The Form, The Substance

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.