Henry Dawson vs Newton, Dalton & Darwin...

During his brief life, (Martin) Henry Dawson managed to have three seemingly wildly different careers : in the Military during WWI, in Academic Science in the interwar years, and in Popular Science during WWII.

But these differences are only apparent , not real.

WWII:began optimistically as Science, ended tragically as Engineering..

WWII, in other words, began in Modernism and ended in post-Modernism.

It should be understood at the onset that Science's task is strictly pedagogical and that it doesn't have to provide answers that are true, in any realistic sense, merely ones that are correct.

In other words, an excellent science experiment also is an excellent exam question.

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.

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.

All Optimists - without exception - are Social Darwinists ; all Pessimists are Altruists

Always the OPTIMIST

Its a Fact. Its a Dogma, a Law, a Commandment you can carve in stone - by definition, all 'blue sky' optimists must be Social Darwinists. Just as, again by definition, all cautious, skeptic, 'grounded' pessimists must be altruists.

NEWTONIAN MODERNITY dies June 6th 1944, in hail of hand grenades ...

   The most effective, the most pinpoint accurate, guided missiles of all WWII ?
   The bog-common hand grenade.
  And usually thrown by a man thought too stupid, too small, too unhealthy to join the real armed forces: which is why he ended up in the infantry as an MOS 745, aka the bog-ordinary rifleman.
   Now he was lobbing that grenade from 10 or 20 feet away , into a MG (machine gun) emplacement, or a concrete pillbox, or down the barrel of a big artillery piece --- and winning the battle for Omaha Beach, turning the potential D-Day disaster into ultimate victory.

   More than just a few German and foreign conscripts died in those emplacements on that day: Newtonian Modernity also suffered a grievous blow from which it never recovered.
   For weeks earlier and on that day itself, the biggest guns in the Allied navy and the biggest bomber fleets in the Allied air forces, had tried and tried to shut down those emplacements with massive blasts of HE (high explosives) delivered via Newtonian ballistics.
   In Newtonian theory (the then dominant paradigm to explain the entire world) it was felt that given enough accurate information, one could correct point and elevate a gun at a distant target, press the 'trigger' and walk away : 'fire and forget'.
   If the math was right the shell would wing its way unerringly to the target.
   But out in the real world, the problem proves to be a 'many body problem' - one that no amount of Newton will resolve.
  The most sophisticated use of Newtonian math and the best in analog computers was on board those battleships and bombers : fire control equipment from famous names like Norden and Sperry.
   But nothing worked - both the destructive power of high explosives and the accuracy of Newtonian fire control was highly exaggerated and knowingly oversold.
   Today we do have smart bombs and guided missiles but they do not make their way to the target accurately via Newton's math.
    No, all their guiding GPS signals are only rendered accurate when Quantum mechanics and Relativity are used to correct their raw data.
    But back to 1944: in the end, it took brave infantrymen like Captain Joe Dawson ( no relation except perhaps spiritually to former infantryman Lt Martin Henry Dawson)  who had to climb the cliffs above the bloody sand and take out the deadly machine gunners (often just single individuals like the famous Heinrich Severloh) and save the situation.
  So, it was down to this : forget the hundreds of thousands of men and the biggest military machines money and science could create trying - via Newton - to take out the D-Day German coastal defences.
  Instead, the entire Allied invasion of Europe was reduced to a 'High Noon' type duel battle between a lone German with a machine gun and a lone American with a hand grenade.
    If that lone German succeeded long enough in holding the Americans to the beach, German tanks might arrive to drive them off the beach altogether, and thus divide the united Allied beachhead into little pieces and then proceed to conquer it piece by piece - a classic German tactic.
   But if the lone American lobbed his grenade just right, the MG fire would cease and the men could move off the beach and go a few miles inland, giving a depth of defence sufficient to blunt any later German armoured counterattack.
  D-Day turned out to be a low tech victory in a war that was claimed above all to be a high tech scientific war : don't believe the liars and deniers who say otherwise.
   They outa make a movie out of the duel : Dawson versus Severloh for the Fate of the Earth --- except who in Hollywood would ever buy the script --- it seems too improbable.
  Once again, fact beggars fiction...

Hitler,Tojo,Norden's big error: trusting HIGH SCHOOL Physics..

   Traditional High School level physics is, at best, only "sorta" okay.
   But only if you agree to do no more with it, than to follow someone else's orders and to keep your mouth shut and your pen capped.
   Shut and capped on the application of HS physics to any other world outside its proper - and severely limited - sphere.

   But you really need a couple of Physics degrees and lots of maturity (and lots of post-doc discussions with your elders), before you are fit to talk up the limitations of all traditional (Newtonian) physics, not just HS physics, to any areas outside of things like bridge-building and chemical plant operating.
   Some metaphors from the world of popular music making might make the reasons a little clearer.
   Anyone who has ever played or sung popular music - or even just read about or hung about people who have - knows about the echo button and the reverb button.
   We may be limited to knowing just what they sound like and how they differ. But real musicians & singers, real record and film producers, must be able to buy those effects successfully and economically.
  Quickly they discover that any price point echo equipment will do the job - the cheapest ,oldest equipment even have their own (un-natural but charming) uses.
   But cheap reverb simply sounds bad. And as your music making ears get more acute , even highly expensive reverb sounds bad.
   And not just bad - unlike the few obvious and reliable controls on an inexpensive echo unit, the expensive reverb unit has many many controls that collectively can unpredictably veer from acceptably okay to horribly awful, at the mere touch of a dial.
   Professionally-oriented musicians and producers are finally forced to learn a little physics to make sense of it all.
   Echo, they learn, is a simple audio event, so simple in fact that high school physics students could and perhaps should, replicate it with a freeware, software, digital audio editor.
   Record your voice - copy the sound and paste it forward on the editor screen (a metaphor for actually moving it forward in time by a few dozen thousands of a second (milliseconds) ).
   Reduce the copy's volume relative to the original, and filter off some of the treble.
  Voila ! A perfect echo - indistinguishable from one we can make in a cave.
   Newton or Norden - maybe even Hitler - would have recognized what HS physics has done: solved a two body problem.
   Body A, our voice, hits the cave's very distant wall and causes Body B, the wall, to reflect our voice back to us , but delayed by the distance (in space and time) between us and the wall and the return.
   The effect is echo : the sound of our own voice in our ear, followed by tiny fraction of a second later, by an echo of our voice, reduced in volume and in brightness by the sound wave weakening itself as it passed from atom to atom, trillions of times over.
   This is High School and University Undergraduate Physics in a nutshell - or rather a cave, a sort of Plato's cave in fact.
   We come away after completing the course and going on with our lives, outside the real world of full time professional physics, think life is really like that : just two bodies,mechanical, linear, determinist cause and effect: life as clockwork.
   But Reality in fact is mostly like the weather - or reverb - its a three body (IE multiple, maybe trillions upon trillions) problem.
   Echo is simple because the distantly returning echo is too weak
upon finally reaching other walls to do more than die there as heat - standing in, incidentally, as proof of the Second Law of Thermodynamics --- the idea that all energy inevitably degrades down to useless low temperature 'heat' .
   But in most buildings, the walls are close enough and hard enough to reflect back echo, but not 100.00000000000000000%
perfectly. There is a slight angle to the return: north south east west - it doesn't matter.
  That means the earliest outgoing re-echo doesn't die in destructive interference with its incoming later original self.
  Instead it hit the other wall and again is deflected slightly off angle in random fashion, dependent ultimately on how smooth the paint or plaster job is - and to air molecules and sound waves, it is never smooth enough.
   In milliseconds, the voice sound - a three dimensional wave remember - a sort of bubble of sound, is reflecting back from all angles and interfering and re-enforcing echos in a madly complex but very ear-satisfying manner that we call reverb.
   It took hundreds of the world's best physicists, working decades, with the best computer equipment at their disposal, to create an approximately acceptable form of reverb artificially.
  Even mass produced, the best of that approximately good artificially-produced reverb still costs tens of thousands of dollars.
  And actually, it is semi-artificially produced - the creators of the best reverb systems simply copy (sample) what Nature produces, without in fact knowing how to recreate those effects themselves 'from first principles'.
   For reverb, substitute the weather in four days time or the climate in four decades time : issues that are vital to our species' survival and yet madly complex beyond any amount of HS physics.
   By contrast, one feels that Hitler  felt that the so called 'fog of war' was all baloney : the science of war was actually more like Newton's planetary motion than it was like predicting the weather.
   So he moved little wooden counters on his war maps as if they were points, masses and forces on some half-remembered HS physics chalkboard.
   Body A (a wooden counter labelled Army Group Centre) was
moved by a wooden stick to Body B (a wooden counter labelled Moscow defenses) and Voila !
  The job was done : cause and effect, linear war.
  Army group A inevitably caused the effect upon Body B of entrapment and surrender : QID !
   In reality, there were three (and more bodies) actually playing at this two body game.
    Counters labelled "earlier-than-expected Fall rains and muddy roads" and "colder-than-expected-Winter-temperatures" also wanted to have their say.
   Once they had their say and had turned simple HS physics echo into highly complex reverb, the jig - as they say - was up.
   Up for Hitler, up for Tojo, up for Norden, up for Newton and above all - up for Modernity....

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.....

Modernity: Last page in Long Book

Modernity was usually felt to be the first page in a book not yet fully written , the gateway to "The World of Tomorrow".

But it could be argued it better represents the very last page of a very, very long book more than 3000 years old.

Definition time: I consider Modernity to be a mode of thought, not a time period.

Yes, it predominated in the period 1880-1980, but it had strength before (1840-1880) and after (1980 - 2020 ??).

It shared the hundred years between 1880-1980 with Pre-Modernity and Post-Modernity but towered well over them in its undisputed hegemony.

It held, along with the ancient Greek scientists (& Newton) the idea that both macro and micro reality consisted of a solid, resilient material that acted and felt rather like metal or rock or wood or a living body.

In objects like the human body, it consisted of a constantly and smoothly curving unbroken structure - made up (perhaps) of tiny granular objects ( atoms) that were as solid and as resilient as the entire body itself and were packed so closely together as to appear and act as if they were all one big solid object.

Hardened cement, solid but yet visibly made of tiny grains all stuck together is as good a visual representative of this vision of ultimate reality as any we commonly see.

There was no "inside detailing" to these atoms and their outer edges were clearcut and definite.

Simple and unchanging (by no coincidence,rather like the definition Modernists held of bacteria), these micro objects were complied into sub-assemblies which became assemblies and then systems - from atoms to molecules to all the way up to human beings
or planets.

Macro Reality - when they thought it was working - was a vast Lego or Meccano Set, an additive form of complexity, in strict hierarchical order.

When it wasn't working, Macro Reality was disordered and "dirt" resulted : atoms out of place.

If you were born in 1880 and completed your education before Queen Victoria died you would only have read, later in life, in the newspapers about changes proposed by some scientists to this way of looking at the world but you won't have and couldn't have accepted those changes, deep down in your bones.

You were simply too old but unfortunately, not quite old enough:
you would have been 53 when Hitler came to power, 60 in 1940, 65 in 1945.

In whatever you did (as long as you were a professional class male) you would have been at the top of your profession  (the boss) and would have run the world, along with other men roughly your same age and with roughly the same kind of scientific education, throughout World War Two and the ten year lead-up to it.

Quantum science was happening during the Modern Era but was not a part of it, in its day to day workings.

Newton still ruled all through the Modern Era.

Don't believe me?

Millions of parents and their kids believed in this view of ultimate Reality:
check out when the sales of Meccano sets,Erector kits,Tinkertoy and their ilk first became popular and when those sales suddenly died, and you can mark the timeline of Modernity at its peak and at its decline...