Science Fiction

I had an old friend, a very good research chemist, that spent the back end of his working life promoting an alternative molecular structure for DNA.

That is, he thought the double helix was either a hoax, or a conspiracy theory, or the result of cargo cult effect amongst scientists.

His evidence was that all the then available experimental data could be explained with more than one molecular structure.

This was partially true at the time, although it is not any more.

But he ignored the fact that the double helix has the sort of easy elegance that nature prefers.

Think of this as an minimum on an aesthetic ‘energy’ surface. What we perceive as aesthetic is in fact efficient; we ourselves are just a product of nature.

My friend was also a passionate believer in God.

So his unrelenting intellectual questioning of orthodoxy was left on the coat hook outside the lab on a Friday afternoon.

Which brings me to Ziggy. Not Stardust but Switkowski, an inexplicable former CEO of Telstra – the grounded kangaroo.

Ziggy, a former physicist, pops up here and there, promoting the most expensive form of electricity generation, nuclear energy. He is paid to do so by some lobby group.

Nuclear energy usually involves profits that are private, and end-of-life plant costs that are socialised at public expense. That is, yet another neoliberal wealth transfer mechanism.

Clean renewable energy is upon us; it has crossed the threshold to reality.

Ziggy, like my friend the chemist, just refuses to recognise when the quixotic crusade is lost.