Friday, March 25, 2016

Dawson's nano-complexity vs Modernity's nano-simplicity

What truly makes one a Post-modernist and not a modernist is a strong acceptance that nanotechnology-sized objects (alive or not) can be extraordinarily complex, despite their very small size in relationship to the largest modern human civilizations.

As in 'sometimes able to do things that objects the size of humans (a billion times bigger) just can not do'.

Modernists, by contrast, felt that large objects just had to be extraordinarily complex and that all smaller objects in the hierarchy of size, be they small Australian Bushman tribes or atoms, just had to be simple.

Simple and thus easy to understand fully, rearrange totally and rigidly control.

Now today's nanotechnology, by definition, is the study of the different behavior exhibited in objects of a size where at least one dimension is 100 nanometres or less.

A nanometre is one billionth of a metre, with, for example, the DNA molecule being at about 2 namometres in width.

Nano-sized objects and nanotechnology matter because while quantum forces affect all size of objects, they don't become dominant until objects get down to that 100 nanometre range in size.

The smallest species of bacteria, when shrunken by starvation, are about that size in width and depth and so are strongly affected by quantum forces.

One can say truthfully, as I often do, that all of Dr Henry Dawson's pioneering work on bacteria between 1925 to 1945 involved the study of 'microbial intelligence' but that is still rather feeble a way to describe the uncomfortable force of his research upon the mind of Modernity Man.

For his research was really the study of microbial nano-complexity cum intelligence.

For if an object only a billionth the size of modern civilized man could display that much intelligence as Dawson's research revealed (HGT, Quorum Sensing, Molecular Mimicry, Biofilm communities,Penicillium-produced Penicillin), what did that say about the intelligence levels of much larger humans , even if they weren't European, male, middle class, Protestant, educated and living in the biggest civilized nations ?

Modernists shuttered to think ...

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