I have a lot of
time for practical scientists and applied scientists. I think that
Luca Turin is one of the very finest minds of the last few years. He
has peers in his chosen field, and some of them are women, and you
may be very surprised to learn what things these people discovered,
invented, and often also developed into commercial success-stories
and placed into common use in all of our daily lives.
Industrial chemist Luca Turin |
You
know, people talk 'billionaire' a lot in places like Forbes and on
Bloomberg television, but seldom do they ever these days expose the
true billionaire of practical and applied science that is not
directly linked to just
electronics and computing. Who knows, for instance about the certain
lady who invented the lemon scent we all assume (incorrectly) is
actually from some kind of extract or synthesis of real lemons
and that we find in basically all of the household bleach, washing
detergent, room fragrance, and even lemonade drinks and packet food
products? She gets a royalty from every single product sold that uses
her patented chemical and believe me, she is really a billionaire and
now owns and lives on an island in the Mediterranean that has a
fairly meaningfully-sized industrial chemical research laboratory and
research facility on it. She is not listed on any so-called 'list of
billionaires' or 'richest people,' but she certainly is that.
Luca
Turin has been reported in leading journals as having recently made
several new (he has
made some previously!) breakthroughs to do with a more complete
understanding of the neuro-physiology and also neuro-chemistry of how
we sense things with our nose and tongue.
Turin is, apart
from being a very clear thinker, an excellent writer and speaker and
presenter of complex ideas, but behind him stand some Russian
research scientists that he works with, as well as some of those
women scientists of whom I spoke about earlier. To cut a long story
short, the Russians visually are a rather dishevelled looking lot and
Turin is as stylish as the city whose name he shares.
The Pope of global wine-tasting, Robert Parker |
Far be
it from me to say that someone of the public stature of Robert Parker
is a charlatan, but ordinary common sense ought to suggest to one's
mind that nobody can 'smell roasting violet petals' from out of the
chemistry of a red wine, for one thing simply because there is no
odoriferant molecule developed by the wine that will create that
smell compound! Either people are halucinating, or there is something
indeed very chemically mysterious about red wine! But for someone
like Parker to continuously say that wines have this or that bizarre
non-wine scent or
essence or flavour – when no such thing is scientifically possible
– is grounds for me to look sideways at him, and everyone like him.
Okay, call me an atheist of wine tasting and lump me in the arrogant,
egocentric, and opinionated wonderland of people like Richard Dawkins
when it comes to smashing people's cherished sillinesses that they
insist on clinging onto, even in the face of facts that utterly
disprove what they are saying. Oh I know it's oh so desireable to be
able to opine intelligently about what bouquet the famous and
expensive red wine you bought is giving off, but brothers, it just
aint so!
No no
no. Something else entirely
is going on. Oh yes yes, you are sensing
something – but it's
not what you think it is.
Here's
the rub: if you do what Luca Turin says, or what one of his Russian
researchers says, about how you
should go about tasting wine – suddenly, what you will experience
is enhanced by a factor you would not have dreamed of beforehand. But
if you do what Parker tells you, you will go away (albeit possibly
not telling anyone else so) that alas, if the Emperor had no clothes
you dared not suggest it be so, so esteemed is Parker and his ilk.
But they are wrong.
Misguided, at best and entirely wrong anyway.
That a
multi-billion dollar industry has grown up around the mythology of
wine-tasting, is positive proof of the total lunatic behaviour of
Mankind whenever its rational good sense is able to be distracted by
brain chemistry rewards to do with material sensations.
Form and substance
are of course not always simple or straightforward antitheses.
Out Front of the Royal Horseguards Hotel! Horse and guardsman look great, but it's an hotel for gawdsake. |
Look at this
picture. The horse and the guardsman look fantastic. But where is the
substance? Is the building behind them just a modern era hotel? And
if that building once housed both MI5 and MI6, do the current era
vestigial and corporate memory custodians have secret private
pretensions they whisper to themselves about, behind cupped hands
over sly mouths...
You
may as well say The Dark Ages
of Inquisition and public damnation and political and financial
rapine are the spirits
that rule the air.
Luca
Turin is a rarity; he both looks stylish and is someone
of great intellectual substance too.
There are a lot of
people today and a lot of groups and let's say 'entities' both
corporate and governmental, that can wear the billion-dollar
marketing and hype label. A lot of things have their wires crossed in
the world today. There are billion-dollar machineries of government
and private interests crossing over each other's traces and getting
themselves and a lot of other people twisted up in the entangling
lines.
The
big fish are still in the seas, though. I would fish away from the
big boats, and cast your lines far
away from theirs... There are too many problems where the bigwigs are; too many problems among themselves, too many blow-in pretenders who actually come close to being bigwigs anyway because of the way modern finance behaves, too many bigwigs who are only big any longer in outward form with little or no substance beneath. And far too many cops and ex-cops who work for private money but who still have access and sway with government agencies despite protestation by politicians that it isn't so. It is so. Half the world's current armed conflicts are to do with programs that governments have lost control of. And you can't trust that lawyers and judges will resolve it all; things get 'stopped' well before revelations can get before an independent authority.
Stay well away. It is bound to get nasty now. I would say. Go fishing maybe. In some distant and despised stream.