Janus Manhattan's Children

Dear old janus-headed Manhattan : giving us both lifesaving 'primitive' fungal slimes AND deadly 'advanced' atomic bombs. No wonder confused boomers were the most healthy and frightened kids ever.

Pages

Showing posts with label synthetic science. Show all posts

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Conflicting Images of Fifties Science - as recalled by a child

As a little kid back then, I have only two memories of Fifties Science --- two images only.

About Me

Michael Marshall: Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...

View my complete profile