Wolfgang Korsus Dipl.-Ing. NT , Astrophysiker
D-25451 Quckborn Klingenberg 40
Handy 491625680456
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Website : Wolfgang.Korsus.net
THE WORLD DOES WITH THE KNOWLEDGE WHAT YOU WANT
It is not so easy for me to find a suitable “on and on signature” for my upcoming lines…… I mean “heading or topic”! The closer I get to my own “years of life”, the more restless my thoughts to be written become —
I open my eyes and notice that the 19th century is hanging around in front of me. So I open my eyes and mind and start!
A climax is reached, it is the Enlightenment, it is striving towards its climax. Look, universities are being founded and they have the advantage that they don’t have to take tradition into account. This is not only a huge advantage, they can start from scratch !!!! because the path is heading towards “applied knowledge”. Now, all of a sudden, there are independent profiles of science. The individual sciences are dripping out of the extremely large vessel of philosophy and honing their instruments.
The geosciences (research into the planet Earth) und are emerging. From the idea of “actualism”, the principle of the uniformity of processes, models are developed about the origin and history of the Earth……but too few people look at them.
The industrialization process, which began in Great Britain, is now actually splashing onto the European mainland, so the question arises: where should the raw materials come from? How can I get the resources to promote the prosperity of my country, but above all my own? The thinking of the just-living society reached factor zero. Creating and grabbing was the order of the day.
So much for the geo-sciences, including mineralogy, crystallography, geology.
I move to Germany and realize that the Ruhr area is booming here, as in the case of the Rhine and Ruhr rivers. Actually, this was a flourishing landscape, but now it looked bleak every day. The red-yellow smoke from the blast furnaces darkened not only the sky but also the heavily populated cities there. Thick coal seams can be relatively easily mined underground. Steel is smelted, rolled and processed into machines and “weapons”. New transport routes on rivers and canals are driving “industrialization” forward. More and more is being produced in ever shorter periods of time. This also increases the range of goods on offer. If demand now increases, the entire economic process would accelerate. And so it did! As you can imagine, the steam locomotive literally became the workhorse and finally the first railroad was built in 1825. The development of electrodynamic machines followed in hot pursuit. This clearly shows the attempt to directly implement scientific knowledge into technology. Machines, so the saying goes, should always be up to date.
Truly a mindset that feeds on the great successes of mechanics.
Switch to celestial mechanics, because it even tries to calculate the movement of astronomical objects exactly, based on Newton’s laws of gravity.
Some planets were already known, and from “their” movements, others had to be inferred. There were just hidden “candidates” in motion, so the search began. The best example is the strange movements of Uranus, which of course led to the discovery of the planet Neptune. A principle emerged, which I call the triumph of analytical mechanics in predicting movements in the sky. Taking this further, I say that if we knew all the positions and velocities of the particles in the universe, we could possibly predict the entire future. It was actually that simple. This reminds me of a sentence that was described as the Laplacian demon of 1814.
‼ The idea that you could calculate the entire world.
Complete determinism. This is a crystal-clear belief in science that goes back to René Descartes. A way of thinking that can still be found in engineering today.
Many people find it difficult to imagine that something might work differently than they extrapolate in their calculations. Fortunately, skepticism about this uncritical belief in science and technology is now prevailing. Now, people not only ask about the opportunities, but also about the risks, both expected and unexpected.
So-called feedback loops are simulated and anticipated. …and scientists are wondering: What are the consequences of our research? Paying attention to this was not yet present in the 19th century. Completely unheard of. This cannot be assessed with the word “damage” alone, but it is a “human failure”. The basic principle was always
‼ further and faster ‼
Even Goethe, in his Italian Journey, wrote: “My God, 30 miles a day, you can’t travel at that pace!” With a little imagination, my imagination tells me: he probably had aching bones, because the stagecoaches of the time were quite bumpy.
That was towards the end of the 18th century. In the 19th century, everything became even faster because everything was mechanized. It is easy to see that in the Western world, the subject-object relationship is now recognized as highly decisive. On the one hand, the human being, and on the other, the “thing” that was developed on the basis of abstract principles. Dear readers, just close your eyes for a moment and you will realize that today is different. In museums, for example, we like to look at steam engines; yes, because we can still understand how they work.
In the 19th century, many people were still amazed and puzzled, but there were only a few who could understand the principle behind them. You have probably often heard the expression “magic stuff”. Not to mention electricity. I would like to ask: Do you know what electricity is?
I won’t answer with “yes”, on the contrary with “no”……No–these are not flowing electrons! There are charges moving back and forth, but, as I know for sure, nothing flows, even if that’s what electricity is called.
A description follows… terms were actually used for electrodynamics that were known from hydrodynamics and the physics of fluids. So that’s how one comes to understand what electricity actually is.
⁉ A short circuit. ⁉
Electricity is simply the premium form of energy, it can be used for many things, as an example of the ways to generate it. A “dynamo”, for example, a machine that could convert the kinetic energy of water into electrical energy: Werner von Siemens invented it in 1866. Another example: water or hot steam contains energy that can be converted into electricity and is therefore ideal for powering machines in a different location.
My final thought on this:
A remarkable development in the 19th century, it is something we are all familiar with today…….
⁑ Tempo ⁑ Tempo ⁑ Tempo
A new form of communication also developed with the study of electricity. Electrical engineering had awakened from its slumber!
It is the first to have wired, electric telegraphy and in 1876 there will be the telephone. Something very interesting then awakened in 1898, it practically became the “W-LAN” of the 19th century. I say, watch out, German physicist Ferdinand Braun invented radio telegraphy
All this works at the speed of light. Man is now entering the pure “new”……I say: the time has come…..Man has touched the speed that will prove to be the most suitable measure for the propagation of effects in the universe, corresponding to the very latest standard. This is not yet known at this point in time, but it dawns on us later.
The car is calling! : Mobility and transportation are revolutionized in 1885 by Carl Benz’s first practical automobile. The 19th century thus saw the technical and economic transition from agricultural to industrial production.
Take a look at this: mechanical and electrical forms of energy are used in the production and transportation of goods and services. It is heavy industry that becomes the focus of human activity in the industrial age. Heavy industry??? Now the “words” that man has used forever and still carries around with him today stand out, so he needs raw materials and a great deal of mineral resources. Iron and coal are ideal for steel production. Agriculture is developing in a similar way because it has to produce higher yields with fewer people, but many people are flirting with the idea of switching to industry?
‼ My opinion: ignorance is blind ‼
The fact was, people were needed as labor in industry, including in the mines underground and at the “friendly” blast furnaces. Industry lures small farmers to the city.
‼ An impoverished mass proletariat emerges. ‼
The existing working conditions are an unsurpassable disgrace. What was produced had to be profitable and sold as quickly as possible: because the conquest of the sales markets coincided with the reduction of prices.
The mechanical spinning and weaving looms also belong to the topic of faster and cheaper. They could produce faster and cheaper and thus the textiles became cheaper, and last but not least, they could displace other offers on the market. The so-called Manchester capitalism emerged, a particularly hard number. Industrialization went hand in hand with monopolization, the economic dictatorship.
In Great Britain, the large merchant and naval fleets complemented each other. In the industrialized countries, a bourgeoisie developed with a strong will to succeed, driven by the constant, diligent pursuit of earthly goods.
Thus, it is inevitable that the advancing industrialization subordinates scientific achievements to its interests. It is sad to note that the principles of nature are only of marginal interest, if at all. I find a contemporary saying again: ‼ Money rules the world 7 ‼ The goal and the meaning are money, to make a lot of money. There were a few idealists, they are still researching medical findings for the physical well-being of their fellow human beings. In the context of pharmacy, the development of drugs, chemistry is an interesting addition to medicine. The two go well together.
Here, too, knowledge of causalities, of cause-and-effect relationships, is noticeable. What do chemical substances do to me? To answer this question, it was necessary to break people down into their biochemical structure and find out what they are made of. Physicians were now slowly beginning to understand how this complex system, like an interlocking gear mechanism, makes a human being human. The questions arose:
- Which organs secrete what?
- What glandular secretions are there, what hormones?
The chemical messengers were discovered, thus the questions just asked were only possible. In the beginning, however, it was only inorganic chemistry, but a little later organic chemistry developed and thus the synthesis of urea was achieved for the first time. This and no other thing happened during the 19th century.
Doctors just realized that it is absolutely necessary to disinfect hands when going to a delivery or when having been in pathology. Hygiene finally arrived in hospitals. Washing hands also led to a significant reduction in childbed fever, i.e. death in childbed. More was also learned about the triggers of diseases, how cells and how organs reacted to them. It is worth mentioning that all of this gave medicine an incredible boost. …….a boost forward.
The dynamics of the 19th century, with its interlocking of science, technology and economy, led to great advances in medicine. As a result, the population grew, life expectancy increased – and with it, the interventions in nature. The 19th century is making itself felt in the increase of carbon dioxide.
I realize after long reflection, not for the people of that time, but for us today. When we look back and ask ourselves when natural cycles decoupled from the development of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, the strongest evidence is found around 1800. Because from then on, it goes really extremely steeply upwards, literally unnaturally. I say yes, because nature knows nothing of human misconduct, but it senses it……and reacts immediately.
Since the introduction of carbon dioxide through the burning of coal, that is, since the beginning of the 19th century, it has been clearly visible how the carbon dioxide content of our atmosphere is increasing faster than any natural process can explain it. Since then, it has been constantly rising, so on.
What really makes the 19th century stand out is the tremendous wave of scientific developments for “technology”. It really took off at the beginning of the 20th century.
- In 1903, the Wright brothers‘ first motorized airplane took flight.
- Cars, trains and ships were getting faster.
- Except for the North and South Pole, there is nothing bigger left to discover on the globe.
- In 1909, the first person reaches the North Pole, a lot of ice on water.
- Two men with their teams compete for the South Pole.
- The Norwegian Roald Amundsen is the first to reach the South Pole in December 1911.
- Robert Falcon Scott arrived a month later.
But today there is a large research station at the geographic South Pole, and it is called the Amundsen-Scott Station. Isn’t that incredible? If you travel to the South Pole today, you should do so during the summer months in the southern hemisphere, because a four-star hotel awaits its guests “down there”.
We are approaching the beginning of the 20th century, which is full of new inventions. Then suddenly on June 28, 1914. An event that was probably not planned, with terrible consequences. In Sarajevo, the Austrian heir to the throne is shot. What follows is the result of human brain hurling…… because a month later Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia. (A crazy decision, but typical of humans.) The First World War begins……I suspect everyone wanted to join in, play war….great game!!!
In Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, this day is considered the great caesura. I call it: the greatest stupidity. As was to be expected, the old world collapsed and a whole new world began.
At the end of the classical modern age, steam engines were already in operation, communication had begun, the first artificial light sources were shining, and electricity was flowing. The world had already been massively changed, and now a merciless war was waged for four years. Science and technology were of course subordinated to military goals. The electric motor had existed for several years before the gasoline engine, but the latter was much better suited for warfare, and so today we all drive around in smelly combustion engines.
There is also something to be said about new power plants:
The first power plant to use solar radiation was already developed……at least in theory……in the first ten years of the 20th century. Hold on tight, it should take many decades before someone comes up with the idea of tapping solar radiation for electricity production. Unfortunately, the First World War destroyed many developments, but it was also a battlefield for new technologies. The weapon technology used at the time was high-tech for its time. Heraclitus was right when he said in his time:
“War is often the father of all things.”
The military has always been one of the biggest financial backers of basic research and technological development in science, and it will remain so. In addition to economization, the world is also becoming militarized.
“Militarization, colonization, globalization.”
The whole thing only works because physics, chemistry, biology, and the geosciences all go along with it. Causalities are offered, cause-and-effect findings are received. So this almost complete knowledge comes into the world, and as already said: power does what it wants with it. And what does it want?
……Some want MONEY, others want CONTROL and POWER.
The end of darkness (the developments of “time”)
On the western horizon, a faint red stripe appears, the sun has set. Then, for a few minutes, the blue hour follows:
“As it has always been, the day goes and the night comes, but it is bright as the bright day.”
An old advertising slogan, oh, an old advertising slogan of one of the major lighting manufacturers on the planet, hit the bull’s eye of the night and now “Let there be light and there was light”. That’s 24 hours of all-round irradiation.
Since 1882, the first electric street lamps have been lighting the way to the future?
Now they are diligently continuing… Edison had applied for a patent for the light bulb two years earlier. The night was literally attacked by “self-generated” light, and attempts were made to wrest the insecurity of the night with the horror, the eerie – the darkness. The way was lit for progress… by artificial light. What does the “universe” have to say about all this?
Yes, the following: the view from space, partially on the northern hemisphere at night, shows what the end of darkness looks like today, because in a constantly denser and brighter web of mainly artificial light sources, the impenetrable cloth of night becomes a hole-riddled rag. A brief example: between Munich and Hamburg, from New York to Naples, between Tokyo and Singapore, from London to Gibraltar, there is a captivating, dazzling rainbow of colors! sparkling tangle of islands of light and lines of light. I call this “the control centers and lifelines of our civilization.”
This includes metropolises and cities, streets and traffic routes.
Man appears as a “maker” because he has turned night into day. Simply put, “the Anthropocene shines”. But what advantage has no disadvantage? We live in one of these earthly islands of light that points to the night sky and shows the dark side of our own light. If you look up now, you get the feeling that stars have seemingly fallen from the sky. The devout might say: God has moved them ⁉
And so it can be seen that during the day the sun outshines the planet, at night the artificial light sources in the Anthropocene steal the twinkling of the stars in the night sky.
What does the average person see with the naked eye in complete darkness and an unobstructed horizon in the night sky? Yes, there are about 3,000 stars visible. Let’s go to a big city like London, where the number of stars visible to the naked eye in the night sky can be counted on two hands. So I say “unbelievable, because it is far more than half of the people in Europe who can no longer see the glowing band of the Milky Way in the sky. Another grievance: some constellations in the sky have been erased, such as the Little Bear, the Great Bear, Capricornus, Aries or Leo, and others have disappeared, such as Serpens, Cygnus or Aquila. The sky has lost its shine. It is mainly neon signs, car headlights and street lamps that light the way home for people, but, as I say, obscure the view of their “real origin” in the stars. Please excuse me for speaking so delightfully of the stars, but we forget that we are “star children”.
I check my synapses and they send me to the hippocampus. (cerebral cortex) There I find the following…… Even the ancient Egyptians would hardly have built pyramids without looking at the stars, the monoliths of Stonehenge would not be standing where they still stand today, the ancient Greeks would hardly have become philosophers, the priests of the Maya would not have been able to calculate calendars, Magellan and others would not have sailed around the world, Columbus would not have discovered America. We would almost certainly still believe that the Earth is flat and the Nebra Sky Disk would never have been found.
If you look “seriously” at the starry sky, many people will silently say, “This is not only beautiful, but has been lighting the way through space and time for (a few) since the beginning of mankind, some say ‘touches us in the soul’, it awakens notions of the wonders and infinity of the universe.”
I am about to leave my lane, so back to earth.
The topic of light is considered daily in new places on earth and in human living spaces and shows the senseless waste of energy… and thus “light”.
So, we’ll stick with light and, by the way, what a Shanghai resident might think is a dark night is actually a never-ending twilight that is 800 times brighter than a really dark night.
But the amount of light is much higher on nights when extremely dense clouds reflect the light. Young people in particular often rave about the way we turn night into day, increasingly flooding our cities as centers of technology and culture with light. For the benefit of humanity, this is no longer well received by everyone. A few people have seen the light, because a form of enlightenment can also look different! Let’s take a look at the city of a thousand lights, Paris, where they are thinking about drastically reducing the amount of light between one o’clock at night and seven o’clock in the morning. Now I can hear many of you saying: “Less light, more romance”.
Another example…….The old Fugger city of Augsburg is not only planning commercially, i.e. economically, but also ecologically: here they are working on needs-based street lighting with computer-controlled LED lamps. These lantern lights are to be adapted to the rhythm of traffic, and the light in streets that are not used much is to be dimmed as much as possible, but will react to movement and then switch up. … interesting!!!
Astronomers have also “already” commented on the topic (light and light pollution) in the USA through the IDA, the International Dark-Sky Association, since 1988.
The aim of the association founded by astronomers is to minimize light pollution by increasing the use of lighting with low “sky-friendly” radiation. Professional astronomers have long since fled to the most remote regions of the earth or straight into space, because the largest and most powerful earth-bound observatories today are located in the Atacama Desert in Chile, on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, in Arizona or on the Canary Islands.
A little story on this topic: in the middle of Munich, the Fraunhofer Refractor, built in 1835, was the best telescope in the world for four years with its objective lens diameter of “29.5 cm” and the quality of its optics. You can imagine that today the refractor is blind, but not because of the old lenses, but because of the “light-polluted sky”.
Plants, animals, humans, in other words, all of nature, have developed over millions of years of evolutionary history in the natural rhythm of darkness and light, dictated by the rotation of the earth on its own axis. Without stars, there would be no earth, and thus no life. Last but not least, without looking at the stars, there would be no “civilization”. I turn to humans and animals: how do they react to the profound and, compared to the history of evolution, sudden change that the end of darkness has brought with it?
At the moment, there is a kind of continuous exposure, but what are the consequences for our body, our “soul”? Next question: what happens to a civilization that is just beginning to explore the universe, but is increasingly depriving itself of the opportunity to see and admire this universe with its own eyes? Of course, many Earth representatives might say that it’s not all that bad, apart from the billions of kilowatt hours that radiate into space every day, and the billions of insects that die night after night in artificial light, never to flap their wings again. Not to mention the birds that change their breeding behavior and migratory routes?
There is no hiding or denying the fact that light pollution is a reality on such a massive scale because it is a result of human activity on the planet. Get rid of the ever-increasing sources of light, because if we didn’t have electric light sources, the problem caused by humans would not exist either.
I take the electric light sources and may say without offending them, we have them because over centuries we have not only slightly changed the planet with science and technology, but too often harmed it. This has changed it quite a bit and even partially disfigured it. On the subject of light pollution, it is actually a sign of globalization. It is a real, global phenomenon that now exists, which means that areas of the earth that would normally be dark are suddenly light. This flood of light is also a sign that a certain species on this planet is decoupling itself as much as possible from nature and making itself independent.Ngh