Together with Darwin and Newton, Galileo forms a trio of the biggest heroes among scientists and as a result the high points of his life story have been inflicted upon the rest of us, over and over, since grade school.
But just like Darwin and Newton, the most exciting, er embarrassing, parts of his life always seem to get left out - edited out of the re-telling.
Like the Royal Society quickly collecting all of Newton's private papers and then keeping the most embarrassing (the arcane religious purposes behind his major discoveries) basically secret for centuries.
Or Darwin's distinctly nasty personal character as revealed himself, in his personal writing.
Like stealing (not figuratively but literally) valuable documents from poor widows.
All fascinating stuff air-brushed out of the much-told tale.
Atheists and their devotion to hagiography of the most shameless kind - you gotta love 'em !
I certainly never knew until now that Galileo had experimented with microscopes at the same time he first turned his telescope on the planets and upset the belief in an Earth-centred Universe.
With his genius, he might even have used his microscope observations to suggest a cause of the plague then ravaging Italy - three centuries early.
Alas - not to be so.
Now since the amazing abilities of the micro universe is the focus of this blog, I naturally read a lot of books about the amazing survival record and chemical abilities of the microbes.
So forgive me if my big takeaway from Paul G Falkowski's first popularly written effort on the wonders of the micro-world that he has explored since early childhood was his throwaway paragraph or two on Galileo's microscope.
Falkowski offers up an explanation for Galileo's failure to take the microscope any further : telescopes extended our knowledge of what we already saw with our naked eye, while microscopes required an imaginary leap into the unknown and unexpected.
This explanation is not likely to offend the scientific establishment - but it should. For if genius is all about imaginary leaps into the unknown, does this not diminish Galileo reputation greatly ?
I believe it does --- and that it should.
But it also got me wondering if Galileo could be accurately described as a proto-Futurist.
The early 20th century Futurists were a scientifically-minded bunch of artists who shared an obsession with speed and machines and war with Mussolini and Hitler.
Because Galileo was clearly unimpressed by the micro universe of tiny objects just barely moving that he saw when he peered down upon them , preferring muchly the macro universe of fast motion and big objects he gazed up at.
MacLean's magazine's Brian Bethune says that humans tend to confound bigger lifeforms with 'more complex' and 'more important' despite clear evidence to the contrary.
I dislike the ambiguity in this type of writing - for Bethune strongly implies that humans have always done thus, without saying so - and that isn't totally true.
Yes the hubris about exalting the big and dissing the small is timeless - and Galileo's behavior is just another proof of that fact.
But we non-microbiologists have really only begun to discover the importance of the smallest lifeforms to our planet in the last twenty five years - thanks to the efforts of people like Falkowski and Bethune.
Even now, every day, the microbiologists are discovering more and more the extent of the microbes' earthly dominance - a process that began for that branch of science only about 150 years ago.
We could have begun to discover this all-important fact way back in Galileo's time ------ but for his - and our - human hubris...
Showing posts with label mussolini. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mussolini. Show all posts
Saturday, June 27, 2015
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
WWII : the warlords as scientists ...
Nature Resists, 1939-1945 : science proposes, nature disposes
The Allied-Axis started out fighting one enemy and ended up fighting a totally unexpected enemy.
Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, Mussolini and Tojo were all well known for having a strong personal interest in science and technology.
FDR had none, but he was astute enough to know that he needs lots of science and technology and astute enough to give it a free hand.
Willing indeed to risk public ridicule by requesting 50,000 planes a year from the 1940 American economy.
Planes, planes and planes enough to tell the world America was going to fight, if it had to, with high tech machines not low tech doughboys.
So a science war, even a scientism war ; a war exclusively fought between the world's top high tech manpower.
And Nature ?
Yawn !
An inert, passive backdrop.
Or was it ......?
1939-1945 : scenery chewing actors ...
1939-1945 : 'civilized men' battle each other to divide the natural world - but then , totally unexpectedly , it resists...
"1939 -1945 : Scenery Chewing Actors" is a wonderful ambiguous title.
Does it mean ham actors like Hitler, Mussolini and Churchill tore up the natural world, in passing, as they struggled to lead all humanity ?
Or does it mean does it mean the best laid plans of mousy prime ministers and ratty war lords are blunted and broken when the neutral seeming natural backdrop to their human-only drama turns out to be very much alive around and willing to bite back ?
Or perhaps, that a lot of both can be found in the actual events of that six year long war.
A 'civilized men' upon 'civilized men' military conflict, mixed in with the natural world exhibiting unexpected 'push back' against the pretensions of those 'civilized men' , right across the globe....
Monday, July 8, 2013
Bystanders make Bullies : in schoolyards or in World Wars
When Tojo, Mussolini and Hitler first crawled out from under their rocks and set to work, the nations they led were relatively weak and ally-less, particularly compared to the combined 'rest of the world', a world that professed to oppose them root and branch.
But when in fact that whole wide world stood around the schoolyard just watching as bystanders ,without intervening, we gave the bad guys their very first triumph.
Albeit these were triumphs over very small victims, but it gave them the confidence to move on and upwards, to successfully take on ever bigger victims and to take on ever more of them at the same time.
The three were always bullies-in-waiting, from birth, but it was the in-actions of we bystanders which gave them room to grow in self confidence, brutality and hubris.
In bullyboy genocide, it always takes two types to tango : one active bully and many in-active bystanders...
But when in fact that whole wide world stood around the schoolyard just watching as bystanders ,without intervening, we gave the bad guys their very first triumph.
Albeit these were triumphs over very small victims, but it gave them the confidence to move on and upwards, to successfully take on ever bigger victims and to take on ever more of them at the same time.
The three were always bullies-in-waiting, from birth, but it was the in-actions of we bystanders which gave them room to grow in self confidence, brutality and hubris.
In bullyboy genocide, it always takes two types to tango : one active bully and many in-active bystanders...
Monday, June 10, 2013
It was the very ORTHODOXY of their economic theories that doomed Hitler,Tojo and Mussolini
Devotedly orthodox economist Robert Solow won the 1987 Nobel Prize basically for just one very famous 1974 quote, taken a bit out of context:
But since he was born in 1924 and was only nine when Hitler came to power, he can hardly be blamed for acting as Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo's unofficial economic advisor.
However, someone had to do that job and so it was done by virtually all of the 1930s' economists, almost all orthodox to the man or woman.
In the 1930s, as in the 1830s and the 2030s, their theories basically claimed the same thing as Solow's quote, albeit in less frank language.
But you protest that Hitler, Tojo and Musso went to war precisely to obtain the natural resources they didn't have at home.
So surely my claim looks highly incredible on the face of it: they obviously took natural resources very seriously indeed.
But remember that these three planned to steal all those natural resources they didn't have, and steal them away from heavily armed neighbours who didn't want to give them up without a big fight.
Relatively 'natural-resource-less' at the moment their military machine planned to do all the stealing, the three still felt confident they could substitute something else for those missing natural resources like copper, oil and rubber : sheer aggressive military willpower.
Their failure to substitute patriotic energy for petroleum energy should be a lesson to even the dimmest of economic light bulbs, but no.
Acting as if it is still mentally wowing the crowds in some stadium in Nuremberg, orthodox economics still daily proclaims 'the triumph of the human will' over mere material limitations.
So who exactly started the bloodbath of WWII ?
May I suggest you look no further than your local university economics department .
Pity then their ilk never faced a war crimes trial , instead of just their most earnest lay students at the top of Japan, Italy and Germany .....
"If it is very easy to substitute other things for natural resources, then there is, in principle, no problem. The world, in effect, can get along without natural resources."
But since he was born in 1924 and was only nine when Hitler came to power, he can hardly be blamed for acting as Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo's unofficial economic advisor.
However, someone had to do that job and so it was done by virtually all of the 1930s' economists, almost all orthodox to the man or woman.
In the 1930s, as in the 1830s and the 2030s, their theories basically claimed the same thing as Solow's quote, albeit in less frank language.
But you protest that Hitler, Tojo and Musso went to war precisely to obtain the natural resources they didn't have at home.
So surely my claim looks highly incredible on the face of it: they obviously took natural resources very seriously indeed.
But remember that these three planned to steal all those natural resources they didn't have, and steal them away from heavily armed neighbours who didn't want to give them up without a big fight.
Relatively 'natural-resource-less' at the moment their military machine planned to do all the stealing, the three still felt confident they could substitute something else for those missing natural resources like copper, oil and rubber : sheer aggressive military willpower.
Their failure to substitute patriotic energy for petroleum energy should be a lesson to even the dimmest of economic light bulbs, but no.
Acting as if it is still mentally wowing the crowds in some stadium in Nuremberg, orthodox economics still daily proclaims 'the triumph of the human will' over mere material limitations.
So who exactly started the bloodbath of WWII ?
May I suggest you look no further than your local university economics department .
Pity then their ilk never faced a war crimes trial , instead of just their most earnest lay students at the top of Japan, Italy and Germany .....
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
WWII : From Manchuria Incident to Nagasaki, NEUTRALITY was majority position of world's sovereign nations
The idea that Hitler, Tojo, Stalin and Mussolini are among the most evil leaders of all time - and that people like them must be stopped at all costs - is a relatively recent idea.
It is an idea promoted by people like you and I, who statistically speaking, weren't likely even alive when WWII ended.
Thus we never had to do the hard-lifting of deciding just what to actually do, or not do, about these obviously aggressive tyrants.
Our parents, grandparents, and great-great-great grandparents obviously felt - and above all acted - quite differently than what we claimed we would do , in similar circumstances, today.
My book - The Hyssop and The Cedar - is an effort to explain why this was the case.
Because, starting in late 1931 and onto early 1942, ( ie roughly for one decade) the lands of China, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxenburg, France, Britain, Greece, Yugoslavia, the USSR, America , Australia were all attacked, one after another, by aggressive neighbours acting without cause.
As well, the lands of many of the colonies of Europe and America, from Newfoundland, through Africa to Asia and the Pacific, also came under land attack by aggressive neighbours.
In addition , the shipping of many neutral nations out on the High Seas were sunk without warning and their crews killed.
Throughout all these fourteen long years of violence, from September 1931 till September 1945, many nations still never did find any reason in morality to want to band together with other nations to bring these world-wide bandits to justice.
Other nations only declared war (or agreed to be called co-belligerents) in the battle against these tyrants in the last months of the war, just so they won't be left out of the trade agreements to be formulated by the post-war United Nations !
Generally, this latter group did not offer any actual combat support against the tyrants or merely offered a token number of warriors as late and as slow as possible.
An amazing number of countries we now honour for their war service actually only declared war on the tyrants , when they were themselves directly attacked by them.
Only the British and French Empires quickly declared war on another nation (Germany) simply because it attacked a smaller neighbour (Poland) , and even here France became neutral again less than a year later.
The Poles will also quickly tell you that the English and French, even then, did not come to the direct aid of the Polish nation.
If we take 1932 as the first year where Japanese aggression (involving China in this case) could and should have been stopped, all nations on earth have a sorry 'war' record : the USSR, for example, only declared war on this aggressor in the very last days of the war.
In the case of Mussolini and Italy, 1935 was the first year it invaded a peaceful neighbour (Ethiopia) and again every nation on earth shows a sorry record in rushing to help this little kid against a stronger schoolyard bully.
In the case of Germany, early in 1938 it invaded its peaceful neighbour Austria and no one did anything.
(Yes, many Austrians wanted Hitler as their leader but probably most of them, if given a a free and fair vote, would have voted to remain an independent nation.)
America, as a prominent example of a sorry neutral, probably would never have declared war on Hitler, if he hadn't done the hard work for them by declaring war on the USA himself first.
One by one the weaker nations and colonies of the world were picked off by stronger schoolyard bullies while good grey people (our dear relatives) averted their eyes and dismissed it as just another squabble in the schoolyard.
Why ? Was their moral values that different than ours ?
I would argue not. But I also argue that their moral values had been gravely weakened by the scientific understanding they had gained at High School and university.
The middle aged adults who ran the world between late 1931 and early 1942 had all completed their High School education before Queen Victoria died , and were the first generation on Earth to have had to pass standardized science exams to graduate.
A little book knowledge is a dangerous thing and never more so than the four years of Victorian Era Scientism they had to endure to graduate.
In retrospect, Victorian Scientism was as adolescent and as naive as the teens it tried to teach.
It saw the then new idea of Evolution as demonstrating, beyond all doubt , that life forms and societies proceeded, inevitably, ever upward to bigger and more complex forms, with weaker beings and societies equally inevitably (and regrettably) dying away.
One has to only read all that period's laments for the inevitable falling away of Canada's aboriginals to see how people felt this sad process could hastened or perhaps slowed by much human effort - but never ever stopped, not in the long term.
Nature ruled !
And perhaps regrettably, Science had proven that the study of Nature revealed that (like it or not) Might is Right, Bigger is Better, God is on the Side of the Bigger Battalions, only the Strongest Survive : on and on with the Victoria platitudes permitting strong aggressors to pick off weaker neighbours.
So one can be sure that the picking off of the world's smaller and weaker nations did not go uncommented upon in that long ugly decade between late 1931 and early 1942.
It was accompanied, I am for sure, by a lots of long drawn out sighs and endless helplessly shrugged shoulders.
But in the end, WWII proved not to go the way expected by the Great Powers on all sides.
As their Modern Science was seen to falter again and again and again, so too faltered the public faith in Modern Morality and in Modernity itself.
Slowly but surely, as the human world changed its scientific understanding, its moral actions also changed.
Slowly, starting around 1945, our (great) grandparents began the slide out of the Modern Era and into our present day Post Modern Era.....
It is an idea promoted by people like you and I, who statistically speaking, weren't likely even alive when WWII ended.
Thus we never had to do the hard-lifting of deciding just what to actually do, or not do, about these obviously aggressive tyrants.
Our parents, grandparents, and great-great-great grandparents obviously felt - and above all acted - quite differently than what we claimed we would do , in similar circumstances, today.
My book - The Hyssop and The Cedar - is an effort to explain why this was the case.
Because, starting in late 1931 and onto early 1942, ( ie roughly for one decade) the lands of China, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxenburg, France, Britain, Greece, Yugoslavia, the USSR, America , Australia were all attacked, one after another, by aggressive neighbours acting without cause.
As well, the lands of many of the colonies of Europe and America, from Newfoundland, through Africa to Asia and the Pacific, also came under land attack by aggressive neighbours.
In addition , the shipping of many neutral nations out on the High Seas were sunk without warning and their crews killed.
Throughout all these fourteen long years of violence, from September 1931 till September 1945, many nations still never did find any reason in morality to want to band together with other nations to bring these world-wide bandits to justice.
Other nations only declared war (or agreed to be called co-belligerents) in the battle against these tyrants in the last months of the war, just so they won't be left out of the trade agreements to be formulated by the post-war United Nations !
Generally, this latter group did not offer any actual combat support against the tyrants or merely offered a token number of warriors as late and as slow as possible.
An amazing number of countries we now honour for their war service actually only declared war on the tyrants , when they were themselves directly attacked by them.
Only the British and French Empires quickly declared war on another nation (Germany) simply because it attacked a smaller neighbour (Poland) , and even here France became neutral again less than a year later.
The Poles will also quickly tell you that the English and French, even then, did not come to the direct aid of the Polish nation.
If we take 1932 as the first year where Japanese aggression (involving China in this case) could and should have been stopped, all nations on earth have a sorry 'war' record : the USSR, for example, only declared war on this aggressor in the very last days of the war.
In the case of Mussolini and Italy, 1935 was the first year it invaded a peaceful neighbour (Ethiopia) and again every nation on earth shows a sorry record in rushing to help this little kid against a stronger schoolyard bully.
In the case of Germany, early in 1938 it invaded its peaceful neighbour Austria and no one did anything.
(Yes, many Austrians wanted Hitler as their leader but probably most of them, if given a a free and fair vote, would have voted to remain an independent nation.)
America, as a prominent example of a sorry neutral, probably would never have declared war on Hitler, if he hadn't done the hard work for them by declaring war on the USA himself first.
One by one the weaker nations and colonies of the world were picked off by stronger schoolyard bullies while good grey people (our dear relatives) averted their eyes and dismissed it as just another squabble in the schoolyard.
Why ? Was their moral values that different than ours ?
I would argue not. But I also argue that their moral values had been gravely weakened by the scientific understanding they had gained at High School and university.
The middle aged adults who ran the world between late 1931 and early 1942 had all completed their High School education before Queen Victoria died , and were the first generation on Earth to have had to pass standardized science exams to graduate.
A little book knowledge is a dangerous thing and never more so than the four years of Victorian Era Scientism they had to endure to graduate.
In retrospect, Victorian Scientism was as adolescent and as naive as the teens it tried to teach.
It saw the then new idea of Evolution as demonstrating, beyond all doubt , that life forms and societies proceeded, inevitably, ever upward to bigger and more complex forms, with weaker beings and societies equally inevitably (and regrettably) dying away.
One has to only read all that period's laments for the inevitable falling away of Canada's aboriginals to see how people felt this sad process could hastened or perhaps slowed by much human effort - but never ever stopped, not in the long term.
Nature ruled !
And perhaps regrettably, Science had proven that the study of Nature revealed that (like it or not) Might is Right, Bigger is Better, God is on the Side of the Bigger Battalions, only the Strongest Survive : on and on with the Victoria platitudes permitting strong aggressors to pick off weaker neighbours.
So one can be sure that the picking off of the world's smaller and weaker nations did not go uncommented upon in that long ugly decade between late 1931 and early 1942.
It was accompanied, I am for sure, by a lots of long drawn out sighs and endless helplessly shrugged shoulders.
But in the end, WWII proved not to go the way expected by the Great Powers on all sides.
As their Modern Science was seen to falter again and again and again, so too faltered the public faith in Modern Morality and in Modernity itself.
Slowly but surely, as the human world changed its scientific understanding, its moral actions also changed.
Slowly, starting around 1945, our (great) grandparents began the slide out of the Modern Era and into our present day Post Modern Era.....
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