The Little Boy atomic bomb that dropped on Hiroshima was a very Big Bomb indeed : 5000 kilograms , 300 cm long, by 70 cm wide and 70 cm deep.
Long and thin : hence Little Boy.
Big Science needed tens of thousands of workers to build it.
By contrast, the tiny ampoule of natural penicillin that saved the life of little baby Patty Malone was only 5 grams in weight, .7cm by .7 cm by 3 cm in size.
It was thus 100 times shorter in length and width and thickness, though it too was long and thin in appearance.
And since its density was also surprisingly similar to that of Little Boy, it appropriately weighed 5 grams : a million times less (100 x 100 x 100 = 1 million).
Small science indeed.
Particularly when we recall that natural penicillin is actually made in a fungus factory that weighs about 70 pico grams (pico : one trillionth of a gram !) .
That is about a billion trillion times less the weight of what it would require for humanity to make the basic machinery and basic chemicals for chemists to synthesize penicillin.
The fungus only requires a bit of dirty water and a bit of decaying organic debris.
America's big bombers carried both the Little Boy bomb and the ampoules of penicillin : one went off to Hiroshima, the other also went all over the world to save lives.
However its first mercy run was from Brooklyn New York to Macon Georgia, to save Anne Shirley Carter.
A mighty big plane and a mighty long journey for such a small little ampoule but if any taxpayer complained, they were very careful not to do it publicly.
Could any two projects - anywhere - anytime - have been more different ?
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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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