In 1940, CHEMISTRY was the "Queen of Science" in the UK, the central science tying Physics to Biology to Engineering to Geology and Metallurgy and on and on.
ICI was one of the biggest employers in the UK and judged the most crucial single industrial firm in the country - as Du Pont and IG Farben were for its competitors , the USA and Germany.
But by 2010, mid-level University Chemistry Departments are rapidly disappearing across Great Britain and more and more chemist professors are going public about their fears that declining undergraduate interest in Chemistry in Britain and around the world was permanent.
By contrast, anything with the word 'bio-" in it seems to be what kids want to make a career in - while Chemistry remains associated with plastics that break and pollution that poisons.
Explaining what went wrong with Chemistry, 1940 -2010, is partly why I am writing MO goes PO....
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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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