Raymond Loewy, High Modernity's Greatest Scientist ??

Raymond Loewy's vision of a cannon-blast propelled rocket liner in 2039 propelling passengers from New York to London in an hour, was the star turn of the fabled 1939 New York's World Fair --- beloved by the public, the media and most significantly, by the scientific establishment.

That is if we can take scientific silence for assent.

The scientific community are like bullies all over : the victims of their anger are always carefully chosen to be much smaller and much weaker than themselves.

So well known figures from interwar organized science were always eager to speak out about the inanities of spoon-benders, perpetual machine advocates and faith healers of various creeds --- the latter a signal sign of just how weak they judged Ole Jehovah had become.

A 'cannon' (sans a real barrel) powerful enough to propel a passenger liner clear across the Atlantic Ocean with a single short sharp shock of an explosion , would momentarily generate enough G-Forces to render the delicate human bodies inside into instant eggnog.

This was Newtonian ballistic science, circa 1939, on LSD and drinking its own Kool-aid.

Make your careful calculations, set the dials just right and then just pull the trigger : 'fire and forget'.

One hour later the rocketship, in a fiery parabolic arc, would reliably land softly and gently down on a tiny rocketport pad after a ten thousand km free-flight.

Loewy freely admitted this trip was not yet possible - but it was only a short matter of time - merely awaiting the proper sort of fuel.

No - it was then and will be for all time - a totally idiotic idea - and the scientists of 1939 knew it - having long ago done the experiments that proved it so.

But while Christians might have their martyrs, who as ever heard of atheist martyrs ?

What scientist has ever bit the hand that fed them ?

This, the star-turn of the World's Fair, was sponsored by Chrysler, and whatever was good for Chrysler was also good for university presidents and science professors.

So those among the scientists who knew better bit their tongues and genuflected in awe like the rest of the visitors.

At least we hope they did .

But what if they secretly believed like Loewy, that all that was needed was a anti-gravity cannon fuel and surely that can only be a matter of time ?

It sounds like science fiction but who , if not young scientists to be , were the main readers of Sci Fi in 1939 ?

Scary isn't it ?

Now perhaps WWII, the war between the scientists, seem more explicable ...

NAS tipped to run American AUSCHWITZ after Nazi conquest ???

Organized Science, if it knows nothing else (a claim easy to defend), sure knows how to sing for its supper.

That is why Scientism is our one and only God.

Organized Science knows just when to switch sides and to start sucking up to the newest powerful entities in town and it knows just who is powerless enough to safely kick in the teeth.

It also picks its opponents it chooses to publicly battle very carefully so that none of the resulting mud sticks to its priestly skirts.

The NAS choose not to criticize Raymond Loewy's ROCKETPORT vision at the New York's World Fair of 1939-1940----- and silence is assent.

The Rocketport was the most scientifically loony idea at a Fair replete with scientifically loony ideas.

The so called 'Rocket' , a small ocean liner in size, was actually a cannon projectile fired in New York and designed to land in Paris  ------- somehow without the resulting enormous G-Forces mushing everybody inside the projectile into protoplasm.

(Humans might survive 200 Gs all over their body, if its only for a fraction of a second as in a car crash, but this voyage would impose at least 20,000 Gs for a fatally long time, even if we ignore the peak force of about 200,000 Gs at blast-off......)

Loewy got away with his loony tune idea because he claimed it came to him from studying scientific journals (rather than saying he saw it in a vision after praying to the Virgin Mary).

Whether the idea came from the Journal SCIENCE or MATTHEW 12 in the Bible, the idea was equally crazy.

But rest assured that the NAS would only have rushed forward to condemn it as scientifically invalid if the idea  had come from their bete noires in the camp of the dreaded 'Religion'.

The All-American idea of applied negative Eugenics (can you say Auschwitz, boys and girls ?) was a much more damaging loony idea the NAS choose not to publicly attack - until it was far far too late and after eugenics had been already discredited by the march of events in Eastern Europe.

That is what I mean by Science's Bad Faith --- its unwillingness to attack anything as unscientific, no matter how loony or deadly, if doing so risks lowering the awesome respect ordinary people still have for those 'wonder-working wizards' of science.

In the end, it all comes down to "JOBS,JOBS,JOBS" as that famous scientist Brian Mulroney once observed ---- he also said "there is no whore like an old whore".

True, so true.....