If only SIR ISSAC NEWTON had been a BIOLOGIST...

Michael Marshall

If only  NEWTON had been a full time scientist .

Rather than being a fulltime NEW AGER and just a part time scientist.

I'll grant one to the camp of the DENIERS, I do believe that there was a concerted effort (yes, a conspiracy of a sort) among generations untold of eminent scientists, to studiously ignore exploring too much about the life of their most famous scientist.

 An effort centred among the members of Britain's famous ROYAL SOCIETY.

Today, shorn of his contributions to physics and math, Newton is liable to come across as a total nutbar and fruitcake.

But he was not untypical of many earlier - and even - current eminent scientists.

Still, this is a post about his useful work in science - the solving of two-body problems.

Briefly, Newton came up with a way to successfully predict (albeit only roughly accurately) the effect on the motions of two objects of their mutual gravitational attraction to each other.

Typically - and I say crucially - the two bodies are very unequal in size (mass, actually).

Sun and Earth ; Earth and Moon.

It replicates many unequal relationships in human society and  flattered the bigger body in those relationships as merely reflecting a fact of nature, a LAW of Nature, for God's Sake !

Man and wife, parent and child, boss and servant, master and slave, white man and black man, A1 people versus 4F people.

On and on.

Oh yes, one more.

In biology, we find Newton's earth and moon replicated in the biologists' naft idea of biological commensality.

"Two-bodied commensality".

The bigger body, Man, has a meal.

Uninvited at Man's table, his physical body, is some tiny body - the commensal microbe.

They eat some of Man's food, but do not harm him ( disease) or help him (generating vitally needed vitamins for human survival inside Man's intestines).

It is a nice simple - stupidly simple -flatteringly untrue image.

In fact, in the real world, Life is run on a infinitely complex three-bodied model - the equation of which neither Newton nor anyone else ever solved perfectly, or even solved imperfectly for very long.

For Man, by mass and number, is in turn but a tiny commensal upon the entire world population of microbes who keep us fed with oxygen and vegetation/meat foods.

Without other life to feed us, we would starve because neither our current genes nor our current science allows us to breath and eat in a world of methane and sulfur -- unlike some of the microbes.

Now in a real world three-bodied problem, the three bodies would all interact with each other - and we definitely do interact with the local microbes upon us and with all the microbes living on the globe  around us.

Our commensals sometimes do kill us and sometimes do help us ---indirectly.

We push them into it, by consuming antibiotics.

Some antibiotics kill off the commensals'  competitors - so they in turn can move into us and cause disease.

Or we kill off our harmless commensals with our antibiotics and their replacements are not harmless but pathogens - we thus learn the harmless- useless- commensal actually indirectly helped us by keeping the deadly alternatives off our skin and out of our throats.

We also pump trillions times trillions of microbe-sized fatal doses of
fatal antibiotics into the general environment every year ; we raise the temperature of the air and the land and the water via our greenhouse gases and thus by our actions we kill some and promote others among the world's microbes.

Just between these three bodies,calculating the interactions would
still boggle Newton's brain.

Now 'three-bodied' is just a scientific cum classroom metaphor.

 Because really life and reality is a many-bodied problem: a many,many,many-bodied problem.

Getting it exactly right - even once - probably boggled even God's mind.....

Why we STILL teach two-bodied science in a three-bodied world ...

Michael Marshall

The simple reason is that until recently, there were no (powerful) bodies opposed to teaching two-bodied science to our kids.

Teachers teach what the powerful in society demand they teach - a 'trickle down' process from the top of society down, down, down to local school boards and local curriculum committees.

Until recently two-bodied science was the only science scientists explored, the only science one got paid to do, the only one that the scientists was likely to get large grants to do.

Scientists loved it, believed in it.

Equally obviously the Right Side of Modernity loved it even if they didn't really understand it and hence, truly believed in it.

Two-bodied science said that the world (and ultimately the Universe) was a treasure trove of profits just begging to be dug up and synthesized into salable goods and services.

There are no limits to what humanity can do--- or as to how much  your company and its profits can grow.

What was there not to love about two-bodied science down at the Chamber of Commerce?

The boys at the Union Hall living on the Left Side of Modernity were equally enamoured of two-bodied science.

They would prefer that they, rather than the businessman,ran the show and got the bulk of the earnings.

But failing that, the only way to see an expanded income for the working stiff was going to have to be that they retained their pitifully small share of national income, but out of a vastly expanded pie.

Growth was good for unions and their pay packets : two-bodied science promised endless economic growth and endless (grudgingly gained) wage increases.

Perhaps the only opponents of two-bodied science until recently were small isolated bands of individuals wearing sandals and living on vegan steaks.

They opposed it from outside science , against any sort of science what so ever, and so failed to garner much support beyond themselves.

For they lived in a world that didn't take scientists wholly at their self-exalting word, but saw that the process basically worked - for good and evil --- it was simply too powerful and too useful to deny.

Two-bodied science's only really dangerous critics would in the end turn out to be well respected 'inside agitators' : scientists who converted to a three-bodied view of Reality grudgingly after reviewing the repeated results they saw in their petri disks and cat- scopes.

Reluctant 'inside agitators' like Dr Martin Henry Dawson....

SCIENCE WARS: two-bodied POSITIVISM versus three-bodied COMMENSALISM

Michael Marshall

It must truly be a shock to be praised all your entire working life as a 'savior of humanity' for your work in advancing "scientific and industrial progress", only to find in your retirement that your peers think your earlier work is actually leading to the destruction of humanity.

No wonder that the vast majority of the climate-cum-nearly-everything-current DENIER spokesmen are retirees.

Retiree scientists (of a sort) .

Yes they are also predominantly male (even predominantly DOMINANT MALES (!) ), predominantly white, protestant, middle to upper middle class , native born.

But let us also admit that most of the DENIER spokesmen are scientists within a generous definition of scientist that widens it to include anyone with a BSc or a BA in a social science who were hired and paid to do a science-oriented job because of that science-oriented degree.

It is dangerous and misleading to assume that to be 'a scientist' one needs a PhD, post-doc experience at leading institutions, grants from recognized agencies, a series of publications in key journals, tenure-like status, and recognition from the important societies in the area you work in.

So this expanded definition includes a lot of people - most of who were in the broader applied science and technology field  - or have retired from careers in the those fields.

Add to the numbers of my expanded definition of scientist their largely supportive/defensive spouse and children.

This expansion of the definition of a 'scientist' moves their percentage of the entire population from well less than one percent to something like ten percent - if you defined them as voters or as subjects of a poll, donors to causes, etc.

You should know that my only really valuable,marketable, expertise is in electoral politics - immodestly I think I am damn good at it and I tend to view reality through its prism.

Electoral politics' use of numbers is dead simple in pure math terms but rather sophisticated in its interest in the excluded middle - we back room operatives tend to only see the grays between the black and whites.

We can connect a political/ideological/social position to a particular age cohort from a hundred paces.

Its our job, it is what we do.

A well educated,well connected,well-off, articulate ,confident ten percent of any population is one heck of a nucleus to build a social movement around.

So while I basically agree with DAVID ROBERTS  that "Climate Deniers won't change, but they will die" , I worry that their ranks will be steadily replenished.

Replenished from the pool of  positivist scientists we are still generating through our truly horrible science education structures at the senior high school and 101 undergraduate university course level.

Neat ,clean ,clear, quick results oriented exam questions demand a particular - and peculiar - type of teaching approach to science.

It requires a peculiar kind of science as well.

Blunt-simple: DENIERS are positivists/modernists/progressivists: people who live in a two-body world.

By contrast, we now know that the real world is a three-bodied science problem - and increasingly basic science questions examine that three bodied world.

But for a single teacher to train (and test) 20 to 100 students, 15 to 22 years old, in many scientific fields in a few months, with very little sophisticated equipment or techniques , only two-bodied science will do.

This linear , Newtonian-Daltonian science is NOT how the real world works , not how real science works.

But it is the sort of science  that we teach people who never venture much past a cursory MSc from an undemanding university but who still end up working in 'science-oriented' jobs.

In my mind, a science class is only truly successful if the student is less sure of the subject than when they entered the course.

Please God ! I hope they know a lot more about the subject as well - but always,always,always, pray they be less sure of what they truly know.

Only this sort of education will produce truly 'scientific' minds - the rest is mere technique and they might as well learn that via on-the-job-training....

COMMENSALITY: Two Bodied or Many-Bodied ?

Michael Marshall

Modernity, NEWTONIAN Modernity, was a simple-minded ideology, asking simple questions and expecting even simpler answers.

The NAIF philosophy of a NAIF-minded age.

Newton more or less correctly predicted the short term stability of the biggest objects in our Solar System, after they had stopped their earlier ,dangerously irregular ,behavior when the Solar System was in its youth.

He could correctly predict the future paths a single big object and a single small object would make, considering only that both attracted each other via the force of gravity.

Sun and Earth, Earth and Moon : Newtonian Science's triumph : 'Solving the Two Body Problem'.

But the really dangerous objects in the Solar System these days are those tens of thousands of various-sized irregular chunks of rock in the Asteroid Belt.

Because they are so small they reflect little sunlight and so are dark and nearly invisible to even today's best human observation tools and skill sets.

All those semi-equally-sized thousands of irregularly shaped rocks tumbling about relatively near to each other leads to highly unpredictable summing of the gravity forces acting on each other, minute by minute, let alone decades in advance.

This means the asteroids' paths through space are highly erratic in normal times.

 Even worse, they can fall into a sort of avalanche-waiting-to-happen mode where a tiny unexpected twitch could send a huge high speed missile headed for Earth with the force of hundreds to hundreds of thousands of H-Bombs.

If we don't see them in time, and if we don't send up a rocket and a nuclear bomb to divert their path away from Earth, its game over civilized Humanity and maybe even game over all Life on Earth bigger than a microbe as well.

Preventing this should have been JOB ONE in the 300 plus years that Newtonian Science has been around, but it's scientific theories simply weren't up for the job.

Fair enough I say: admit it, and let someone else do the job right.

But no.

Newtonian Science was proclaimed - and taught - (is still taught) as all that a practical man needs to order his world.

A problem that Modernist Science couldn't solve wasn't explained away as 'being in God's hands', (because of course Modernity didn't believe in God.)

No, it simply wasn't talked about as all.

Newton's laws could tell us that Mars wasn't about to crash into the Earth - which none of us had thought would ever happen anyway, even before Science chimed in with its me-too-ism.

(I say 'Mars isn't about to crash into Earth' because newer computer models show a very slim chance it could happen someday if the variety of gravity forces in the entire Solar System happen to hit a not-so-sweet resonance point.)

That was Newtonism's 'triumph' and it was the hollowest triumph ever touted this since of Madison Avenue hucksterism.

Newtonian Science's failures were many (predict the weather or turbulent current flows anyone ?) but the failure to predict an asteroid killing us all while we sleep overnight has to be its biggest single failure.

The real world, outside the tenured offices and laboratories of basic science, is the home of applied science and this is where Newton hit a snag.

The Sun and the Earth have an infinite number of gravity and electromagnetic forces impacting on them, from all angles, at all
levels of energy, and varying independently minute by minute.

There is no real world 'two body problems' .

I repeat, no real world 'two body problems'- all problems  in this universe/ in this reality are many-bodied.

Admitably all those forces upon the Earth normally are tiny, even when summed in some unholy alliance, compared to the attraction the giant Sun has for the tiny Earth.

So a 'two body problem' is really like the relationship between that of parent and child, man and woman, master and slave,human host and microbe.

I hope one can begin to see the social/economic/ideological attraction for the modernist male for saying that the important problems in the physical world are all 'two body problems'.

It can neatly be carried over to all of life's problems.

And , of course, everything that happens seem to happen as seen through the larger object's eyes.

For example.

We tend to think and act as if the microbes upon us are either predators (parasites) or spongers (commensal) or at best creatures we endure because we give them lots of free food and they give us back a few vitamins (mutualists).

We are the HOSTS and they mostly unwanted guests eating at our table: its another two bodied problem, big Sun-like Host and tiny parasite-like Earth.

But in fact, we humans can only breath air, survive in a moderately stable climate and find food to live off of, because of microbes.

(My definition of microbe is all life forms too small to see with the casual naked eye --- effectively they are invisible to us.)

Remove just them, but all of them, and Humanity would start dying off in a few months and I do not see any way we could do much about it.

They have not just been on Earth for a thousand times longer than humanoids have - and a million times longer than civilized humanity has , they live everywhere --- from miles underground to high in the sky, in frozen ice and scalding hot chemical waters.

And size ?

Individually invisible, collectively they well outweigh all other life on Earth - not just humans but giant whales and giant trees as well.

They are our Host globally and we are their Host locally (on or in our individual bodies.)

But once we look with our new commensally-oriented eyes, we quickly find there are many Hosts and Guests interacting throughout the Earth's biosphere.

We could claim that "we get our oxygen through trees" (not true but partially true - we get some from them) - "we don't need microbes after they taught the trees to split water and give us oxygen".

But in fact most trees could not survive if the microbial fungi that co-exist by their roots weren't there, these two lifeforms are simultaneously Host and Guest, clinging to each other closely for continued life.

Consequences quickly multiply unexpectedly in a many-bodied commensal world: when a fungicide ends up killing the fungi on those roots and the trees start dying, for example.

But that is a problem relatively easy to avoid.

However all the various recycling of scarce nutrients that keep the earth livable and edible react with one another in complex and unpredictable ways that are well beyond our understanding let alone our controlling at the present time.

By this I mean they react sort of consistently with each other up to a point in a sort of 'varying mildly around a midpoint equilibrium' and then suddenly shift to a wholly new equilibrium point that could leave the world very different indeed.

As in puff - all human are gone.

Nothing dramatic seems to happen for a long time as we alter the ratios of the various nutrients (oxygen,nitrogen,carbon,sulfur, phosphorus, potassium, etc) flying about around us until they reach that point in an avalanche's life when the slightest breeze causes a landslide.

Mars suddenly does crash into Earth or the polar ice caps suddenly do all melt in 25 years.

We can't solve any many-bodied problem in physics with the entire global economy devoted to the computer trying to solve it.

And basic science craves exact solutions and reproducibility as basic tenets of whether something is scientific.

Unexpectedly, I totally agree with them.

Most of the 'science' successes that we humans talk about today , and most of them from the past, hasn't been pure science, but rather trial and error technology, informed massively by the near successes of pure science.

Many bodied problems - the problems of the real world, can not be solved in the exact meaning of scientists and math professors.

But we can often get in real close, coming up with a tentative, approximate, temporary solution, provided we also keep our eyes open for any signs of a sudden change possibly coming up in the near future.

We do it by trial and error, caution, openness, humility - muddling through.

Similarly with Life on Earth and its 'many bodied commensality' - we can't perfectly solve it or perfectly predict it, but we can muddle through it, with caution mixed with openness to change and humility to admitting failures....