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 ! )
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- 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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