After all, sharing unexamined assumptions is what makes two scientists 'peers' in the first place

Logically, the only thing worth examining is the unexamined assumptions that we all hold in common

The only real test of a scientific hypothesis is to have it reviewed by non-peers , for they will probably not share the underlying 'unexamined assumptions' that form the outer limits of whatever space a potentially new scientific theory can inhabit in a particular discipline.

By its very definition, peer review always fails, must fail, any truly ground-breaking scientific effort.

But having new ideas torn apart by non-peers is difficult in practise because many non-peers will fail to fully understand the context of the subtle internal arguments being made in support of that particular hypothesis.

Perhaps pre-publishing a particularly bold and unorthodox hypothesis to the world wide web and inviting critiques from all and sundry might get an useful blend of non-peers and peers tearing it apart.

But for most academics, the hypothesis in their potential article or monograph is simply too limited in 'newness' to be viewed as controversial by more than their fellow specialists.

This is a long roundabout way of saying that if a hypothesis really deserves a Nobel prize, it better have been first rejected by peer reviewers in all of the most influential journals in that scientific field.

Unfortunately, most Nobels are for normal science,  for works that only bites away at exciting new patches of grass , well inside the unexamined assumptions that form a scientific field's boundaries.

The Modern Age (and its Science) had a particularly strongly hegemonic set of unexamined assumptions to hold it together .

 This was in fact the main reason for the strength and uniformity of the underlying beliefs that united Modernity's many warring ideologies.

As a result, when a few minor and extremely non-charismatic  scientists fundamentally challenged those unexamined assumptions, they were not put on trial and burned at the stake, in a scientific sense.

Instead their views merely caused bemusement and puzzlement among the scientists and the science-following educated laity of the Modern Age.

These minor scientists might not even have been aware of how fundamental their critiques were.

Thus they saw no need to further nail their views dramatically, in a Luther-like fashion, upon the nearest lab wall as some sort of troop-raising manifesto.

One minor scientist however, did unite his intellectual opposition to the Modern Age's unexamined assumptions with his moral objections to the Modern Age's behavior and his impact, perhaps as a result, had world wide and prophetic impact.

His name was Henry Dawson (Martin Henry Dawson).

The conclusions he drew about the microbial small and the weak from his pioneering studies in HGT (and other such marvels) , put steel beneath the velvet of his moral objections as to how the human small and weak were being mis-treated by Modernity's Axis and Allied alike in WWII.

His heart was open, agape, to the sufferings of small but his mind was also open, agape, to the brilliance of the small as well.

And that made all the difference......

It was the very ORTHODOXY of their economic theories that doomed Hitler,Tojo and Mussolini

Devotedly orthodox economist Robert Solow won the 1987 Nobel Prize basically for just one very famous 1974 quote, taken a bit out of context:

"If it is very easy to substitute other things for natural resources, then there is, in principle, no problem. The world, in effect, can get along without natural resources."

But since he was born in 1924 and was only nine when Hitler came to power, he can hardly be blamed for acting as Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo's unofficial economic advisor.

However, someone had to do that job and so it was done by virtually all of the 1930s' economists, almost all orthodox to the man or woman.

In the 1930s, as in the 1830s and the 2030s, their theories basically claimed the same thing as Solow's quote, albeit in less frank language.

But you protest that Hitler, Tojo and Musso went to war precisely to obtain the natural resources they didn't have at home.

So surely my claim looks highly incredible on the face of it: they obviously took natural resources very seriously indeed.

But remember that these three planned to steal all those natural resources they didn't have, and steal them away from heavily armed neighbours who didn't want to give them up without a big fight.

Relatively 'natural-resource-less' at the moment their military machine planned to do all the stealing, the three still felt confident they could substitute something else for those missing natural resources like copper, oil and rubber : sheer aggressive military willpower.

Their failure to substitute patriotic energy for petroleum energy should be a lesson to even the dimmest of economic light bulbs, but no.

Acting as if it is still mentally wowing the crowds in some stadium in Nuremberg,  orthodox economics still daily  proclaims 'the triumph of the human will' over mere material limitations.

So who exactly started the bloodbath of WWII ?

May I suggest you look no further than your local university economics department .

Pity then their ilk never faced a war crimes trial , instead of just their most earnest lay students at the top of Japan, Italy and Germany .....

Like Admiral Byng, but in reverse, AlexanderFleming was given a Nobel prize "pour encourager les autres"

Alexander Fleming pursued, preserved and publicized a foolish observation that turned out to be.... not so foolish after all.

His personal Nobel Prize was really to encourage other future scientists to also publicize their oddball observations because they too might be all important.

New scientific breakthroughs are often delayed because the scientifically powerful are older and no longer open to an new ideas any newer than the new breakthroughs of their youth.

A person bold enough to bring forth oddball ideas is likely to face a lot of bricks and catcalls from these powerful personages who control grants and tenure and publication in big journals. (Big shout out to Dr Milton Wainwright !)

So the thought that a possible future Nobel Prize might lay in the offing if one faces the bricks and the catcalls , does tend to give all of us a little dutch courage.

Fleming was badly wrong about penicillin on two key counts.

It did not need to be synthetic to be useful and it was not limited to only local antiseptic use, but he argued these points from a reasoned position and did not attempt to weasel away from these positions when he was proven badly wrong by the mid-1940s.

And when I say wrong, I mean being highly visible wrong (as Fleming had become the most famous single person on earth).

Wrong ,wrong, wrong before the eyes of every single scientist in the world.

Fleming accepted he had been wrong and didn't fudge it

That took more than a little courage --- it is a pity than none of the rest of the penicillin pioneers who also advocated synthetic penicillin research to well past its due date were not as open in admitting their similar error......

Aside from VEGEMITE, what did Aussies Gray & Duhig have that Alexander Fleming totally lacked ? (Moral Fervour)

6 million might have lived

In the Fall of 1943, fifteen years after Nobel Prize winner Alexander Fleming proved that penicillin - at least his method of making penicillin - could NOT save lives, two intrepid Aussies using his very same penicillin strain and his very same methods (right down to the use of Seitz asbestos filter pads) plucked a half dozen patients from the jaws of certain death.
  Aussie "Men at Work" , under tough wartime conditions

"They came from a land down under" - working in fact in then remote Brisbane Australia , under severe wartime shortage of staff and materials, their methods displayed NO technical improvements over what Fleming and his two young assistants had managed 15 years earlier.

Unfortunately, Altruism was never Alexander Fleming's long suit...

The key difference was that they had the moral fervour ( that Fleming totally lacked) to try almost anything to save people who were certain to die in days if not hours , by pumping extraordinary amounts of impure ("crude") penicillin water into their bodies.

Even at that late stage in penicillin's development, when the whole middle class world was talking up the miracle of penicillin, most doctors would rather see a patient die, than publicly admit that they injected an impure natural substance into a human being's bloodstream.

(It, after all, was an age of eugenics, and pure breeds, families of good blood and evil half bloods , pure-blooded Indians, when 1/32 or even one drop of black blood made you legally black and when the American Red Cross would not allow the mixing of black and white blood in transfusions : pureness and blood had a quasi-scientific, almost mystical , quality in those years .)

 Nothing impure went into such a symbol of purity as human blood.

So even in late 1943, only a few doctors let the two pioneers, Duhig and Gray, inject raw penicillin juice into their patients - and even they, only when their patient seemed at death's door.

So these were not average very sick patients - they were gravely weakened patients given up for dead - so their recovery was all the more remarkable.

Penicillin's Holocaust

If Fleming had displayed any of their moral fervour in the 12 peacetime years when he had penicillin virtually to himself, an estimated six millions lives might have been saved.

Including - tragically - his own favourite brother  John in 1937 - whose pneumonia case was easily curable by even modest amounts of crude penicillin water - if only Alexander Fleming  had tried.

Instead it was left to the moral fervour of another Scot, Nova Scotian born  Martin Henry Dawson, to first put impure penicillin into a patient's bloodstream, in 1940.

Fewer doctors than you can count on your hands followed Dawson's moral fervour when it came to fighting for the right of impure - natural - penicillin's  to save lives,  in those all important  years between October 1940 and May 1944....

* They used Vegemite in the making of their penicillin juice , as a growth stimulant

'Nasty' Abbott and Howard Florey : told they'd be important from day they were born

the new Howard Florey ?

Reading David Marr's fascinating walkabout through the early years of the next Aussie PM, A. 'Nasty' Abbott, an astute student of that other hard-driving Aussie, Howard Florey, can't help but see similarities in how both men's families deliberately distorted their only son's personality to suit their parental dreams.

Both men were the only spoiled child - the only male child - in a family of girls. From birth they were told constantly they, not the girls, would be somebody--- that they had to be somebody.

Spoil a child and raise up a sociopath....

"At all costs , get there !"

Energy, sharp elbows and "take no prisoners" attitudes got them to the top but left very few, except fellow sociopaths, really liking them.

The lazy but studiously modest Alexander Fleming charmed his way into getting a Nobel Prize and most of the glory for merely discovering penicillin ("to be basically useless as a life-saver") .

Fleming left it to others to work hard (onto death in the case of Martin Henry Dawson) to prove the reverse : that penicillin is in fact the most useful life-saving medicine yet invented (my italics).

One who worked hard to prove up penicillin was Florey - but widespread dislike of Florey led the media (and Fleming and his hospital) to make Alec Fleming the star of this saga.

History isn't done with wannabe DLP leader Nasty Abbott : but I doubt it will be kind.

Both Florey and Abbott had much in their characters to admire but because they were warped from birth by their parents, the bad always seemed to outweigh the good in them, as they obeyed their parents' dictates to succeed at all costs, unceasingly issued to them since before they could even speak.

Spoil a child and ruin a nation.....

"PETER C GLOVER" to receive NOBEL for 5th law of thermodynamics ?

GLOVER takes the Fifth

Peter C Glover, the well known evangelist, is said to be set to receive the Nobel Prize for Theology for formulating (stepping in for God) the Fifth Law of Thermodynamics : "Thou can not change the Climate, get over it".

Glover , like the rather more  illustrious Sir Charles Lyell , left a field he was good at (the law) to dabble at something he is terrible at (science).

Glover (not yet Sir Glover) is best known for his thesis that "Humanity can not change the Climate for good or for bad". Full stop.

Most critics of the theory of human-caused climate change at least allow change in the climate with sufficient inputs of extra or less energy : but they mathematically quantify these inputs to be at such levels that humanity as of yet simply doesn't have the means to generate them.

Prolonged shifts in the Earth's relationship, distance-wise, to the Sun, or sharp rises and falls in the energy output of the Sun are held by these critics to be big enough to cause the Earth Climate to change fundamentally.

This is a serious argument, a serious scientific argument, and the various sides argue over whether smaller changes in energy inputs (small enough for current humanity to evoke) are sufficient to evoke pronounced changes in the Earth's climate.

Glover does not make these sort of arguments - he is a lawyer by trade and so may be intellectually unequal to making logical rather than rhetorical arguments.

Fair enough.

But I do not believe that Glover's thesis rests on science at all : he does not qualify or quantify his argument with any caveats.

His law is a Law in the Mosaic sense : laid down on tablets as imperative commands.

Moses' tablet laws are different from both changeable laws of humanity in the court of law and in the court of science.

Legislatures bring criminal and civil laws in and out of existence daily.

Science Laws once judged fundamental, like the First Law of Thermodynamics which forms the intellectual underpinning (such as it is) beneath Glover's thin reed of theory, can and were demoted to mere 'derived laws'  , once the truly fundamental nature of the Second Law of Thermodynamics became apparent.

The Theology of Peter XXXXXIII

But Glover's Law that humanity never could, never can and never will be able to change the climate has a much more eternal ring to it.

Humanity may be the most powerful species on this rock, third from the Sun, but God in his wisdom has apparently not granted us the hubristic power to destroy the Earth.

As a Christian , don't I daily wish that it be so !

But I see no evidence that our species can't destroy our own nest and that, in fact, it is happily doing so, as I write.

Nor do I see any hand-waving and finger-pointing from Peter as to just what other species, then, caused the Ice Ages .

Perhaps it was the Lilies of the Field, who despite weaving and spinning not, are apparently a dab hand at hexing the weather patterns big time......

"Member" of HOUSE OF LORDS ensnared in claim that global warming is a JEWISH conspiracy

Viscount Monckton, fond of announcing that he is a member of the House of Lords and winner of the Nobel Prize, now finds himself embroiled in a growing scandal surrounding The Galileo Movement , the well known climate changer denier group that says global warming is a JEWISH conspiracy.

Malcolm Roberts, the managing director of the group recently told Ben Cubby of Australia's biggest daily, the Sydney Morning Herald, that climate change science has been "captured" by some of the world's major "banking families" who form a "tightly-knit cabal".

These "dog whistle" phrases are well known for being coded references to the old faked book, The Protocols of the Elders of  Zion, a text that claims Jewish bankers are conspiring to take over the world and much used by Hitler to justify the Holocaust.


The morality of the  Cliveden Set re-visited : silently assent - or not - to rising tide of anti-semitism in the world of deniers


The Viscount Monckton, a member of the Galileo Movement's board of scientific advisors , now faces a moral dilemma : face a bruising public clash with his fellow deniers over this racial slur ---- or silently assent to it, to keep the deeply fractured denier movement united a short time longer .......