True Left

Our enemies are at it again:

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2021/06/15/the-silencing-of-science-how-block-lives-matter/

The periodic table is astonishing partly because it manages to capture so much with so little. If I look around me at the moment, I see a huge variety of things, from sea-shells to books, from memory-sticks to egret feathers. But everything I see is made from just three things: protons, neutrons and electrons. At the conscious level, there’s endless variety. At the sub-atomic level, there’s endless repetition. If the protons in the egret feathers were swapped with the same number of protons in the books, it would be impossible to detect any change. Ditto for the neutrons and electrons, and ditto for any other pair of material objects, no matter how superficially different. The periodic table is a kind of cookbook for matter, listing the recipes used by Mother Nature to rustle up a lustrous weighty solid like silver or a poisonous swirling gas like chlorine from exactly the same ingredients.

But it wasn’t easy to uncover the unifying simplicity of the periodic table. It’s not just a cookbook: it’s a monument to human intelligence, ingenuity, obsession and effort. Or rather, it’s a monument to those things as displayed by White males. Take a survey of the periodic table like Jack Challoner’s excellent The Elements: The Ultimate Guide to the Building Blocks of Our Universe (2012). Reading about the blocks, you won’t come across any Blacks. Instead, the names of stale pale males occur on almost every page, beginning with the Frenchman Antoine Lavoisier (1743–94), the Englishman John Dalton (1766–1844) and the Russian Dmitri Mendeleev (1834–1907).
...
The first two helped lay the foundations of modern chemistry and the last devised its recipe-book: the periodic table. Then stale pale males like the New Zealander Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) helped explain the patterns of the periodic table. Hundreds of other stale pale males, and a few stale pale females like the great Pole Marie Curie (1867–1934), helped to fill in the table by extracting and refining elements from substances as diverse as slag, seaweed and fresh air. And by detecting one in sunlight before it was found on earth. If the elements are the building-blocks of the universe, then you could say that the scientists who explained and uncovered them were leading block-lives. And block-lives matter in a way that mainstream politics and culture presently refuse to admit.

For example, here’s a curious thing: four of those elements – the obscure but sometimes important ytterbium, yttrium, terbium and erbium – were named from the small Swedish village of Ytterby. It wasn’t just that they were found in a quarry there: Swedes and other Scandinavians worked to extract them from reluctant minerals. And vanadium is named from a Norse goddess and holmium from the Swedish capital Stockholm. Scandinavian men have contributed more to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) than all Blacks who ever lived, despite being vastly outnumbered by Blacks. In other words, even as chemistry was unifying heaven and earth, it was disuniting humanity, because scientific talent and success haven’t been evenly distributed among the diverse groups of humanity.

White European males were necessary for the creation of modern science and might have been entirely sufficient.

Homework: how much shorter would the following topics be if the periodic table had never existed?

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-is-a-health-hazard/

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/if-western-civilization-does-not-die-soon/

Bonus question: would Israel exist today if the periodic table had never existed?