A hybrid between a billiard ball and a bowl of jelly : Modernity's 'the horror, the horror'

Hard to imagine Modernity ever being really comfortable at the Seaside : hard to ever imagine it capable of being relaxed and comfortable that close to such an un-modernist miscegenation of land and water.

Pierre-Simon Laplace is NOT a Commensalist

Michael Marshall

Well if I am a commensalist and you are too, just who exactly is not a commensalist ?

Well Stephen Harper is not and neither is Ricky Santorum , but you probably already guessed that.

More importantly, people like Albert Einstein, that icon of the tired old left, isn't one either.

Nor is his intellectual mentor, Pierre-Simon Laplace.

Laplace, and Einstein, thought of themselves as fully Modernist and firm advocates of the Enlightenment.

Laplace famously claimed that since he believed he already stood above and outside Nature and Reality for all practical measure, only a current lack of sufficient calculating power prevented him from perfectly predicting the present, past and future right down to the atomic level.

But both Chaos Theory (Henri Poincare) and Quantum Theory (Paul Dirac) show that if you are in anyway a participant within the system you are studying (and we finite humans are definitely within the Universe --- as even Einstein and Laplace would have readily admitted that), then even your tiniest efforts to measure it, act upon it and feedback to alter those measurements.

Thus, as with the food we eat and the air we breath , "all measuring instruments (and the beings operating them) dine at a common table" ---  that is they are embedded fully into the systems they are tryong to measure -- thus, in point of fact, they are commensalist with it.

But until someone accepts this, emotionally as well as intellectually, they do not act upon that knowledge or try to temper their hubris.

I do not believe that Einstein would have ever found it easy to accept that a small weather measurement taken in the brazilian jungle could trigger a big twister in Texas....

2011: creation of clash of 1840s darwin/dalton versus 1940s dirac/dawson

The "Four Ds" are not "The Four Divas" but two groups of conflicting scientists who laid the ground for the world most of us are destined to live , reproduce and die in - the 21st century.

John Dalton and Charles Darwin, scientists from the 19th century, still bulk out 21st science education for most of us, thanks to the ego issues of the teaching class, who can not accept that the world is not fully composed of definite answers to definite questions.

But our century is actually the dialectic result of the WWII clash between the scientific certitudes of Darwin and Dalton colliding with the scientific uncertitudes promoted by Paul Dirac and Henry Dawson, scientists definitely of the 20th century.

Plenty of irony in the latter pair.

Dirac's QUANTUM PHYSICS said the behavior of a billion radioactive atoms are predictable in true Daltonian fashion, but  the activities of any one individual radioactive atom is not.

In contrast, Dawson's QUORUM BIOLOGY agreed that a single individual bacteria was as dumb as Darwin said all the"primitive races" were, but that collectively a billion bacteria were collectively (and unpredictably) smart in ways we are only beginning to comprehend.

Both agreed that the smallest entities of matter and life were not as stable and as dumbly inert as civilized man had assumed.

Conversely, WWII itself seemed proof enough that civilized man was not as smart as he had thought.

From above, such Phaetons as Albert Einstein fell back earthward, while from inside the ground itself, Penicillium rose up in our esteem to meet Einstein midway to dine with him at Life's commensal table...