Most people in 1940 exalted the big with a positive mania for admiring the newest biggest hydro dam or heavy bomber and they considered an atom to be pretty tiny - in fact, probably the tiniest thing in the Universe.
But even in 1940, scientists and those who kept up with popular media reports of the latest scientific discoveries and theories knew that that rocky objects like the Earth, made up of atoms combined into compounds and mixtures, were a blindingly small part of the Universe.
For 99.9%, by mass, of the visible Universe is plasma - the fourth (common) state of matter, a swirling hot gas made up of ions rather than complete atoms.
While in terms of space, most of the visible universe is (nearly empty) vacuum.
And already by the early 1930s, thanks to visionary scientists like Zwicky, it was seen that the visible facts of the universe could only be explained by the impact of simply massive amounts of dark invisible matter and energy, far far bigger than the visible mass and energy.
So by now, atoms and rocky planets like Earth were down to maybe .00001% of the total mass/energy of the Universe.
And big objects on Earth - objects like Man and his buildings - represented a much smaller percentage of even that small percentage.
So when Dr Henry Dawson chose to exalt the small in his "small" penicillin Manhattan Project, he was actually backing a certain winner and voting with the crowd.
Only the unbounded hubris of Man at the very apogee of Modernity, could think that in exalting the big as the "norm", he was going with the flow of Nature.
Because, in fact, the tide of Nature was decidedly going the other way.....
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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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