Theory explaining inexact weather predicting is salient : theory explaining dual slit particle-wave experiment is not

It is quite easy to spot the difference between "political scientists" and "scientists".

The Poli Sci types are always on about saliency or lack thereof --- the boffins never ever are.

Never never never never ever are.

Any theory that claims that the stock market or the economy or the weather is virtually impossible to predict accurately can be tested - for free - by the seven or eight billion of us.

The results affect all of us - daily - and we ourselves can conduct the experiment.

But most of the supposedly epoch breaking experiments, the type that scientists love to bang on about, we can only take on the word of well educated journalists making sense of long articles in journals like Nature or Science.

We can't even follow the logic of a written report on a written report of an experiment, let alone conduct the experiment ourselves and besides nothing it claims to report seems to make a bit of difference to our lives.

It totally lacks saliency.

It is really nothing but 'science porn' - fun for a few minutes to relieve the stress of our day to day lives, but nothing more.

We can respect the fact that without proven quantum theories, GPS systems won't be accurate enough to safely land the planes that billions of us have flown in.

But we still tend to more admire the applied technology of GPS than the basic science behind it.

Truly epoch breaking changes in the basic tenets of physics, chemistry, geology and astronomy all occurred in the first half of the 20th century without really changing the classical - Newtonian and Platonic - ways we ordinary people were taught to view reality.

My book argues that it rather took changes in the way we viewed (a) biology in general (b) human and social activities like consciousness and the economy in particular and (c) 'the weather' to really change us --- to really make us post-progress, post modern, post Newton, post Plato after 1945.

(I include with 'the weather' such events as earthquakes, volcanoes, asteroids, pandemics : ---- all of the globe's massive, sudden and unpredictable catastrophes.)

The three things these items all had in common is that they are close at hand, they envelope us daily and most importantly, they happen over relatively short (in terms of an typical human life) time periods.

Yes, tectonic plates move, but extremely slowly - yes, the universe is expanding and cooling, again seemingly slowly - yes, the Earth's radioactive atoms are decaying and diminishing in number, but oh so slowly.

WWII : inducing epoch-making changes in the way we view Biology, human/social behavior and catastrophes like The Weather 

WWII was a catastrophe by any measure, particularly to people who make confident predictions for a living, and served as the catalyst to put the fatal post into modernity and progress and the enlightenment project.

I won't spend much time in my book arguing that Auschwitz and Hiroshima played a key role in modernity's demise - gazillions have already trotted down that path before me.

I obviously want to add the unexpected success of penicillium slime poo (standing in as the very mental image of 1940's anti-civilization) to help account for WWII's upending of progress and civilization.

But I also want to give a fuller account of the hundreds of embarrassing failures in supremely confident prediction - that very hallmark of left brain science - that so marked that unexpectedly long six year war.

Like the drip drip drip of water torture, they too played a big role in the sense of fatigue against anymore Progress Talk that so marked post 1945 intellectual and artistic thought and eventually became the commonplace of many ordinary folks as well.

One prediction made about the coming war, made by most people in the years 1931-1939, certainly was proven true - millions of civilians did die and did die by gas.

But they certainly did not die, as was generally predicted, in the first few days of a sharp short war.

Because I know of no one notable who claimed the war would last six years because all such predictions of quick successes (and from all sides) would fail time and time and time again.

So parallel to Dawson and Meyer's daily work on penicillin-for-all, I will watch these two frontline veterans of WWI parse the news of the unexpectedly long course of WWII, as seen from by far the best served city in the world for abundant wartime media, New York ....

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....