Substantia. An International Journal of the History of Chemistry 4(2) Suppl.: 119-121, 2020 Firenze University Press www.fupress.com/substantia ISSN 2532-3997 (online) | DOI: 10.36253/Substantia-1146 Citation: B.W. Ninham (2020) Postscript. Substantia 4(2) Suppl.: 119-121. doi: 10.36253/Substantia-1146 Copyright: © 2020 B.W. Ninham. This is an open access, peer-reviewed article published by Firenze University Press (http://www.fupress.com/substantia) and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distri- bution, and reproduction in any medi- um, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All rel- evant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Competing Interests: The Author(s) declare(s) no conflict of interest. Postscript Barry W. Ninham Department of Applied Mathematics, Research School of Physical Sciences, The Austral- ian National University, Canberra, Australia E-mail: barry.ninham@anu.edu.au 1348 was the year of the great plague in Europe. One third of the popu- lation died. A project into causes commissioned by the King of France from the best Doctors of Medicine of the premier Sorbonne University found out why. The plague, they discovered, was due to a rare conjunction of the plan- ets Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. That all made sense. These planets were associated with 3 of the 4 humours of the body, the balance of which determined health. Astrology was God-given in those Geocentric times. To dispute such a proof was tanta- mount to impiety. Similar dogma attends the certainty of the science of each and every era. With time the theories of one generation evolve and are dismissed by the next as naïve, comparable with the book of Genesis. But not so credible! Witness quantum entanglement. This we know. Nonetheless current scientific theories are invariably defended as vigorously as the Bible is taken literally to be God’s revealed truth by some fundamentalist believers. And so it is today.1 Priests will be priests and professors will be professors. We have reported on a suite of simple new water technologies, in desal- ination, in sterilisation, in heavy metal pollution and harvesting, in cavita- tion, in a new class of environmentally friendly surfactants, on control of slimes and sludges from mining and floods. All are cheap, scalable. All are desperately needed. Why were these not developed before? The answer is that all depend on science2 that does NOT fit into the standard dogmas of physical, colloid and surface chemistry. These theo- ries we expect to be the enabling disciplines that underpin life sciences and chemical engineering sciences. In this, the physical sciences have signally failed. They have not done the job. The Greeks told us why. Of the four ele- ments, fire, water, earth and air, we forgot about the air. OUR THEORIES IGNORED DISSOLVED GAS IN WATER The exemplar is the electrolyte ion pair specific bubble-bubble fusion interaction inhibition phenomenon.3 It occurs around 0.17 M, precisely the 120 Barry W. Ninham ionic strength of the blood. It has been known for a cen- tury, widely known for 40 years. Perhaps the simplest imaginable experiment, it cannot be explained by classi- cal physical chemistry. The standard theories also omit specific ion (Hofmeister effects). All of our novel tech- nologies depend on these things. Concepts like pH and buffers, and pKa and osmotic pressure, activities, zeta potentials and membrane poten- tials, ion pumps, electrostatic forces, molecular recogni- tion, antibody-antigen and enzyme specificity are part of the language and intuition of biology and electrochem- istry. The interpretation of such measurements that depend on a now outmoded astrology, flawed theories that omit the role of dissolved gas. “Hydrophobic” inter- actions go away when dissolved gas is removed.4. Simi- larly the theories omit or treat incorrectly specific ion effects. Simulation suffers from the same defects. So what we think ought to be the relevant science in exploring new arenas is impotent. It is as handicapped as was that geocentric astrology of the good Doctors of Paris. Our new technologies rely on unexplained effects associated with bubbles and dissolved gas. And as we proceeded it became clearer that we could begin to see the outline of something very new. The very effective sterilisation of water, killing of viruses and other path- ogens by warm CO2 in a column above 0.17 M, physi- ological concentration suggested more.5,6 Nanobubbles of CO2, oxygen and nitrogen under these conditions will also be stable and produce free radicals that drive not just enzymatic reactions,7,8 but chemical reactiv- ity generally.9,10,11 And so it turns out. For example, the structure and function of the endothelial surface layer in physiology was revealed as a dynamic foam of CO2 nanobubbles.12 It complements the lung surfactant struc- ture and its delivery of oxygen and nitrogen via nano- bubbles.13 The ESL protects tissue from invasions by pathogens and acts to destroy COVID viruses.14 The self-assembly of gas nanobubbles as a function of salt in bulk solution4 and at surfaces mimics the same subtleties in self-assembly as surfactants15,16 and provides the energy that drives chemical reactions.7-11 The ubiquity of stable spontaneous nanobubbles that are sources of free radicals17 adds a whole new flexibility to the rigidity and limitations of present antibody-antigen and enzyme sub- strate interaction ideas in immunology and biochemistry. THESE THINGS IF ONLY DIMLY PERCEIVED, ARE NOW A LITTLE CLEARER There remains the hurdle of Dean Swift’s Confeder- acy of Dunces and their dialogue of the deaf. But if we ignore them, we can begin to see a scientific parallel for the Reverend Martin Luther King’s Promised Land. We remark finally that an excellent study of the effects of shaking and bubbles on inactivation of virues and bacteria as long ago as 1948.18 REFERENCES 1. B. W. Ninham, The Biological/Physical Sciences Divide and the Age of Unreason, Substantia, 2017, 1 (1) 7- 24. 2. B. W. Ninham, R. M. Pashley, P. Lo Nostro, Surface forces: Changing concepts and complexity with dis- solved gas, bubbles, salt and heat, Curr. Opin. Colloid Interface Sci., 2016, 27, 25-32. 3. V. S. J. Craig, B. W. Ninham, R. M. Pashley, The Effect of Electrolytes on Bubble Coalescence in Water, J. Phys. Chem. 1993, 97 (39), 10192-10197. 4. B. W. Ninham and P. Lo Nostro, Unexpected Prop- erties of Degassed Solutions, J. Phys. Chem., 2020, 124(36), 7872-7878. 5. A. G. Sanchis, R. M. Pashley, B. W. Ninham, Water ster- ilisation using different hot gases in a bubble column reactor, J. Environ. Chem. Eng., 2018, 6, 2651-2659. 6. A. G. Sanchis, R. M. Pashley, B. W. Ninham, Virus and bacteria inactivation by CO2 bubbles in solution, NPJ Clean Water, 2019, v 2 Number 1. 7. H.-K. Kim, E. Tuite, B. Nordén, B. W. Ninham, Co- ion dependence of DNA nuclease activity suggests hydrophobic cavitation as a potential source of acti- vation energy, Eur. Phy. J., 2001, 4, 411-417. 8. B. Feng, R. P. Sosa, A. K. F. Mårtensson, K. Jiang, A. Tong, K.D. Dorfman, M. Takahashi, P. Lincoln, C. J. Bustamante, F. Westerlund, B. Nordén, Hydro- phobic catalysis and a potential biological role of DNA unstacking induced by environment effects, P. National Acad. Sci. United States of America, 2019, 116, 17169–34343. 9. M. E. Karaman, B. W. Ninham, R. M. Pashley, Effects of dissolved gas on emulsions, emulsion polymerization, and surfactant aggregation, J. Phys. Chem., 1996, 100 (38), 15503-15507. 10. M. Alfridsson, B. W. Ninham, S. Wall, Role of co-ion specificity and dissolved atmospheric gas in colloid interaction, Langmuir, 2000, 16 (26), 10087-10091. 11. B. W. Ninham, K. Kurihara, O. I. Vinogradova, Hydrophobicity, Specific Ion Adsorption and Reactiv- ity, Colloids Surf., A: Physiochem. Eng. Aspects, 1997, 123-124, 7-12. 12. B. P. Reines, B. W. Ninham, Structure and function of the endothelial surface layer: unraveling the nano- 121Postscript architecture of biological surfaces, Quarterly Rev. Bio- phys., 2019, 52, 1–11. 13. M. Larsson, K. Larsson, S. Andersson, J. Kakhar, T. Nylander, B. W. Ninham, P. Wollmer, The alveolar surface structure: Transformation from a liposome- like dispersion into a tetragonal CLP bilayer phase, J. Dispersion Sci. Technol., 1999, 20 (1&2), 1-12. 14. B. P. Reines, B. W. Ninham, Pulmonary intravascu- lar coagulopathy in COVID-19 pneumonia, Lancet Rheumatol., 2020, 2(8), 458-459. 15. B. W. Ninham, K. Larsson, P. Lo Nostro, Two Sides of the Coin. Part 1. Lipid and surfactant self-assembly revisited, Colloids Surf.  B: Biointerfaces, 2017, 152, 326–338. 16. B. W. Ninham, K. Larsson, P. Lo Nostro, Two Sides of the Coin. Part 2. Colloid and Surface Science meets real Biointerfaces., Colloids Surf. B: Biointerfaces, 2107, 159, 394-404. 17. N. F. Bunkin, B. W. Ninham, P. S. Ignatiev, V. A. Kozlov, A. V. Shkirin and A. V. Starosvetskiy, Long- Lived Nanobubbles of dissolved Gas in Aqueous Solutions of Salts and Eurythocyte Suspensions, J. Biophotonics, 2011, 4 (3), 150–164. 18. M. H. Adams, Surface inactivation of bacterial viruses and of proteins, J. Gen. Physiol., 1948, 31(5), 417-431.