Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Nothing can stop an idea that even tiny children can understand : sometimes, the Last May Be First

I argue that nobody really understood (or understands) the world of sub-atomic particles as it emerged, in ever growing complexity, from the 1890s to the 1940s and that as a result, it failed to change the childlike faith people still held in Hard Reductionism and Determinism.

But even as a tiny kid, I got the point of the story of microbe-made antibiotics - particularly as a tiny , powerless, kid.

Postmodern science was born in early postwar childhoods

Tiny weak beings, just like me, found in the ordinary and despised basement slime, in jungle dirt and in the filthy sewer water of Sardinia all were besting the smartest chemists in the universe ("big people" in kidspeak) and producing all the medicines that were saving the lives of tiny kids like me.

It was a grownups' science story that even I could rock and roll !

Otherwise we only learned in science of the effort of thousands of important big people, working in vast clean white labs  with billions of times our weekly allowance, making atomic energy for us - and for world-ending bombs....

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Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...

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