TAXONOMY- MON AMOUR!
( a declaration of intellectual love)
Note No 1: This paper is dedicated to Professor Francesco Piantelli.
These days I have tried to write a synthesis of his LENR ideas
and I have constantly discovered order and inner consistency
in his Opus. If this work is continued in the same spirit of the scientific method, a new, reliable Energy Source will be born plus other techno-blessings.
Note No.2: This writing was almost ready, months ago, but I postponed its publication because it has a controversial part – re Noah’s Ark But now I have decided to take the risk of a confrontation with literalists who believe in the reality of this
Logically improbable and zoologically impossible story..
OK, let’s start:
My young age intellectual pleasures were: to be informed and to understand what happens. These are also my old age intellectual pleasures. I still want to understand how the world works. A very important statement, is the following, actually my Septoe No 77:
“The world is simultaneously chaotic and ordered.”
This seems to be impossible for a natural “or-or” thinking but is perfectly true. You have to find the order and accept the presence
of chaos This is the role of Science.
But the magic substantive ORDER has already appeared and it is directly connected with the quintessential verb: to UNDERSTAND. I have understood long time ago that the first step of understanding a set of data, facts, ideas, whatever is to find some internal logic, some order , a common principle in them- to classify them. To build their taxonomy-is always a mixture of the natural and the artificial- created by the thinker.
Please allow me to insert here two relevant quotations:
A classification is a definition comprising a system of definitions. (Friedrich von Schlegel)
Science is the systematic classification of experience. (George Henry Lewes)
Most important- a good taxonomy demonstrates that you have made progress in thinking- you are beyond the humiliating primitive prelogical thinking: See:
My encounters with taxonomy are episodes of a great intellectual love story and even more. Some such encounters were of decisive importance for my thinking and even for my life.
The first encounter took place in the pharmacy of Uncle Leopold/. My parents were both working and they could not supervise me during the summer holidays so they have decided that I shall be an apprentice in this pharmacy. Leopold, a relative of my father was so famous and skilled that the communists have not taken away his pharmacy and drugstore- a real miracle for those times best described by the adjective idiotic.
The pharmacy’s specialty was medicinal plants and I have learned how to collect, select, wash, dry, package them, how to prepare teas and extracts and mixtures of them, according to strict rules. I have learnt soon how important and beautiful- a full of sense a recipe can Names like Achillea millefolium, Mentha piperita, Tussilago farfara became familiar but I also was informed
that Hyosciamin niger
From the names of the plants I have arrived to Carl Linne- the father of taxonomy, the scientist thinker who gave identity to the plants. Life is so interesting so rich, I believe in almost each new issue of the INFORMAVORE’s SUNDAY you can read about the discovery of new species. Here it is great discovery that would make Carl Linne very happy:.
Rare Discovery of Plant Genus:
And a fine paper _ I have received just now:
Biodiversity Key to Earth's Life-Support Functions in a Changing World: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110811084513.htm
Better than tons of eco-propaganda.
After Linne I have discovered the book of Alfred Brehm about the world of the animals with a similar taxonomy as that of the plants.
Great pleasure I was born with a love for order not so much for the external order – to place each thing at its place as for internal order that determines how do work different systems and the entire world.
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Intermezzo- if you believe in the reality of the story of Noah’s Ark
A fine piece of wisdom- if consider it metaphorically, but something contrary if you take it literally is this quote.
“Through perseverence the snail got on Noah’s Ark.” (Chasrles Haddon Spurgeon)
It is a well known fact that Noah’s Ark was discovered and will be discovered again on the a Ararat or on some other mountain in the area. I confess that this story is absolutely unbelievable for me, and Linne is the original cause of this dangerous and sinful skepticism.
. I will focus now on Spurgeon’s heroic snail.
The snail makes a lot of problems in this case; the animals came in pairs- male + female, he +she but snails are usually hermaphrodites (heshe and/or shehe) and their sexual acts can be considered in the same time double normal and double homosexual (sin! sin!). But the real problem is that there ,are some 40,000 species of land snails worldwide http://www.blurtit.com/q639615.html
and theologically/theoretically all of them had to be present on the Ark,in couples.- at a safe distance from the 1700 species of noisy, unmanageable dinosaurs.Just when I am writing this I get a paper about what were these dinos eating: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/science/12dinosaurs.html?_r=2&ref=science. Snails are eating mainly rotten plants but there also are gourmets/cannibals that eat other, obviously smaller, snails.
When did this army of snails arrived,- before or after the marsupials, penguins, the Kiwi bird and some another thousands of species that live only in New Guinea Madagascar
In case the snails were first they have received a better room
or cabin on the Ark. Probably the common, edible species
Helix campestris and Helix aspersa behaved with decent modesty
but I am not sure about the giant Achatina achatina,living in Ghana- up to 35 cm long and weighing above 1 kilogram, surely an arrogant bastard. Not speaking about his/her wife/husband- a very noisy, aggresive individual- so are they all.
As regarding the other passengers, they were a lot. Read this please, suppose 40% of these are good swimmers- but a lot remains.
I hope that old Noah was an expert zoologist and a great animal lover so he gathered plenty of food (not for strict survival only)
for these dear creatures. Between 560 million and 1 billion of humans were drowned at the Flood but they were all irrecuperable sinners
I have to confess that due to my brain structure I am unable even to take seriously this story and I am aware that this adds me to a blasphemous minority and will determine my post-mortem location. I don’t care, but surely I am more resistant to pain than to boredom.
I am deeply disappointed and sad that in this so-called 21st Century my grandchildren learn at school about Noah’s Ark
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Back to taxonomy. Without it no scientific thinking can exist, and it is necessary to think scientifically to grasp the essence of existence.
When you think scientifically as a rational being, the world will become very different for you.
An other taxonomy which has decisively influenced my life was tMendeleev’s periodic table of elements. It is both a taxonomy and a I-st class theeory (first class theory predicts, second class theory prohibits, third class theory explains)- it is painful that cold fusion has only theories from the last class, Piantelli’s LENR of transition metals theory is the first exception.)
Mendeleev’s understanding has produced a really bright vision. And has saved me in a critical occasion.
The periodic table of elements is an extraordinary performance in taxonomy. Using it and the electronic conformation of the elements we can understand their properties. I can become very enthusiastic reading papers like:
Why is mercury liquid?: http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1997-05/862179191.Ch.r.html or:
“Why gold and copper have an yellow/orange color and thus differ from all the other metals?
The story is about my admission exam at the Faculty iof Chemical Engineering back in 1954. It was the wild age of communism then, acute class fight. The children coming from poor families entered the University on shortcuts, children of bad social origin on the
opposite i.e. obstacled ways. I was a sinner with inherited sins an idea that I consider dreadful irrespective of its origin- ethnical, religious, political, or,as it was then, economical. Horribly injust.
Seemingly eternal, but forms and reasons change.
A new form of “numerus clausus”.
I had to get good marks, but unfortunately I made an error at the math exam. I was in great danger...the critical exam- chemistry.
I get a question about Chromium. I tell them its element No 24. atomic weight 52. How do you know? they ask. I tell them that I know the periodic table by heart. They laugh, don’t believe it and ask me about a lot of elements - including lantanides and actinides- and I answer well to all the questions- I knew then Mendeleev’s table at the “know-why” level. Great success- people not excessively intelligent but with good memory are appreciated and considered socially useful. I become kind of a star.
Thank you, Dmitri Ivanovich!. I also get a very high mark at the exam of Russian language, I like the language and my Mother has told many times that Dostoievsky was one of the greatest psychologists between the writers- he understood so well the human soul. At least its darkes parts.
So has saved and helped me my passion for taxonomy to become a chemical engineer.
By the way- at the beginning of this Century I have published a paper in which I try to re-define the “chemical element”:
It is a noble task of scientist to work out improved taxonomies.
And these successive taxonomies show you the evolution of a field or of a problem.
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