High School Science : 'Home of the Hubris' , STILL

Science (the resulting name for the 150 year old victory of Natural Philosophy over Natural History) is widely accepted to be primarily pedagogical in nature.

It exists as a subdivision of Philosophy and is designed primarily to do nothing more that to teach students (and the adult laity) formal and informal lessons in metaphysics and ethics, 'Drawn from Nature' as Science understands it.

Natural History has had to retreat to those vast areas of useful if messy , applied technology : areas like engineering, industrial processes and clinical medicine, where much 'trial and error' is required to align classroom theory to the reality at hand.

By contrast,  parents can rest assured that all real reality has been carefully airbrushed away from intro University undergraduate science courses, which together with their bigger and older brothers in the High School sciences,  continue to supply the world with most of its Popular Hubris.

High School Science continues to be the 'Home of the Half-Filled Glass Science', the place of Panglossian Science, where Mid Victorian Optimism burns as brightly as ever.

High School Science syllabus setters claim that setting real world problems for lessons and exams would be too tough for young people to answer correctly.

'Let them wait till they are adult engineers and doctors to have to struggle to figure out the actual solutions, out in a real world where Ceteris Paribus never applies'.

But of course the vast percentage of students never go on to be professional scientists or engineers and doctors and get a chance to learn to wrestle daily with the difference between idealized high school science theory and messy reality .

Instead they grow up to become voters and politicians, generals and soldiers, CEOs and machine operators.

All of them, as a result of formal education (together with the drip-drip media pronouncements from the High School's fellow travellers, the science journalists, sic ) remain as deluded as 16 year old High School kids.

Deluded into believing that because Newtonian science can more or less successfully predict the paths of a half dozen placid , near-by, large planets that this means it can also predict the paths of smaller and more dangerous objects.

Like darkly invisible, tiny, unpredictable asteroids, or ballistic shells fired off twenty miles away, or incoming raindrops.

My idea of an ideal High School science course would be one where the children know less, for absolutely certain, than they did before they came in, where they fail to correctly answer the exam questions but give it as good a first try as any working engineer might do.

Because out in the real Universe,out beyond Newton and Galileo, there is no real absolute vacuum for objects to move through, and so those objects are always affected by the arbitrarily accumulated (not cross-cancelling) effects of other forces and objects---- and kids today might as well know that from day one.

The real reason why High Schools continue to focus on teaching Newton,Dalton and Darwin, more than a century after they stopped being cutting edge science, is that they impart to the students a hugely self-confident scientific sense of imperialism ; that out there is a world and a universe just waiting to be easily and safely exploited by Man's Science.

In a world where mining company executives continue to hold far more sway than do their environmentally concerned critics, High School Science teachers are going to continue to be compelled to teach self-preening, self-esteem and 'uplift'.

And it won't stop until environmentalists back off attacking mining executives and focus instead on questioning Popular Scientific Hubris at its fount : High School....

Skygods vs Earthlings: a post-Modernist history of WWII

Modernity finally gets its own WAR

The historians of 75 years ago could only see the things that made the leading warring nations different but with the passage of time and today's new era, younger historians are beginning to see the thing that all the leading warring nations held in common: Modernity.
World War II was like all the certitudes of grade 11 High School Science, armed with machine guns and unleashed upon the physical reality outside the laboratory door : the most violent, evil, catastrophe that Humanity has ever inflicted upon itself.

Modernity's scientists - scientists of faith - lost the physical war but crucially won the postwar battle of words, won the war of books, myths and movies (or did they ?)

1945 : MO goes PO

Because today historians are starting to uncover the stories of WWII's evidence-based scientists ,who resisted the onslaught of science based on faith , as best they could.

Above all, younger historians are starting to tell Mother Nature's version of WWII, because she easily bested Modernity's science, time and again.

Now we can see post-war 1945 for what it really was : the time when MO goes PO, when Modernity began to fade and be gradually replaced by post-Modernity's new Global Commensality Era.........

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.


An optimist believes that there is only one simple, perfect, permanent solution to each of Life's relatively few difficulties.

Someone more skeptical and cautious sees many possible solutions  to each of Life's many and complex problems: all imperfect, impermanent and all highly contingent.

Yesterday's wild-eyed optimistic science - that of Newton, Dalton & Darwin - is still worshipped in High Schools around the world

And right now , wild-eyed cock-eyed optimism ,(aka Yesterday's Science - the science of Newton, Dalton and Darwin still worshipped in High School laboratory chapels around the world) , is killing this planet - destroying tomorrow's world for our kids and grandkids.

And we're just letting it all happen.

When there is only one possible - simple - certain - permanent - solution to every problem, what do you do with the rest - the imperfect solutions ?

Those mouchers, those useless mouths, those "unfit" ideas, those takers not makers , those 47% type ideas ?

You eliminate those ideas like an eugenicist eliminates the unfit.

But when you doubt that this or any solution will work perfectly and permanently in each and every set of circumstances, what do you do with today's less than perfect solutions ?

Like a pack rat, you preserve them for another day and another situation - you redeem them - see if they can serve the community with pride under different circumstances.

You don't write them off forever - you don't toss them aside like a used condom - you treat them them like those people who are down today, but not out - because, with a little help and sympathy, they might be up and about tomorrow.

Mitt Romney says his action plan actually consists of nothing more than free floating optimism.

Should we really be surprised then about his secret speech writing off the 47% as 'useless mouths' ?

I don't think so....

"Blue Sky" libertarian think tanks are today's "Boiler Rooms" of deceit

Libertarianism = Blue Skyism

Who says God doesn't have a sense of humour ? How else to explain that in Standard & Poor's dictionary of financial terms, "boiler room" follows immediately upon "blue sky" stock laws?

As grandmother recalled to you when you started to invest a little for your retirement, a "boiler room" is where the conmen operated that sold your grandfather a pile of worthless blue sky (stocks) in return for all the retirement money he had socked away earning a low but safe return in a bank.

If the rate of return on a stock seems too good to be true it probably isn't true --- but instead is just blue sky optimism or fraud.

Washington's (and London,Canberra,Ottawa et al) libertarian think tanks are not frauds - they sincerely believe that their political ideology and economics are firmly based upon the physical reality of the Science they were taught in High School.

And it is.

Unfortunately High School science is not itself based on physical reality, not at least as professional scientists of today understand it to be.

Rather High School science is still - still  - based upon physical reality as understood by the professional scientists of  200 years ago !

By no coincidence, the state-of-the-art science of 200 years ago was far more optimistic and upbeat (seeing nothing but blue skies from now on, skies so blue I gotta wear shades) than the state-of-the-art-science of 150 years ago and later.

Given the choice : either an older science that flattered their self-centered worldview or a newer science that humbled humanity into merely one among many commensalist beings on a resource-limited Earth, guess which one the selfish of the world choose to have taught ?

Clashing thermodynamics

Libertarianism and the First Law of Thermodynamics were spawned on the same rock : just as us post-Scientism commensalists equally favour the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

A Mexican Stand-Off ?

Not exactly ; because the far bigger, unlimited - fundamental - law of the two is the Second Law.

The First Law is but a smaller, derived law : think of it as a special case of relativity versus the general Law of relativity.

Physical reality looks like , acts like, the commensalists' Second Law.

But traditional political parties and traditional economics, both grounded in the science of 1812 are not : this is why our world is in such a mess.

Extremely rhetorically self-flattering , traditional parties and economics win every voting contest among fallible humanity ---- but loses every clash with cold ,hard ,firm physical reality.

Until our politics, economics and High School science (above all else) aligns with the Universe's actual physical reality, this planet and this human civilization is going to continue to flatline....

Merkel world's first "Post-Victorian Science" leader ?

Merkel gets it !

Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel has a PhD in Quantum Chemistry* and worked as a  quantum researcher, publishing several peer-reviewed articles in that science.This means that she knows almost nothing ----- and accepts that she knows almost nothing ---- about the fundamental nature of Reality.

She radiates humility.

By contrast, almost all of the rest of the world's leaders (and not just in politics either) have a few snoozed-through classes in Victorian (aka anti-quantum) science at their High School under their scientific belt.

As a result they honestly believe that they have a firm handle on who controls Reality and that the name of that "who" is Man.

Unlike Merkel, most world leaders think they already know everything about anything : a happy by-product of a high school education in Victorian Science

They ooze hubris into the atmosphere --- guised as CO2.

No wonder then that Merkel  (aka "the traitor-warmist" to most on the Right)  understands that our climate is changing into an enormous disaster zone and that we need Post-Victorian Science employed full bore, to save us from our Victorian-Scientific selves.....

* Investigation of the mechanism of decay reactions with single bond breaking and calculation of their velocity constants on the basis of quantum chemical and statistical methods

Margaret Thatcher was also famous as a chemist cum political leader. But she got only a second class honors BSc and that during WWII ----she then worked briefly - and fittingly - in plastics, by far the most MODERNISTIC of industries.

By education and inclination , Thatcher's science was of a Victorian nature.

Perhaps the most useful thing a scientific biographer could do to help save this planet is to prepare a joint  scientific  biography of Thatcher and Merkel, contrasting how their differing science educations influenced their very different politics, though both are conservative and women.

EPA is not required to reprove the existence of the atom every time it approaches a scientific question

Like most of you, I only know a few famous quotes concerning courts of appeal (life is too short, it is not ?)

There is Mr Dooley's devastating quip that "while the Constitution might follow the Flag , the Supreme Court follows the Election Returns".

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr 's clarion call to start the Holocaust, when in the infamous case of Buck versus Bell, he declared "three generations of imbeciles is enough" as the Supreme Court of America okayed the Science of Negative Eugenics and Hitler applauded.

Now a brand new quote is entering "The Book of Famous Law Quotes" .

It is only a week old but every commentator - sans, significantly, the Denier media - has seized upon it:

"The EPA is not required to reprove the existence of the atom , every time it  approaches a scientific question."

Ditto the IPCC .

Or any other major scientific decision-making body, trying to synthesize the results of thousands of reports; reports that have been already peer-reviewed by other scientists and critics, both before and after their publication.

Fittingly, since this is the 21st century after all, the Federal Court of Appeals firmly rejected the mid-19th century science of Determinism as created by Pierre-Simon LaPlace , preferring the late 19th century science of Statistical Probability as created by Ludwig Boltzmann.

Now if only we can finally get  21st century high school teachers to do the same .....