a lot of wasted space.
Molecules, the real basis of differentiated physical reality, were formed of wildly shaped, ever-changing, ever-moving three dimensional collections of these smears of probability.
In biology, Martin Henry Dawson and others were demonstrating that species were also not billiard ball like but that gene material could freely cross the barriers supposedly separating species via activities like bacterial transformation.
Again, this was in the Public (scientifically peer-reviewed /published) Science media.
By contrast, in Popular Science, the science of High School and undergraduate courses, reality was still all about little billiard balls.
And more than a century later, still is.
In the last 80 pages of most current 900 page science textbooks, quantum reality is introduced furtively like the Church teaching 'sex for mature catholics' .
Over a century after quantum theory dislodged Newton from academic science HE (sic) still reigns supreme, whenever underpaid adjunct professors must teach massive undergraduate intro courses while the tenured mighty & wise ponder the Higgs particle.
Modernity long ago died away in mainstream culture and in academic science.
But as long as it reigns unchallenged in Popular Science and in applied science, engineering and technology departments, we will continue to have these supposedly ' educated ' people out there blithely denying any limits on Man's ability to control the few billiard balls they see as lying at the base of all Reality.
Blithely denying the possibility of uncontrollable man-made climate change .....
This is because, starting with Newton, then Dalton and onto Darwin , Modernity's chief metaphor to describe Reality (both physical and mental) was as something built-up upon a collection of a few dozen different-sized and different-weighted hard, indestructible, impenetrable billiard-ball-like atoms.
So, too, Truth was one billiard ball and the non-truth another, life worthy of life was one billiard ball, life unworthy of life another and so on for ever more.
Living things (once formed into species) did not mix their genes ever again with members from other species said Darwin, adapting Newton's and Dalton's metaphor fruitfully to his re-casting of Biology.
By the 1930s, Modernity Science was under attack from people like Dirac and Pauling ,but only in the pages of Public (scientifically published) Science .
They had demonstrated that that those supposedly so hard, so dense and so impenetrable billiard ball atoms of classical physics and chemistry were actually mere flashing smears of probability roaming around a lot of wasted space.
Molecules, the real basis of differentiated physical reality, were formed of wildly shaped, ever-changing, ever-moving three dimensional collections of these smears of probability.
In biology, Martin Henry Dawson and others were demonstrating that species were also not billiard ball like but that gene material could freely cross the barriers supposedly separating species via activities like bacterial transformation.
Again, this was in the Public (scientifically peer-reviewed /published) Science media.
By contrast, in Popular Science, the science of High School and undergraduate courses, reality was still all about little billiard balls.
And more than a century later, still is.
In the last 80 pages of most current 900 page science textbooks, quantum reality is introduced furtively like the Church teaching 'sex for mature catholics' .
Over a century after quantum theory dislodged Newton from academic science HE (sic) still reigns supreme, whenever underpaid adjunct professors must teach massive undergraduate intro courses while the tenured mighty & wise ponder the Higgs particle.
Modernity long ago died away in mainstream culture and in academic science.
But as long as it reigns unchallenged in Popular Science and in applied science, engineering and technology departments, we will continue to have these supposedly ' educated ' people out there blithely denying any limits on Man's ability to control the few billiard balls they see as lying at the base of all Reality.
Blithely denying the possibility of uncontrollable man-made climate change .....
Friday, March 15, 2013
the "THEATRE" of war : 1939-1945
WWII started out on a note of uplift in 1939, with its three actors (Scientific Racism, Scientific Capitalism and Scientific Socialism) all united in eating the scenery but ended in farce in 1945, as the scenery proceeded to eat the three actors.
These actors can't be said to lack ambition.
Japan and Germany agreed to divide the world between them, planning over the course of a few years to double their size every three months until they had grown from roughly 100,000 square miles in size into giants 100 million square miles in size.
These were to be formal empires, ruled directly from Berlin and Tokyo.
Washington and Moscow planned, instead, just informal empires , ruling indirectly, but also saw no reason to stop at sharing the globe with anyone : an entirely capitalist or communist world would do nicely.
But in all these variegated planned empires , their shared gods would at least be a constant : all praise Newton, Dalton and Darwin !
In Physics, Newtonian ballatics still held total sway : for Nordenized bombs , neither snow,rain,heat nor the gloom of night would stay these couriers of death from their anointed round : enemy barrels would soon be in right some pickle.
In Chemistry, Dalton's simple adding together of elemental atoms had been shown, mostly by German chemists, as able to create anything and everything.
Hitler, among others, was reassured that no more would hunger be a restraint on war, with all the resulting disease and government-toppling food riots. "No bread ? Why don't they just eat food pills ?"
In Biology, all three actors believed in negative and positive eugenics, with characteristic national differences in its actual application.
In Germany, quoting from the Old Testament of Darwin, the matter was strictly genetic, nature not nuture.
Certain races, bound by blood, were irredeemable and to be terminated negatively.
Other races were more plastic and could be molded positively into becoming the new Aryan superman.
Stalin much preferred the New Testament of Darwin , the Lamarck side of the old man , with certain classes , bound by their wealth and education, as irredeemable and to be terminated.
But the workers were more plastic and could made into the new socialist supermen.
America and most of the rest of the modern nations took a bit from both of these extreme positions and saw it was individuals within their nations that were irredeemable , mostly of one class admitably but in that class because of their genetic nature.
Flash forward to the summer of 1945, six long year later.
The actual course of the war hadn't gone exactly to any of the three actors' plans but instead had rather meandered , with Norden-like precision, widely and wildly all over the map.
The Norden bombsight, that apogee of Newtonian ballistic precision, had been proven so inaccurate thanks to recalcitrant Nature, that the war only truly ended in August when a massive fire bomb was dropped, out of a bomber named after someone's mother, and burned thousands of babies to death.
Now as long as your bombsight was accurate enough to be sure of hitting the right country, (something that bomber pilots from all combatant nations failed to get right at times), it was good enough : the A-bomb became Physics' reluctant Plan B.
And that summer all over the world, from Vietnam to the Netherlands, people were still looking up to the skies still hoping to see the long promised food pills drop out of the butterfly bombers like modern day manna.
Most dead people in this war, like most wars, still ended up dying of hunger and its diseases : Nature never bites back more violently that in the human stomach.
But no food pills. In fact, a few thousand chemists with PhDs and endless pots of money had even failed to assemble a few of Dalton's atoms into tiny molecules only 300 daltons in size.
So, in the end, penicillin and quinine still had to be made by dumb nature : and Oxford University's most refined, dying, were saved by Pfizer's Brooklyn Crude, Chemistry's reluctant Plan B.
In fact, Oxford's most refined and least refined were both saved indifferently by Pfizer's and Glaxo's medicine, a sort of chemical Beveridge Report in action.
In July, the voters of Britain, having had a chance to look over what Buchenwald and Beveridge had offered as a solution to the problem of the weak and the poor , had voted overwhelmingly for Beveridge, Biology's reluctant Plan B.
Because even in race-above-all Germany, irredeemable races were soon found to be redeemable after all, as farming and mining slaves , to keep Germans from starving and freezing to death.
Tens of millions of non-Germans filled every corner of nation that had started a war in an effort to purify itself all foreigners and all useless mouths.
Have I proven that irony and war are made for each other....
These actors can't be said to lack ambition.
Japan and Germany agreed to divide the world between them, planning over the course of a few years to double their size every three months until they had grown from roughly 100,000 square miles in size into giants 100 million square miles in size.
(!!!!!!)
These were to be formal empires, ruled directly from Berlin and Tokyo.
Washington and Moscow planned, instead, just informal empires , ruling indirectly, but also saw no reason to stop at sharing the globe with anyone : an entirely capitalist or communist world would do nicely.
But in all these variegated planned empires , their shared gods would at least be a constant : all praise Newton, Dalton and Darwin !
In Physics, Newtonian ballatics still held total sway : for Nordenized bombs , neither snow,rain,heat nor the gloom of night would stay these couriers of death from their anointed round : enemy barrels would soon be in right some pickle.
In Chemistry, Dalton's simple adding together of elemental atoms had been shown, mostly by German chemists, as able to create anything and everything.
Hitler, among others, was reassured that no more would hunger be a restraint on war, with all the resulting disease and government-toppling food riots. "No bread ? Why don't they just eat food pills ?"
In Biology, all three actors believed in negative and positive eugenics, with characteristic national differences in its actual application.
In Germany, quoting from the Old Testament of Darwin, the matter was strictly genetic, nature not nuture.
Certain races, bound by blood, were irredeemable and to be terminated negatively.
Other races were more plastic and could be molded positively into becoming the new Aryan superman.
Stalin much preferred the New Testament of Darwin , the Lamarck side of the old man , with certain classes , bound by their wealth and education, as irredeemable and to be terminated.
But the workers were more plastic and could made into the new socialist supermen.
America and most of the rest of the modern nations took a bit from both of these extreme positions and saw it was individuals within their nations that were irredeemable , mostly of one class admitably but in that class because of their genetic nature.
Flash forward to the summer of 1945, six long year later.
The actual course of the war hadn't gone exactly to any of the three actors' plans but instead had rather meandered , with Norden-like precision, widely and wildly all over the map.
The Norden bombsight, that apogee of Newtonian ballistic precision, had been proven so inaccurate thanks to recalcitrant Nature, that the war only truly ended in August when a massive fire bomb was dropped, out of a bomber named after someone's mother, and burned thousands of babies to death.
Now as long as your bombsight was accurate enough to be sure of hitting the right country, (something that bomber pilots from all combatant nations failed to get right at times), it was good enough : the A-bomb became Physics' reluctant Plan B.
And that summer all over the world, from Vietnam to the Netherlands, people were still looking up to the skies still hoping to see the long promised food pills drop out of the butterfly bombers like modern day manna.
Most dead people in this war, like most wars, still ended up dying of hunger and its diseases : Nature never bites back more violently that in the human stomach.
But no food pills. In fact, a few thousand chemists with PhDs and endless pots of money had even failed to assemble a few of Dalton's atoms into tiny molecules only 300 daltons in size.
So, in the end, penicillin and quinine still had to be made by dumb nature : and Oxford University's most refined, dying, were saved by Pfizer's Brooklyn Crude, Chemistry's reluctant Plan B.
In fact, Oxford's most refined and least refined were both saved indifferently by Pfizer's and Glaxo's medicine, a sort of chemical Beveridge Report in action.
In July, the voters of Britain, having had a chance to look over what Buchenwald and Beveridge had offered as a solution to the problem of the weak and the poor , had voted overwhelmingly for Beveridge, Biology's reluctant Plan B.
Because even in race-above-all Germany, irredeemable races were soon found to be redeemable after all, as farming and mining slaves , to keep Germans from starving and freezing to death.
Tens of millions of non-Germans filled every corner of nation that had started a war in an effort to purify itself all foreigners and all useless mouths.
Have I proven that irony and war are made for each other....
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
All Optimists - without exception - are Social Darwinists ; all Pessimists are Altruists
 |
| Always the OPTIMIST |
An optimist believes that there is only one simple, perfect, permanent solution to each of Life's relatively few difficulties.
Someone more skeptical and cautious sees many possible solutions to each of Life's many and complex problems: all imperfect, impermanent and all highly contingent.
Yesterday's wild-eyed optimistic science - that of Newton, Dalton & Darwin - is still worshipped in High Schools around the world
And right now , wild-eyed cock-eyed optimism ,(aka Yesterday's Science - the science of Newton, Dalton and Darwin still worshipped in High School laboratory chapels around the world) , is killing this planet - destroying tomorrow's world for our kids and grandkids.
And we're just letting it all happen.
When there is only one possible - simple - certain - permanent - solution to every problem, what do you do with the rest - the imperfect solutions ?
Those mouchers, those useless mouths, those "unfit" ideas, those takers not makers , those 47% type ideas ?
You eliminate those ideas like an eugenicist eliminates the unfit.
But when you doubt that this or any solution will work perfectly and permanently in each and every set of circumstances, what do you do with today's less than perfect solutions ?
Like a pack rat, you preserve them for another day and another situation - you redeem them - see if they can serve the community with pride under different circumstances.
You don't write them off forever - you don't toss them aside like a used condom - you treat them them like those people who are down today, but not out - because, with a little help and sympathy, they might be up and about tomorrow.
Mitt Romney says his action plan actually consists of nothing more than free floating optimism.
Should we really be surprised then about his secret speech writing off the 47% as 'useless mouths' ?
I don't think so....
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
NEWTONIAN MODERNITY dies June 6th 1944, in hail of hand grenades ...
The most effective, the most pinpoint accurate, guided missiles of all WWII ?
The bog-common hand grenade.
And usually thrown by a man thought too stupid, too small, too unhealthy to join the real armed forces: which is why he ended up in the infantry as an MOS 745, aka the bog-ordinary rifleman.
Now he was lobbing that grenade from 10 or 20 feet away , into a MG (machine gun) emplacement, or a concrete pillbox, or down the barrel of a big artillery piece --- and winning the battle for Omaha Beach, turning the potential D-Day disaster into ultimate victory.
More than just a few German and foreign conscripts died in those emplacements on that day: Newtonian Modernity also suffered a grievous blow from which it never recovered.
For weeks earlier and on that day itself, the biggest guns in the Allied navy and the biggest bomber fleets in the Allied air forces, had tried and tried to shut down those emplacements with massive blasts of HE (high explosives) delivered via Newtonian ballistics.
In Newtonian theory (the then dominant paradigm to explain the entire world) it was felt that given enough accurate information, one could correct point and elevate a gun at a distant target, press the 'trigger' and walk away : 'fire and forget'.
If the math was right the shell would wing its way unerringly to the target.
But out in the real world, the problem proves to be a 'many body problem' - one that no amount of Newton will resolve.
The most sophisticated use of Newtonian math and the best in analog computers was on board those battleships and bombers : fire control equipment from famous names like Norden and Sperry.
But nothing worked - both the destructive power of high explosives and the accuracy of Newtonian fire control was highly exaggerated and knowingly oversold.
Today we do have smart bombs and guided missiles but they do not make their way to the target accurately via Newton's math.
No, all their guiding GPS signals are only rendered accurate when Quantum mechanics and Relativity are used to correct their raw data.
But back to 1944: in the end, it took brave infantrymen like Captain Joe Dawson ( no relation except perhaps spiritually to former infantryman Lt Martin Henry Dawson) who had to climb the cliffs above the bloody sand and take out the deadly machine gunners (often just single individuals like the famous Heinrich Severloh) and save the situation.
So, it was down to this : forget the hundreds of thousands of men and the biggest military machines money and science could create trying - via Newton - to take out the D-Day German coastal defences.
Instead, the entire Allied invasion of Europe was reduced to a 'High Noon' type duel battle between a lone German with a machine gun and a lone American with a hand grenade.
If that lone German succeeded long enough in holding the Americans to the beach, German tanks might arrive to drive them off the beach altogether, and thus divide the united Allied beachhead into little pieces and then proceed to conquer it piece by piece - a classic German tactic.
But if the lone American lobbed his grenade just right, the MG fire would cease and the men could move off the beach and go a few miles inland, giving a depth of defence sufficient to blunt any later German armoured counterattack.
D-Day turned out to be a low tech victory in a war that was claimed above all to be a high tech scientific war : don't believe the liars and deniers who say otherwise.
They outa make a movie out of the duel : Dawson versus Severloh for the Fate of the Earth --- except who in Hollywood would ever buy the script --- it seems too improbable.
Once again, fact beggars fiction...
The bog-common hand grenade.
And usually thrown by a man thought too stupid, too small, too unhealthy to join the real armed forces: which is why he ended up in the infantry as an MOS 745, aka the bog-ordinary rifleman.
Now he was lobbing that grenade from 10 or 20 feet away , into a MG (machine gun) emplacement, or a concrete pillbox, or down the barrel of a big artillery piece --- and winning the battle for Omaha Beach, turning the potential D-Day disaster into ultimate victory.
More than just a few German and foreign conscripts died in those emplacements on that day: Newtonian Modernity also suffered a grievous blow from which it never recovered.
For weeks earlier and on that day itself, the biggest guns in the Allied navy and the biggest bomber fleets in the Allied air forces, had tried and tried to shut down those emplacements with massive blasts of HE (high explosives) delivered via Newtonian ballistics.
In Newtonian theory (the then dominant paradigm to explain the entire world) it was felt that given enough accurate information, one could correct point and elevate a gun at a distant target, press the 'trigger' and walk away : 'fire and forget'.
If the math was right the shell would wing its way unerringly to the target.
But out in the real world, the problem proves to be a 'many body problem' - one that no amount of Newton will resolve.
The most sophisticated use of Newtonian math and the best in analog computers was on board those battleships and bombers : fire control equipment from famous names like Norden and Sperry.
But nothing worked - both the destructive power of high explosives and the accuracy of Newtonian fire control was highly exaggerated and knowingly oversold.
Today we do have smart bombs and guided missiles but they do not make their way to the target accurately via Newton's math.
No, all their guiding GPS signals are only rendered accurate when Quantum mechanics and Relativity are used to correct their raw data.
But back to 1944: in the end, it took brave infantrymen like Captain Joe Dawson ( no relation except perhaps spiritually to former infantryman Lt Martin Henry Dawson) who had to climb the cliffs above the bloody sand and take out the deadly machine gunners (often just single individuals like the famous Heinrich Severloh) and save the situation.
So, it was down to this : forget the hundreds of thousands of men and the biggest military machines money and science could create trying - via Newton - to take out the D-Day German coastal defences.
Instead, the entire Allied invasion of Europe was reduced to a 'High Noon' type duel battle between a lone German with a machine gun and a lone American with a hand grenade.
If that lone German succeeded long enough in holding the Americans to the beach, German tanks might arrive to drive them off the beach altogether, and thus divide the united Allied beachhead into little pieces and then proceed to conquer it piece by piece - a classic German tactic.
But if the lone American lobbed his grenade just right, the MG fire would cease and the men could move off the beach and go a few miles inland, giving a depth of defence sufficient to blunt any later German armoured counterattack.
D-Day turned out to be a low tech victory in a war that was claimed above all to be a high tech scientific war : don't believe the liars and deniers who say otherwise.
They outa make a movie out of the duel : Dawson versus Severloh for the Fate of the Earth --- except who in Hollywood would ever buy the script --- it seems too improbable.
Once again, fact beggars fiction...
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Hitler,Tojo,Norden's big error: trusting HIGH SCHOOL Physics..
Traditional High School level physics is, at best, only "sorta" okay.
But only if you agree to do no more with it, than to follow someone else's orders and to keep your mouth shut and your pen capped.
Shut and capped on the application of HS physics to any other world outside its proper - and severely limited - sphere.
But you really need a couple of Physics degrees and lots of maturity (and lots of post-doc discussions with your elders), before you are fit to talk up the limitations of all traditional (Newtonian) physics, not just HS physics, to any areas outside of things like bridge-building and chemical plant operating.
Some metaphors from the world of popular music making might make the reasons a little clearer.
Anyone who has ever played or sung popular music - or even just read about or hung about people who have - knows about the echo button and the reverb button.
We may be limited to knowing just what they sound like and how they differ. But real musicians & singers, real record and film producers, must be able to buy those effects successfully and economically.
Quickly they discover that any price point echo equipment will do the job - the cheapest ,oldest equipment even have their own (un-natural but charming) uses.
But cheap reverb simply sounds bad. And as your music making ears get more acute , even highly expensive reverb sounds bad.
And not just bad - unlike the few obvious and reliable controls on an inexpensive echo unit, the expensive reverb unit has many many controls that collectively can unpredictably veer from acceptably okay to horribly awful, at the mere touch of a dial.
Professionally-oriented musicians and producers are finally forced to learn a little physics to make sense of it all.
Echo, they learn, is a simple audio event, so simple in fact that high school physics students could and perhaps should, replicate it with a freeware, software, digital audio editor.
Record your voice - copy the sound and paste it forward on the editor screen (a metaphor for actually moving it forward in time by a few dozen thousands of a second (milliseconds) ).
Reduce the copy's volume relative to the original, and filter off some of the treble.
Voila ! A perfect echo - indistinguishable from one we can make in a cave.
Newton or Norden - maybe even Hitler - would have recognized what HS physics has done: solved a two body problem.
Body A, our voice, hits the cave's very distant wall and causes Body B, the wall, to reflect our voice back to us , but delayed by the distance (in space and time) between us and the wall and the return.
The effect is echo : the sound of our own voice in our ear, followed by tiny fraction of a second later, by an echo of our voice, reduced in volume and in brightness by the sound wave weakening itself as it passed from atom to atom, trillions of times over.
This is High School and University Undergraduate Physics in a nutshell - or rather a cave, a sort of Plato's cave in fact.
We come away after completing the course and going on with our lives, outside the real world of full time professional physics, think life is really like that : just two bodies,mechanical, linear, determinist cause and effect: life as clockwork.
But Reality in fact is mostly like the weather - or reverb - its a three body (IE multiple, maybe trillions upon trillions) problem.
Echo is simple because the distantly returning echo is too weak
upon finally reaching other walls to do more than die there as heat - standing in, incidentally, as proof of the Second Law of Thermodynamics --- the idea that all energy inevitably degrades down to useless low temperature 'heat' .
But in most buildings, the walls are close enough and hard enough to reflect back echo, but not 100.00000000000000000%
perfectly. There is a slight angle to the return: north south east west - it doesn't matter.
That means the earliest outgoing re-echo doesn't die in destructive interference with its incoming later original self.
Instead it hit the other wall and again is deflected slightly off angle in random fashion, dependent ultimately on how smooth the paint or plaster job is - and to air molecules and sound waves, it is never smooth enough.
In milliseconds, the voice sound - a three dimensional wave remember - a sort of bubble of sound, is reflecting back from all angles and interfering and re-enforcing echos in a madly complex but very ear-satisfying manner that we call reverb.
It took hundreds of the world's best physicists, working decades, with the best computer equipment at their disposal, to create an approximately acceptable form of reverb artificially.
Even mass produced, the best of that approximately good artificially-produced reverb still costs tens of thousands of dollars.
And actually, it is semi-artificially produced - the creators of the best reverb systems simply copy (sample) what Nature produces, without in fact knowing how to recreate those effects themselves 'from first principles'.
For reverb, substitute the weather in four days time or the climate in four decades time : issues that are vital to our species' survival and yet madly complex beyond any amount of HS physics.
By contrast, one feels that Hitler felt that the so called 'fog of war' was all baloney : the science of war was actually more like Newton's planetary motion than it was like predicting the weather.
So he moved little wooden counters on his war maps as if they were points, masses and forces on some half-remembered HS physics chalkboard.
Body A (a wooden counter labelled Army Group Centre) was
moved by a wooden stick to Body B (a wooden counter labelled Moscow defenses) and Voila !
The job was done : cause and effect, linear war.
Army group A inevitably caused the effect upon Body B of entrapment and surrender : QID !
In reality, there were three (and more bodies) actually playing at this two body game.
Counters labelled "earlier-than-expected Fall rains and muddy roads" and "colder-than-expected-Winter-temperatures" also wanted to have their say.
Once they had their say and had turned simple HS physics echo into highly complex reverb, the jig - as they say - was up.
Up for Hitler, up for Tojo, up for Norden, up for Newton and above all - up for Modernity....
But only if you agree to do no more with it, than to follow someone else's orders and to keep your mouth shut and your pen capped.
Shut and capped on the application of HS physics to any other world outside its proper - and severely limited - sphere.
But you really need a couple of Physics degrees and lots of maturity (and lots of post-doc discussions with your elders), before you are fit to talk up the limitations of all traditional (Newtonian) physics, not just HS physics, to any areas outside of things like bridge-building and chemical plant operating.
Some metaphors from the world of popular music making might make the reasons a little clearer.
Anyone who has ever played or sung popular music - or even just read about or hung about people who have - knows about the echo button and the reverb button.
We may be limited to knowing just what they sound like and how they differ. But real musicians & singers, real record and film producers, must be able to buy those effects successfully and economically.
Quickly they discover that any price point echo equipment will do the job - the cheapest ,oldest equipment even have their own (un-natural but charming) uses.
But cheap reverb simply sounds bad. And as your music making ears get more acute , even highly expensive reverb sounds bad.
And not just bad - unlike the few obvious and reliable controls on an inexpensive echo unit, the expensive reverb unit has many many controls that collectively can unpredictably veer from acceptably okay to horribly awful, at the mere touch of a dial.
Professionally-oriented musicians and producers are finally forced to learn a little physics to make sense of it all.
Echo, they learn, is a simple audio event, so simple in fact that high school physics students could and perhaps should, replicate it with a freeware, software, digital audio editor.
Record your voice - copy the sound and paste it forward on the editor screen (a metaphor for actually moving it forward in time by a few dozen thousands of a second (milliseconds) ).
Reduce the copy's volume relative to the original, and filter off some of the treble.
Voila ! A perfect echo - indistinguishable from one we can make in a cave.
Newton or Norden - maybe even Hitler - would have recognized what HS physics has done: solved a two body problem.
Body A, our voice, hits the cave's very distant wall and causes Body B, the wall, to reflect our voice back to us , but delayed by the distance (in space and time) between us and the wall and the return.
The effect is echo : the sound of our own voice in our ear, followed by tiny fraction of a second later, by an echo of our voice, reduced in volume and in brightness by the sound wave weakening itself as it passed from atom to atom, trillions of times over.
This is High School and University Undergraduate Physics in a nutshell - or rather a cave, a sort of Plato's cave in fact.
We come away after completing the course and going on with our lives, outside the real world of full time professional physics, think life is really like that : just two bodies,mechanical, linear, determinist cause and effect: life as clockwork.
But Reality in fact is mostly like the weather - or reverb - its a three body (IE multiple, maybe trillions upon trillions) problem.
Echo is simple because the distantly returning echo is too weak
upon finally reaching other walls to do more than die there as heat - standing in, incidentally, as proof of the Second Law of Thermodynamics --- the idea that all energy inevitably degrades down to useless low temperature 'heat' .
But in most buildings, the walls are close enough and hard enough to reflect back echo, but not 100.00000000000000000%
perfectly. There is a slight angle to the return: north south east west - it doesn't matter.
That means the earliest outgoing re-echo doesn't die in destructive interference with its incoming later original self.
Instead it hit the other wall and again is deflected slightly off angle in random fashion, dependent ultimately on how smooth the paint or plaster job is - and to air molecules and sound waves, it is never smooth enough.
In milliseconds, the voice sound - a three dimensional wave remember - a sort of bubble of sound, is reflecting back from all angles and interfering and re-enforcing echos in a madly complex but very ear-satisfying manner that we call reverb.
It took hundreds of the world's best physicists, working decades, with the best computer equipment at their disposal, to create an approximately acceptable form of reverb artificially.
Even mass produced, the best of that approximately good artificially-produced reverb still costs tens of thousands of dollars.
And actually, it is semi-artificially produced - the creators of the best reverb systems simply copy (sample) what Nature produces, without in fact knowing how to recreate those effects themselves 'from first principles'.
For reverb, substitute the weather in four days time or the climate in four decades time : issues that are vital to our species' survival and yet madly complex beyond any amount of HS physics.
By contrast, one feels that Hitler felt that the so called 'fog of war' was all baloney : the science of war was actually more like Newton's planetary motion than it was like predicting the weather.
So he moved little wooden counters on his war maps as if they were points, masses and forces on some half-remembered HS physics chalkboard.
Body A (a wooden counter labelled Army Group Centre) was
moved by a wooden stick to Body B (a wooden counter labelled Moscow defenses) and Voila !
The job was done : cause and effect, linear war.
Army group A inevitably caused the effect upon Body B of entrapment and surrender : QID !
In reality, there were three (and more bodies) actually playing at this two body game.
Counters labelled "earlier-than-expected Fall rains and muddy roads" and "colder-than-expected-Winter-temperatures" also wanted to have their say.
Once they had their say and had turned simple HS physics echo into highly complex reverb, the jig - as they say - was up.
Up for Hitler, up for Tojo, up for Norden, up for Newton and above all - up for Modernity....
Sunday, April 15, 2012
If only SIR ISSAC NEWTON had been a BIOLOGIST...
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| Michael Marshall |
Rather than being a fulltime NEW AGER and just a part time scientist.
I'll grant one to the camp of the DENIERS, I do believe that there was a concerted effort (yes, a conspiracy of a sort) among generations untold of eminent scientists, to studiously ignore exploring too much about the life of their most famous scientist.
An effort centred among the members of Britain's famous ROYAL SOCIETY.
Today, shorn of his contributions to physics and math, Newton is liable to come across as a total nutbar and fruitcake.
But he was not untypical of many earlier - and even - current eminent scientists.
Still, this is a post about his useful work in science - the solving of two-body problems.
Briefly, Newton came up with a way to successfully predict (albeit only roughly accurately) the effect on the motions of two objects of their mutual gravitational attraction to each other.
Typically - and I say crucially - the two bodies are very unequal in size (mass, actually).
Sun and Earth ; Earth and Moon.
It replicates many unequal relationships in human society and flattered the bigger body in those relationships as merely reflecting a fact of nature, a LAW of Nature, for God's Sake !
Man and wife, parent and child, boss and servant, master and slave, white man and black man, A1 people versus 4F people.
On and on.
Oh yes, one more.
In biology, we find Newton's earth and moon replicated in the biologists' naft idea of biological commensality.
"Two-bodied commensality".
The bigger body, Man, has a meal.
Uninvited at Man's table, his physical body, is some tiny body - the commensal microbe.
They eat some of Man's food, but do not harm him ( disease) or help him (generating vitally needed vitamins for human survival inside Man's intestines).
It is a nice simple - stupidly simple -flatteringly untrue image.
In fact, in the real world, Life is run on a infinitely complex three-bodied model - the equation of which neither Newton nor anyone else ever solved perfectly, or even solved imperfectly for very long.
For Man, by mass and number, is in turn but a tiny commensal upon the entire world population of microbes who keep us fed with oxygen and vegetation/meat foods.
Without other life to feed us, we would starve because neither our current genes nor our current science allows us to breath and eat in a world of methane and sulfur -- unlike some of the microbes.
Now in a real world three-bodied problem, the three bodies would all interact with each other - and we definitely do interact with the local microbes upon us and with all the microbes living on the globe around us.
Our commensals sometimes do kill us and sometimes do help us ---indirectly.
We push them into it, by consuming antibiotics.
Some antibiotics kill off the commensals' competitors - so they in turn can move into us and cause disease.
Or we kill off our harmless commensals with our antibiotics and their replacements are not harmless but pathogens - we thus learn the harmless- useless- commensal actually indirectly helped us by keeping the deadly alternatives off our skin and out of our throats.
We also pump trillions times trillions of microbe-sized fatal doses of
fatal antibiotics into the general environment every year ; we raise the temperature of the air and the land and the water via our greenhouse gases and thus by our actions we kill some and promote others among the world's microbes.
Just between these three bodies,calculating the interactions would
still boggle Newton's brain.
Now 'three-bodied' is just a scientific cum classroom metaphor.
Because really life and reality is a many-bodied problem: a many,many,many-bodied problem.
Getting it exactly right - even once - probably boggled even God's mind.....
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