Postmodern Science came from postwar kids : the question is WHY ?

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 ! )

'Noir Science' of the 1940s

Compared to the complex , indeterminate and unresolved plots of 1940s Noir films, mainstream Hollywood plots - then and now - tend to look like they had all been successfully predicted centuries in advance by Isaac Newton or Pierre-Simon Laplace.

Predictable, determinist, reductionist, logical, elegant : words of praise in Science - and in mainstream Hollywood.

It as if news of the 20th century revolutions in probability theory, quantum theory, contingency theory et al has never reached mainstream Hollywood.

Okay - a commonplace criticism of Hollywood plot-making.

But what if we reversed the criticism : searched scientific theories to see if some of them displayed the makings of a well-made Hollywood plot and others  displayed more Noirish plotting ?

I can think of many.

For example , the 1920s saw a fierce and highly personal counterattack by the geological establishment defending Charles Lyell's vision of a slow gradual orderly geology against the new unpredictable geology revealed by young Harlen Bretz's theory of a sudden massive Missoula Flood in ancient times .

To his critics, Bretz's explanation for the some highly unusual geological features seemed positively Noirish -- suggesting a hidden dark unpredictable side to what their own Breen Office had always portrayed as a cheery sunlit orderly process.

Others ?

Obviously Martin Henry Dawson's new vision of the chaotic random horizontal genetic transfers found in the microbe world versus the universal and orderly vertical genetic inheritance scheme proposed by his (intellectual) rival Charles Darwin....

The high school teachers of WWII's leaders, got THEIR high school education back in the Early Victorian era

MY high school teachers ran WWII !

It is striking how just old the leaders of WWII were: not just politicians, but also the generals, bureaucrats, CEOs, professors and editors. Anyone who was anybody was usually far older than today's leaders is in equivalent positions.

Most were born in the 1870s and 1880s and so got their last science education in the 1890s, from high school teachers who themselves got their last science education at a high school at the end of the Early Victorian era !

So : the Science of the late 1840s used to guide the world of the early 1940s.

The leaders of WWII , Modernists to the core, had a firm faith grounded on a distinct impression that the First Law of Thermodynamics and Lyell's Law of Uniformitarianism was the Alpha and Omega of scientific knowledge ----- for all time.

When your high school science teacher tells you the universe is eternally unchangeable, why bother to drop by to be posted on the latest updates in basic science . There aren't going to be any , there can't be any.

Just take a bit of time to keep up on the latest wonderful new technological offerings.

Now do the horrors of Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Stalingrad seem more understandable ?

Like race relations before King, like the Gold Standard, in deniers' minds the climate was supposed to be eternally stable and unchangable

heat death of the DENIERS' certitudes

"The climate can't be changing - it just can't," all the blue rinsed ladies cry. "Its not fair - everything in life is changing - and now the climate - it just isn't fair !"

After living a long life safe inside the nice warm milk and cookies of certitudes, to now - in their declining years - to face yet another lose of certitudes is all a little too much for the average - aging - climate denier.

Life used to be so stable : the negro, hebrew, homosexual or career woman used to know their place and knew how to mind their manners.

Money was stable, based on the solid gold standard.

Economists and scientists assured them that matter and energy was stable, indestructible and eternal: it could be changed but never destroyed.

Droughts came ,yes, in a few small areas and for only a short time, replaced by floods also in just a few areas and for just a short time.

Like the rise of volcanoes and the fall of earthquakes, recessions and booms / war and peace came and went, came and went : moderated oscillations but always around a strictly defined - and maintained - norm.

In the Victorian mindset, there could be no science of climate CHANGE

Weather was ceaseless in its oscillations but the climate - the climate was eternal , as eternal as God and the Sun and the Universe.

As Spencer Weart points out, the idea of climate change literally didn't exist and couldn't exist : there were no departments of Climate Change at universities, no Society for the Study of Climate Change, no Journal of Climate Change.

Deniers thought they hadn't asked much out of life, only a level playing field to play out their life upon.

And  modernity's science - for its own selfish, greedy reasons - appeared to give that to them.

Until recently, until the rise of post-modernity science  : the new young whippersnappers.

Because, in fact, there is no such thing as a level playing field, never was and never will be : all fields, like it or not, must tilt subtly but inevitably downward, tracking the great arrow of time's long slow plunge into Heat Death.

Because the one thing the deniers were never taught in school was that the First Law of Thermodynamics (the claim that neither mass or energy can ever be created or destroyed but merely altered) was to the Second law of Thermodynamics as Einstein's Special Law of Relativity was to Einstein's General Law of Relativity.

Which is to say, very much the junior partner in this particular law firm.

The Second Law's Entropy ensures nothing ever really stays the same but rather is always changing : energy and matter are not destroyed true, but their utility to us became steadily degraded - and to us, that is as good as destroyed.

The centre of the Earth is very hot, just as it was 4 billion years ago - but it is less hot today than back then : day by day, millennium by millennium, it is steadily getting colder and colder - and this will one day mean less magnetic fields, less atmosphere and less Life on Earth.

The deniers'  Victorian credo (Lyell's Uniformitarianism) is nothing more than errant nonsense : the present is a guide to nothing more than the present and presents no certitudes as to the past or our future.

Shat happens : suck it up....

The very naughty Charles LYELL ....

"We must all learn to live together within Nature: all diners at her common table (commensal) or all learn to die together, frying up in the upcoming global climate meltdown."   (Blog Mission Statement.)

Modernist Man still views life on earth through the prism of geology, the legacy of that very wicked barrister Sir Charles Lyell.

Man's continued existence on Planet Earth, in this schema, is practically guaranteed by the fact that the geological processes of the earth are supposedly uniform in character , uniform all over the world and uniform in nature back to the beginnings of time.

Supposedly these geological forces are what created and sustain the great natural cycles - the circulation streams of  rain, water and air and of oxygen,nitrogen, carbon, sulfur et al.

But while it is true that because our planet was stony with a fluid metallic core, this allowed life the ability to begin here, most of those vast natural circulations wouldn't exist if life, Microbe Life mostly, didn't sustain them.

In fact most of the minerals and ore bodies that we take for granted as being of geological origin, actually were created and assembled by biological forces.

True, Geology gave us all the elements that make up the Earth - but most of our minerals and compounds owe some or all of their creation to Life forces.

Man, pace Robert Solow, could not live on rocks alone - we need Life to live ; all Life....

The very naughty Charles LYELL ....

Michael Marshall

Modernist Man still views life on earth through the prism of geology, the legacy of that very wicked barrister Sir Charles Lyell.

Man's continued existence on Planet Earth, in this schema, is practically guaranteed by the fact that the geological processes of the earth are supposedly uniform in character , uniform all over the world and uniform in nature back to the beginnings of time.

Supposedly these geological forces are what created and sustain the great natural cycles - the circulation streams of  rain, water and air and of oxygen,nitrogen, carbon, sulfur et al.

But while it is true that because our planet was stony with a fluid metallic core, this allowed life the ability to begin here, most of those vast natural circulations wouldn't exist if life, Microbe Life mostly, didn't sustain them.

In fact most of the minerals and ore bodies that we take for granted as being of geological origin, actually were created and assembled by biological forces.

True, Geology gave us all the elements that make up the Earth - but most of our minerals and compounds owe some or all of their creation to Life forces.

Man, pace Robert Solow, could not live on rocks alone - we need Life to live ; all Life....