A compelling scientific theory cum law is simple and consistent : all carbon atoms throughout the universe have six - and six only, no more or less - protons.
But in reality, there are very few science theories or laws that are that simple and consistent.
Exceptions always abound and become a nightmare for science theorists - their brain structure is not set up to easily handle uncertainties and probable possibilities and unknowabilities.
(I include experimentalists among the theorists because experiments are specifically designed to greatly simplify the reality found outside the laboratory --- many sciences have fierce internal conflicts between those big on lab work versus those pro field work.)
Theorists' brain = Conservatives' brain is a good rule of thumb (again, only a probability, not a dead certainty.)
If theorists make a living, win fame and fortune, by creating laws that simplify reality, naturalists do the exact reverse.
They win special fame and fortune by discovering the single one species in a vast genus that does not reproduce sexually.
Exceptions to the rule are their coin of fortune -- they seek out and see things that most of the rest of us either don't see or don't want to see.
Henry Dawson was a naturalist ---- but the kings of the science world, back in 1940 as today, were the theorists , the terrible simplifiers.
Wartime Penicillin, the conflict-driven drama between naturalists and progress-oriented theorists, was thus born to happen.....
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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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