Has the Manhattan-based Atomic Bomb and nuclear reactors really made our world a kinder healthier place ?
Was the Manhattan-based Norden bombsight and its delusion of mass bombing of civilians as way to end all future wars really the way to a kinder gentler world ?
Was Manhattan-based Dr Foster Kennedy's wartime project to propose the gassing of all the retarded children ,in emulation of Hitler's Aktion T4 project, really going to make us a better people ?
Showing posts with label norden bombsight. Show all posts
Showing posts with label norden bombsight. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Thursday, May 2, 2013
WWII : Science finds, Man applies, Nature confounds ...
Yes indeed, the Universe is just like some giant man-made clockworks, albeit one taken out of its 'shielding' case and left out in Nature's harsh elements, exposed years in years out to blazing sun, wind, rain, snow, dust and mould.
How much our vaunted Civilization rests upon the thin security provided by the shielding roofs over our man-made "Cartwright Machines" is made particularly clear during war.
Then those carefully hand-washed machines, the ones we normally baby and only take for a spin in good weather on a summer's afternoon , are worked to death in all times of year and in all kinds of weather.
As a result, they, their human operators and the civilizations behind them usually crack up pretty quickly.
We have all seen those terribly despondent photos of the soldiers of some Great Power or other, desperately trying to get all their vehicles out of the mud of Russia's winter or Guadalcanal's summer ; Civilization spinning its wheels hard and going nowhere fast.
At least six modernist Utopias (White Man's Burden , Aryan Man's Burden , Proletarian Man's Burden , Norden Precision , Synthetic Autarky and Eugenic Breeding) all quickly fell apart when taken out of their protective boxes and were left exposed to Nature's harsh elements between 1939 and 1945.
Just like clockwork......
How much our vaunted Civilization rests upon the thin security provided by the shielding roofs over our man-made "Cartwright Machines" is made particularly clear during war.
Then those carefully hand-washed machines, the ones we normally baby and only take for a spin in good weather on a summer's afternoon , are worked to death in all times of year and in all kinds of weather.
As a result, they, their human operators and the civilizations behind them usually crack up pretty quickly.
We have all seen those terribly despondent photos of the soldiers of some Great Power or other, desperately trying to get all their vehicles out of the mud of Russia's winter or Guadalcanal's summer ; Civilization spinning its wheels hard and going nowhere fast.
The Aryan Man's Burden.... and others
At least six modernist Utopias (White Man's Burden , Aryan Man's Burden , Proletarian Man's Burden , Norden Precision , Synthetic Autarky and Eugenic Breeding) all quickly fell apart when taken out of their protective boxes and were left exposed to Nature's harsh elements between 1939 and 1945.
Just like clockwork......
Friday, March 15, 2013
the "THEATRE" of war : 1939-1945
WWII started out on a note of uplift in 1939, with its three actors (Scientific Racism, Scientific Capitalism and Scientific Socialism) all united in eating the scenery but ended in farce in 1945, as the scenery proceeded to eat the three actors.
These actors can't be said to lack ambition.
Japan and Germany agreed to divide the world between them, planning over the course of a few years to double their size every three months until they had grown from roughly 100,000 square miles in size into giants 100 million square miles in size.
These were to be formal empires, ruled directly from Berlin and Tokyo.
Washington and Moscow planned, instead, just informal empires , ruling indirectly, but also saw no reason to stop at sharing the globe with anyone : an entirely capitalist or communist world would do nicely.
But in all these variegated planned empires , their shared gods would at least be a constant : all praise Newton, Dalton and Darwin !
In Physics, Newtonian ballatics still held total sway : for Nordenized bombs , neither snow,rain,heat nor the gloom of night would stay these couriers of death from their anointed round : enemy barrels would soon be in right some pickle.
In Chemistry, Dalton's simple adding together of elemental atoms had been shown, mostly by German chemists, as able to create anything and everything.
Hitler, among others, was reassured that no more would hunger be a restraint on war, with all the resulting disease and government-toppling food riots. "No bread ? Why don't they just eat food pills ?"
In Biology, all three actors believed in negative and positive eugenics, with characteristic national differences in its actual application.
In Germany, quoting from the Old Testament of Darwin, the matter was strictly genetic, nature not nuture.
Certain races, bound by blood, were irredeemable and to be terminated negatively.
Other races were more plastic and could be molded positively into becoming the new Aryan superman.
Stalin much preferred the New Testament of Darwin , the Lamarck side of the old man , with certain classes , bound by their wealth and education, as irredeemable and to be terminated.
But the workers were more plastic and could made into the new socialist supermen.
America and most of the rest of the modern nations took a bit from both of these extreme positions and saw it was individuals within their nations that were irredeemable , mostly of one class admitably but in that class because of their genetic nature.
Flash forward to the summer of 1945, six long year later.
The actual course of the war hadn't gone exactly to any of the three actors' plans but instead had rather meandered , with Norden-like precision, widely and wildly all over the map.
The Norden bombsight, that apogee of Newtonian ballistic precision, had been proven so inaccurate thanks to recalcitrant Nature, that the war only truly ended in August when a massive fire bomb was dropped, out of a bomber named after someone's mother, and burned thousands of babies to death.
Now as long as your bombsight was accurate enough to be sure of hitting the right country, (something that bomber pilots from all combatant nations failed to get right at times), it was good enough : the A-bomb became Physics' reluctant Plan B.
And that summer all over the world, from Vietnam to the Netherlands, people were still looking up to the skies still hoping to see the long promised food pills drop out of the butterfly bombers like modern day manna.
Most dead people in this war, like most wars, still ended up dying of hunger and its diseases : Nature never bites back more violently that in the human stomach.
But no food pills. In fact, a few thousand chemists with PhDs and endless pots of money had even failed to assemble a few of Dalton's atoms into tiny molecules only 300 daltons in size.
So, in the end, penicillin and quinine still had to be made by dumb nature : and Oxford University's most refined, dying, were saved by Pfizer's Brooklyn Crude, Chemistry's reluctant Plan B.
In fact, Oxford's most refined and least refined were both saved indifferently by Pfizer's and Glaxo's medicine, a sort of chemical Beveridge Report in action.
In July, the voters of Britain, having had a chance to look over what Buchenwald and Beveridge had offered as a solution to the problem of the weak and the poor , had voted overwhelmingly for Beveridge, Biology's reluctant Plan B.
Because even in race-above-all Germany, irredeemable races were soon found to be redeemable after all, as farming and mining slaves , to keep Germans from starving and freezing to death.
Tens of millions of non-Germans filled every corner of nation that had started a war in an effort to purify itself all foreigners and all useless mouths.
Have I proven that irony and war are made for each other....
These actors can't be said to lack ambition.
Japan and Germany agreed to divide the world between them, planning over the course of a few years to double their size every three months until they had grown from roughly 100,000 square miles in size into giants 100 million square miles in size.
(!!!!!!)
These were to be formal empires, ruled directly from Berlin and Tokyo.
Washington and Moscow planned, instead, just informal empires , ruling indirectly, but also saw no reason to stop at sharing the globe with anyone : an entirely capitalist or communist world would do nicely.
But in all these variegated planned empires , their shared gods would at least be a constant : all praise Newton, Dalton and Darwin !
In Physics, Newtonian ballatics still held total sway : for Nordenized bombs , neither snow,rain,heat nor the gloom of night would stay these couriers of death from their anointed round : enemy barrels would soon be in right some pickle.
In Chemistry, Dalton's simple adding together of elemental atoms had been shown, mostly by German chemists, as able to create anything and everything.
Hitler, among others, was reassured that no more would hunger be a restraint on war, with all the resulting disease and government-toppling food riots. "No bread ? Why don't they just eat food pills ?"
In Biology, all three actors believed in negative and positive eugenics, with characteristic national differences in its actual application.
In Germany, quoting from the Old Testament of Darwin, the matter was strictly genetic, nature not nuture.
Certain races, bound by blood, were irredeemable and to be terminated negatively.
Other races were more plastic and could be molded positively into becoming the new Aryan superman.
Stalin much preferred the New Testament of Darwin , the Lamarck side of the old man , with certain classes , bound by their wealth and education, as irredeemable and to be terminated.
But the workers were more plastic and could made into the new socialist supermen.
America and most of the rest of the modern nations took a bit from both of these extreme positions and saw it was individuals within their nations that were irredeemable , mostly of one class admitably but in that class because of their genetic nature.
Flash forward to the summer of 1945, six long year later.
The actual course of the war hadn't gone exactly to any of the three actors' plans but instead had rather meandered , with Norden-like precision, widely and wildly all over the map.
The Norden bombsight, that apogee of Newtonian ballistic precision, had been proven so inaccurate thanks to recalcitrant Nature, that the war only truly ended in August when a massive fire bomb was dropped, out of a bomber named after someone's mother, and burned thousands of babies to death.
Now as long as your bombsight was accurate enough to be sure of hitting the right country, (something that bomber pilots from all combatant nations failed to get right at times), it was good enough : the A-bomb became Physics' reluctant Plan B.
And that summer all over the world, from Vietnam to the Netherlands, people were still looking up to the skies still hoping to see the long promised food pills drop out of the butterfly bombers like modern day manna.
Most dead people in this war, like most wars, still ended up dying of hunger and its diseases : Nature never bites back more violently that in the human stomach.
But no food pills. In fact, a few thousand chemists with PhDs and endless pots of money had even failed to assemble a few of Dalton's atoms into tiny molecules only 300 daltons in size.
So, in the end, penicillin and quinine still had to be made by dumb nature : and Oxford University's most refined, dying, were saved by Pfizer's Brooklyn Crude, Chemistry's reluctant Plan B.
In fact, Oxford's most refined and least refined were both saved indifferently by Pfizer's and Glaxo's medicine, a sort of chemical Beveridge Report in action.
In July, the voters of Britain, having had a chance to look over what Buchenwald and Beveridge had offered as a solution to the problem of the weak and the poor , had voted overwhelmingly for Beveridge, Biology's reluctant Plan B.
Because even in race-above-all Germany, irredeemable races were soon found to be redeemable after all, as farming and mining slaves , to keep Germans from starving and freezing to death.
Tens of millions of non-Germans filled every corner of nation that had started a war in an effort to purify itself all foreigners and all useless mouths.
Have I proven that irony and war are made for each other....
Monday, April 9, 2012
HERMANN MULLER versus the LONG LANCE : two failures of MODERNITY
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| Michael Marshall |
For that same war, the Japanese Navy created the LONG LANCE torpedo ( and long range naval guns) - expected to be accurate enough to sink a ship 40,000 metres away.
(While Allied bombers, using the NORDEN BOMBSIGHT, were expected to be much, much more accurate ---albeit from about 4000 metres up.)
The two accuracy distances desired ( Japan's & Muller's) were a thousand trillion times different, but neither proven possible in practice.
WWII's military ended up bombing entire metropolitan populations, in the faint hope that the collateral damage might also destroy any military targets within.
Some useful penicillium mutations were achieved during the war in much the same way - by blasting trillions of fungi spores with radiation from above, in the equally faint hope that a few of the survivors might possess useful mutations.
SKY GODS - boys with toys, deadly toys .....
Sunday, April 8, 2012
SKY GODS versus the earthlings : 1939-1945
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| Michael Marshall |
"I have a vision, a vision", says the bigtime TV producer as he 'does lunch' with some hapless TV writer , "I see a man in a dusty pickup truck somewhere in the South West". "Can you write a series around that?"
And of course Mr Big Time will later make the big dough and the big fame as the 'creator' of the series concept, while the writer ends up eating baloney in some low rent motel.
Well I ,too, "have a vision, a vision" for my book - in particular - the book cover.
The book cover background is a gradient of subdued blood red at the top changing slowly into a subdued green yellow at the bottom.
In big letters across the top, filling the width - in the garish colors of every 1940s Sci Fi cover - will be the words:
SKY GODS
(All in upper case.)
In fact, everything about the book cover is designed to evoke and guy-up those over-the-top 1940s Sci Fi covers : from the unsubtle flat bright primary colors to the razor-jawed heroes and ravishing women.
Immediately below and under that lettering will be three bombers, equipped with the supposedly war-winning NORDEN BOMBSIGHT, rising in an arc from left to right, filling the width, dropping bombs into the blood red sky,flames and smoke.
Inside the bombers, of course, are all those 20 year old Pierre-Simon Laplace-like bombardiers, coolly sealing the fates of tens of thousand of invisible civilian 'dots', from 25,000 feet up.
Next are these words, in a little smaller type and only occupying the center of the width:
versus
And a line below them , again in smaller type but this time filling the width:
the earthlings
(Yep, all in lower case.)
Below and under the words is an image of three patients in wheelchairs, arms linked upwards in a victory gesture, surrounded by three cheering friends.
On the left, its Charlie (Aronson) the first ever patient to receive penicillin-the-antibiotic, with Dr Tom Hunter (polio survivor) to the left of him, leaning on his ever-present crutches.
Despite his polio and those crutches, American student Hunter still coxed the Cambridge team against Oxford , at a time and place when winning the Nobel prize was almost as good as winning the rowing cup...
Charlie is a life-long sucker for any life-threatening illness the strep bacteria can throw at him but has survived them all - including his second bout of the normally invariably fatal SBE - once again responding well to Dawson's penicillin.
This cat may have used up a lot of his nine lives but he is about to need one more - a severe stroke (which he will again survive) awaits him a week or two from now - but for today, he is grinning broadly.
A shit-eating grin. And why not? There is much to celebrate and Charlie has been along for the long ride, right from the start.
Charlie has a penicillin bottle IV and the over-sized bottle is well above him, casting a big yellow circle of light against the subdued green (1930s hospital green) background.
If the glow looks like a solar monstrance in some dimly lit Orthodox church, well that is no accident.
In the center is Doctor D (Martin Henry Dawson) the doctor who brought the world the naturally grown penicillin that we still use today.
He had worked for years with the musty-moldy smelling soil bacteria and fungi that give us natural penicillin and his lab and office literally had a freshly-turned earth smell so calling his tiny team 'the earthlings' seems oddly appropriate.
He is dying, dying of MG (Myasthenia Gravis) , has been dying almost ever since he started this penicillin project back in September 1940.
One characteristic of MG is that patients with really severe cases undergo many life-threatening Myasthenic Crises , where breathing becomes almost impossible.
Even after they are stabilized, they remain on Oxygen Bottle Assist and are kept in a wheelchair until the crisis has truly passed. This is one of those times.
Dr Hunter is not just Dawson's clinical assistant in the penicillin project, he is also Dawson's personal physician - helping his boss save others' lives or saving his boss's own life, as circumstances dictate.
But today is Dr Dawson's personal day of triumph.
He has heard that his arch opponents, Dr Alfred Richard and Dr Chester Keefer, have finally thrown in the towel and will now permit penicillin to be used in thousands of American and Canadian civilian hospitals.
It is late April 1944, and penicillin has yet to undergo its first mass clinical trials ( that will only come about on June 6th, on the beaches of Normandy) but already, thanks to Dawson's example, PFIZER is producing more naturally-grown penicillin than anyone could ever have thought possible just months earlier.
Meanwhile Dr Richards's fair haired child, synthetic penicillin, still seemed as distant an illusion as ever, despite all the taxpayers' money thrown at the problem.
Behind Dawson is his wife Marjorie - born with a bad hip, which no amount of painful operations have helped and she must often use a cane to get about - today is one of those days.
Over to his right, also hooked up to a strangely glowing yellow penicillin IV bottle high above her, is HH , the young woman for whom Dawson broke the law and took on all his colleagues and the wartime American government --- all in an effort to save her.
The stolen penicillin was never enough and the course of her illnesses, as Dawson was wont to say, was 'stormy' .
Even as she beat off the SBE , the spread of its infectious fragments through her blood stream had cost her an eye and the use of her ovaries. But now thanks to new bigger supplies of penicillin there seemed to be no more pockets of infection hiding anywhere in her body and she would soon be discharged home.
She too had the same shit-eating grin as Charlie and all the others. Again, why not ?
It was the story of her dramatic recovery - and of the normally meek and mild Dr Dawson actually stealing wartime government penicillin to save her - that had spread like wildfire through the 10,000 member strong medical community in tri-state New York and had led to further dramatic incidents that finally broke the penicillin story worldwide and brought PFIZER on side.
To her right is an unremarkable looking man - an accountant of a man - also holding onto his two crutches for support.
His name is Floyd Odlum and he is one of the richest men in the world ---- and one of the best known husbands-of in the world.
An odd combination.
His wife is Jackie Cochran - glamerous, smart, tough, one of the world's fastest, best, pilots - winning all kinds of speed records and even beating the world's best test pilots at their own game.
Floyd?
He may look like a mild accountant but who said accountants can't also be smart ?
For he made all his money during the Great Depression, when everyone else was losing their shirts.
Super-Rich, a strong Republican - but also a real patriot with an eye for helping the little guy.
So the Big-Corporation-Owner-to-end-all-Big-Corporation-Owners has the unlikely job of trying to see that small businesses got a few crumbs from the war contracts going almost exclusively to the nation's top fifty corporations - because without contracts and their material allotments these small businesses would have to fold up.
The awesome stress of trying to work inside The Beltway has given him an extremely severe case of Rheumatoid Arthritis, which brought him to Dawson, because Dawson's, real, day, job is to head up a famous Arthritis Research Clinic.
Odlum began getting involved in the beginnings of a patient-centred American Arthritis organization -- which kept him connected with Dawson.
He had grown interested in, and supportive of, Dawson's small pioneering home-grown penicillin project: even helping him to recover, after a grave operation that failed to cure Dawson's MG.
So, the image I wish to leave you with is six cripples - six people who should be 'the 4Fs of the 4Fs' . Losers.
Losers and worthless 'dots' , in the eyes of the SKY GODS in particular.
But far from being despondent with their fate - the six 'crips' are grinning ear to ear ---- and why not ?
For the wartime triumph of naturally-grown penicillin is a signal Triumph of the Weak , well set to rebuke the Triumph of the Strong doctrine promoted by Sky Gods all over the world during the war.
Finally, at the bottom of the book cover, in as big a font as the one used for SKY GODS is:
1939-1945
Now, let's see if that very tiny visual artist stuck inside of me is actually capable of pulling this all off...
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| Original of SKY GODS versus the earthlings:1939-1945 |
Saturday, April 7, 2012
SKY GODS or earthlings : WWII's choices ...
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| Michael Marshall |
Maybe I can be more succinct.
Spread over an eighty acre corridor in Harlem, two very different projects at Columbia University during the WWII period laid out wildly different visions for humanity and its future on this planet.
Heavy stuff !
One Columbia University project, the massive Manhattan Project, was a last minute patch or kluge to the centerpiece of the Allied war effort, which was that high altitude bombing with that NORDEN BOMBSIGHT could end the war quickly and cheaply.
Quickly and cheaply, yet with minimum deaths for Allied A1 military personnel and for enemy and occupied 4F civilians.
The NORDEN, out in the real world, proved a military and moral disaster, but the A-Bomb painted such broad strokes that it could destroy entire cities (and end the war) , even when the NORDEN used to aim it once again missed.
(The A-bomb together Nature actually did the job : for the winds blow the fallout from the Bomb all over the world, regardless of Humanity's best efforts to claim that this is entirely a man-made show. Fallout is so down-to-earth ,n'est-ce pas?)
But let us ignore such awkward truths and stick with the 'vision thing' : call the original Norden plan part of the SKY GOD vision of Modernity.
All life on Earth would be nicely invisible (but still controllable) from 25,000 feet up ; controlled by coolly rational objective men modeling themselves quite self consciously upon PIERRE SIMON LAPLACE.
(Lenin's Omelets could still be made but no one would have to see or hear or smell the human eggs being broken.)
Laplace's vision was that scientific man, with a lot of effort , and thanks to Newton's three laws of physics - could observe the Universe from a place far above it and perfectly predict its past, present and future right down to the level of the atom.
The NORDEN, the assumed crown jewel (and as it turned out the culmination) of 250 years of Newtonian physics, was just a start on this bold vision.
Modernist males (for this was a very male-centric vision) would become like the Sky Gods and Sky Fathers of ancient legend.
In another part of Columbia University - in the university but never really supported or encouraged by the university, unlike with the Manhattan Project - Martin Henry Dawson also had a vision.
Like him, the vision was unorthodox, humble and (literally) down-to-earth.
Down into the earth, actually.
This was an earthling Vision of Life : our only possible home was down here on earth, at the ground zero of reality, not building some castles in the sky.
So he formed a commensal partnership with some of life's smallest and weakest beings.
These were the earth fungi and bacteria whose presence
and 'earthy' smell was so familiar to him from his time in the WWI trenches.
All this so he could help the men and women and children in the figurative trenches of WWII - the 4F individuals overlooked or destroyed by a war that revolved very much around the 1As of intellectual and physical life.
But note first a further uncanny parallel with the much bigger, much badder, Manhattan Project.
His effort was seized upon, at the last minute after being either ignored or depreciated, by the Allied war effort in a determined effort to rescue another centerpiece of their war aims.
Dead soldiers were just that, dead ,said the Allied leadership.
But soldiers,sailors and airmen seriously wounded and infected could be saved back to useful lives in WWII, unlike WWI, because we have got that wonderful man-made synthetic miracle drug called SULFA.
But the entire family of sulfa drugs - an army themselves with America alone issuing 7000 patents on the sulfa drugs during the war - were not working as promised.
Never fear, said modernist Chemistry,we'll synthesize this new stuff, penicillin, only make it better, much cheaper and much much more plentiful.
A mini-Manhattan Project of money men and effort failed to produce any synthetic penicillin - or any synthetic quinine for that matter ----Nature did the job so much better, as it turned out.
Dawson's idea of a low tech factory of factories - trillions upon trillions of tiny fungi factories making penicillin inside low cost milk bottles in some underused milk plant - was working well , as GLAXO in England proved in spades.
It didn't use up scarce war-oriented resources or need highly skilled workers --- most of the workers growing and nurturing this precious life-giving crop were - surprise ! - women of child-bearing age.
Great !
Or was it ?
Not high tech enough for this science-run war of flash, glitz and Hollywood press agency.
Not male enough for testosteronic modernist science.
So the trillions of natural fungi penicillin makers were moved out of thousands of milk bottles and put into an extremely expensive milk bottle many stories high, made of scarce stainless steel and run by serious looking men in lab coats.
Now that seriously looked the business !
But it was in fact, just another kluge, a patch : like Newtonian Physics and the Norden , Chemistry had failed and Chemistry - the Queen of Science in the 1930s economy - never looked anywhere but downward from that point on.
(Just compare - if you will - the size of DuPont Chemicals versus the largest of the biotech companies in 1930 with DuPont and the largest of the biotech giants of today : no contest.)
So A-bombs and Penicillin: two last minute kluges to cover male egos or two of the many planned high tech successes that ultimately won us the war ?
And which way forward: become like SKY GODS or humble and limit our hubris and become more like earthlings ????
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Physics,Chemistry break 1940 promises
At the time of the New York World's Fair, with its theme of a learned gaze into the crystal ball to reveal the America of the 1960s, Big Physics and Big Chemistry made two firm promises:
Physics promised that with nuclear fission newly achieved, by 1960 your family home would be heated and lit by electricity '"too cheap to meter", made by atomic energy.
It also said that this war would be a clean quick war, hitting only military targets, as B-17 bombers, with precision Norden bombsights, would be able to drop a bomb into a pickle barrel ,from 15,000 feet.
Chemistry pledged that your family would be disease free by the 1960s, "with hospitals no longer used for infectious diseases", thanks to pure,defined, man-made chemicals like the growing family of sulfa drugs.
But in 1945, atomic energy was used only to destroy homes (and the families inside).
(And with a bomb that powerful there was no need to aim, which was just as well ,as the Norden bombsights turned out to be useless.)
True, diseases were being held at bay, but not conquered, by 1945.
But not by the toxic and increasingly ineffective sulfa drugs.
Rather the success was due to penicillin - an impure,undefined mixture made by Nature and grown on an impure, undefined mixture of nutritional mediums also made by Nature.
And it was the humble science of biology that helped make it all work - while chemists only got in the way.
World War Two was NOT a triumph of nerdy,weedy scientists in spectacles winning the war when the stud muffin /BMOC /football captains of America proved unable to best the visiting German and Japanese teams out on the field.
This was the official take on World War Two Science, as produced by the leading science bureaucrats in their official and semi-official histories.
Because this 'revenge of the nerds' is so self-flattering to academics, even normally skeptical historians have lapped up the 'official version' like it was mother's milk.
In truth, Science suffered as many defeats to its ego during WWII as any over-confident general ever did.
In 1940, Man may have batted first, but by 1945 it was Nature that bats last: and Nature bats last and Nature bats long ....
It would perhaps be a bit much to ask today's historians to turn their sights on their colleagues and themselves and ask have they probed the truth of the penicillin saga or , to paraphrase Donald J McGraw,("On Leaving the Mine ", 1991) have they been content to merely uncritically retell tales already told too often ?
Physics promised that with nuclear fission newly achieved, by 1960 your family home would be heated and lit by electricity '"too cheap to meter", made by atomic energy.
It also said that this war would be a clean quick war, hitting only military targets, as B-17 bombers, with precision Norden bombsights, would be able to drop a bomb into a pickle barrel ,from 15,000 feet.
Chemistry pledged that your family would be disease free by the 1960s, "with hospitals no longer used for infectious diseases", thanks to pure,defined, man-made chemicals like the growing family of sulfa drugs.
But in 1945, atomic energy was used only to destroy homes (and the families inside).
(And with a bomb that powerful there was no need to aim, which was just as well ,as the Norden bombsights turned out to be useless.)
True, diseases were being held at bay, but not conquered, by 1945.
But not by the toxic and increasingly ineffective sulfa drugs.
Rather the success was due to penicillin - an impure,undefined mixture made by Nature and grown on an impure, undefined mixture of nutritional mediums also made by Nature.
And it was the humble science of biology that helped make it all work - while chemists only got in the way.
World War Two was NOT a triumph of nerdy,weedy scientists in spectacles winning the war when the stud muffin /BMOC /football captains of America proved unable to best the visiting German and Japanese teams out on the field.
This was the official take on World War Two Science, as produced by the leading science bureaucrats in their official and semi-official histories.
Because this 'revenge of the nerds' is so self-flattering to academics, even normally skeptical historians have lapped up the 'official version' like it was mother's milk.
In truth, Science suffered as many defeats to its ego during WWII as any over-confident general ever did.
In 1940, Man may have batted first, but by 1945 it was Nature that bats last: and Nature bats last and Nature bats long ....
It would perhaps be a bit much to ask today's historians to turn their sights on their colleagues and themselves and ask have they probed the truth of the penicillin saga or , to paraphrase Donald J McGraw,("On Leaving the Mine ", 1991) have they been content to merely uncritically retell tales already told too often ?
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