Untitled Document
The Message in a Bottle
April 20, 2009
I often receive messages from strangers who write "I like what you do." In fact, I do what I can. Many people send me links to information they would like to be broadcast, all more horrible, more alarming than the last. There are so many. I watch hours of videos, on this, on that. I see the Earth suffering from us.
It's easy to stumble upon human stupidity. I remember, it was many years ago. There was a small scented path running along the coast near Saint-Tropez. At the turn of this path, you suddenly came upon a large granite slab: the tomb of Emile Ollivier, with a Latin inscription meaning "the greatest hope and the greatest rest." The tomb was facing the sea. I don't know if it still exists. I wanted to find out who this man was. Nowadays, there is a window on the screens, which opens onto almost everything.
Click, and you will receive...
It's enough to indicate a place, a name, and you are swept into a whirlwind. You jump from link to link, from one subject to another, like a frog jumping from one lily pad to another. The Second Empire, the Ems dispatch, France declaring war on Prussia on July 18, 1870. Emile Ollivier who "accepts the war with a light heart."
We jump from facts to facts, from technical revolutions to technical revolutions. During Napoleon's time, cannons were made of bronze, which melted at a lower temperature than iron. They were loaded from the muzzle, with balls. The war of 1870 changed that. The recoil moved the carriage. It had to be re-aimed each time. What a waste of time! And then, suddenly, our brilliant military engineers invented the shell, propelled by the powder contained in its casing. This powder is then carefully calibrated. We gain in accuracy. It's more convenient: we reload from the rear, clack! We can now kill more effectively, with more precision.
I had forgotten Emile Ollivier. What does it matter.
Emile Ollivier, leaving the hairdresser
The Prussians defeated the French badly, who were unprepared. And this war, why make it? Why? It seems as absurd as the one in 1914-1918. Faster, though. There were citations, medals. Has anyone calculated the weight of metal turned into medals since the beginning of war?
New progress: the recoil is absorbed by a shock absorber system. At this address, you are explained everything. There is even a nice animation. Click to fire a shot. You load. Boom! The breech recedes. A piston compresses oil, which, passing through a hole, compresses nitrogen. The shell is fired, spins. To stabilize it: the invention of the rifled cannon.
Interior rifling of a cannon from the First World War. Pretty, isn't it?
Isn't science, technology, at the service of man, beautiful? With the recoil being absorbed, the carriage does not move. We can reload and fire again, like at a fair, like at a carnival. Man invents rapid fire. Read the poems composed in praise of the 75 mm cannon, right here with us.
http://canonde75.free.fr/freindetir.htm
The shell replaces the rustic ball, which killed by bouncing. Then, new progress: the rocket. The projectile can then be full of steel balls of one centimeter in diameter, which are scattered below the target, watering the point aimed at with a shower of shot. Note: the best burst heights, the most effective, are between ten and thirty meters. But, very quickly, we fill the shells with all sorts of things, like chocolate truffles. We create penetrating shells, gas shells, delayed-action shells, etc. Today we even have shells with shells ("submunitions").
I almost quoted a sentence from the generalissimo Foch in the book I wrote, which is about to be published. Then I explored the careers of all these people, like Foch, Joffre, Pétain, the first having left their names on street signs, under bronze statues. The third had messed up the campaign. It's fantastic to be able to send millions of men to die, having spent one's whole career in the engineering corps, the railways, or the general staff. And even to have those who retreat shot.
"We'll get them!"
And if it were only the past. But it continues everywhere. We kill men, we kill animals, we kill nature. We consider ourselves the center of the universe, the top of the evolutionary pyramid.
Look at this photo that my friend Xavier Laffont sent me. Look at it for a long time, pixel by pixel:
Each of these blurry spots is a galaxy, with a million planets bearing organized life
At these distances, we are no longer seeing stars, but galaxies, like our own, the Milky Way (by the way, it's because we are inside it that we see it in the sky as a path bearing its name. Well, we saw it, when the sky was clear enough for that).
In each galaxy: hundreds of billions of stars, and in each, very probably, a million solar systems similar to our own, around which orbit inhabited planets. You are looking at, with a single glance, a billion planets bearing intelligent life. A billion billion guys.
Xavier showed this photo to his professional and family circle. No reaction:
- The Mona Lisa shown to chimpanzees
Try showing this to an Islamist, to an orthodox Jew, to ... etc.
Don't you think we look silly with our beliefs, our battles, our medals, our silly weapons? Don't we look silly with our science, our religions, our various gods? We should invent something else. Another idea of the universe, would say de Gaulle. Yes, that's it, that's not bad. We need to form another idea of the Universe. Like in the animated film Ratatouille, when the food critic says:
- I would like a new, fresh idea.
So I wrote a book, like throwing a message in a bottle. It is about to be published. No, that's not the title, nor the cover design.
Novelties Guide (Index) Home Page
http://www.defense.gouv.fr/terre/decouverte/materiels/artillerie/ratac