When Worlds of Creation and Destruction Collide
By MALCOLM W. BROWNE
New York Times 5v99
His diary entry for one day in 1898 read: "Fired cannon, pop and firecrackers all
day. in evening had five sky rockets, three Roman candles, one large pinwheel
and a Japanese match which I made."
The words were not those of a vengeful delinquent planning a schoolyard
massacre; they were written by a 15-year-old Robert Hutchings Goddard, whose
later inventions - liquid rocket fuel, multistage vehicles and rocket gyrostabilizers,
among them - opened the way to space travel.
One wonders what would have befallen space science if Goddard and a host of
youthful experimenters had been denied access to the very things legislators
and others these days are seeking to ban. The fact is, many young people have
been drawn to careers in science and engineering partly by spectacular chemical
reactions, especially explosions.
Recent school killings have prompted calls for banning almost every potential
weapon from flint knives to nuclear bombs. (Somehow the automobile is never
included.) But to ban all dangerous substances would be a tall order.
There has never been any lack of explosive materials, and explosives have
proliferated at a tremendous rate over the years. A dictionary of explosives in
1900 contained 1,091 entries, whereas the current tally of "satisfactory"
explosives (according to an expert at Los Alamos National Laboratory) is about
20,000.
There are those who would favor outlawing all 20,000 of them if it meant keeping
children safe. But it's worth remembering that at least some explosives are vital
to modern civilization; explosives are needed for mining, building roads, digging
foundations, welding pipelines and railroad tracks, actuating automobile air bags,
sending rockets to Mars and simulating conditions deep within the atmospheres
of giant planets, among countless other thmigs.
During my own childhood in the 1930's and 1940's, dangerous chemicals
including explosives and poisons were easy to come by, and yet I cannot
remember a single incident comparable to the disaster in Littleton, Colo., and
other recent killings.
Not that kids didn't experiment and play dangerous tricks.
Firearms and explosives (including fireworks) invite mischief, but in the past it
was usually of a fairly harmless kind. Farm children of a more relaxed generation
than the present one used to annoy dairymen by detonating sticks of dynamite
under empty 20-gallon milk cans, sending the cans sailing into the sky. College
students delighted in flushing lighted firecrackers down dormitory toilets, causing
fountains to erupt from toilets on lower floors. Mild but startling explosions
caused by ammonia-moistened iodine crystals scattered around lab benches
enlivened many a chemistry class.
Recreational explosions are not necessarily dangerous. Since 1912, the
Conestoga Company of Bethlehem, Pa., has been making and selling acetylene
cannons that delight children with satisfying bangs free of any risk of injury.
But fireworks containing explosive or propellant charges are not harmless; every
year children lose fingers or eyes by holding lighted firecrackers or rockets.
Moreover, fireworks can be put to criminal purposes. Most of the pipe bombs that
have figured in recent terror incidents have been filled with aluminum powder
and oxidizers extracted from ordinary firecrackers.
Naturally, people are eager to prevent massacres. The response has been an
effort to prevent the trafficking in explosives and guns, and to somehow
reprogram children with violent proclivities.
Snuffing out the fire of genius for fear of a few psychopaths.
Fireworks are banned (or limited to relatively innocuous pyrotechnic products like
sparklers) in 16 states, and each year sees new legislation to prevent
substances like ammonium nitrate fertilizer from falling into felonious hands. The
sale of old-fashioned black powder, the propellant needed for firing antique
weapons, has been sharply curtailed because it has been used in homemade
bombs.
As the trend continues, government agencies have also constrained the sale of
chemicals so tightly that it is difficult or impossible for most young students to
buy them.
Until 1957, when it moved to New Jersey to provide chemicals and apparatus
exclusively to manufacturers, the Ace Scientific Supply Company on 11h Street,
Manhattan, used to count many neighborhood high school students among its
customers. A thicket of regulations eventually blocked such sales, but the com-
pany's president, Robert L. Lowenstein, remembered his student customers
fondly.
"Many of those young customers made important contributions to science and
are now research directors," Mr. Lowenstein said. "I wish something could be
done to make chemicals and apparatus more available to students, but I can't
see anyway."
Similar regrets are often expressed by older teachers.
Dr. David Weitzman, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Bath,
England, wrote in the New Scientist nearly two decades ago that although he
had accepted the chairmanship of his university's safety panel, the reduction of
laboratory risks had had its down side.
"In the laboratories, we forbid this, don't allow that, and prevent the other ... and
we're all safer and less at risk of harm and hazard. Most commendable," he
wrote. "But have we, at the same time, removed some of the fun and excitement
of laboratory life, the thrill of experimenting with the unknown?"
Dr. Weitzman described some of the risky experiments and procedures once
common in student laboratories, including a very hazardous method for cleaning
flasks by filling them with an explosive mixture of nitric acid and alcohol.
"These encounters conveyed a sense of intimacy with one's chemical materials,"
he wrote. "One saw reagents and reactions at their most angry and violent and,
having done so, one learnt to tame them and discipline them to do one's own
bidding."
He concluded that "perhaps just a little bit of danger might bring a lot more fun
and lead to more insight and understanding."
Banning several thousand chemicals as well as timers, pipes, epoxy glue and
other items that can be combined as bombs would be one approach to denying
bombs to potential criminals. Another would be the reprogramming of
violence-prone people to eliminate aggressive impulses; it might be done with
psychotherapy, chemical castration or brain surgery.
By selective breeding or gene manipulation, traits associated with aggressive
behavior and the creation of sociopaths might be reduced throughout the world,
spawning the most well-behaved human race the world has ever seen. A similar
result has been achieved in Siberia, where fur breeders have invented a com-
pletely docile breed of silver fox -one that licks its keepers' faces while being
prepared for slaughter.
But must we really squelch all the things that can contribute to anti-social
behavior to protect ourselves from a handful of sociopaths?
Could an aggression-free race produce a Jefferson or Beethoven or Einstein? As
we race to eliminate aggressors and their weapons, should we not take care to
avoid throwing out the baby with the bath water?hiperion42 - 29-9-2010 at 01:58
Well thank you for sharing this article.
Obviously mister Malcom W. Browne's mind is fully
institutionalised.
Quote:
By selective breeding or gene manipulation, traits associated with aggressive
behavior and the creation of sociopaths might be reduced throughout the world,
spawning the most well-behaved human race the world has ever seen.
Quote:
Another would be the reprogramming of
violence-prone people to eliminate aggressive impulses; it might be done with
psychotherapy, chemical castration or brain surgery.
Seeing mainstream media openly nourishing false and inverted truths.
In a time when humanity's derailment is becoming more and more apparent
he mentions the total purging of any deviant human behavioural reaction as a possible viable option.
Unbelievable.
[Edited on 29-9-2010 by hiperion42]The WiZard is In - 29-9-2010 at 12:50
Seeing mainstream media openly nourishing false and inverted truths.
In a time when humanity's derailment is becoming more and more apparent
he mentions the total purging of any deviant human behavioural reaction as a possible viable option.
Unbelievable.
------
… All societies believe nonsense. It spreads irresistibly through
conformity, and changes slowly through fashion. As in cell
replication, any given society sooner or later hits on a chunk of
lethal nonsense, and collapses. In a world of many independent
societies, this does not matter. But once communications
technology has formed a single global society, the time must come
when everyone believes the same lethal nonsense simultaneously.
Civilization then collapses globally, leaving no seed from which it
could raise again.
