<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div><div><div><b>What is Physics? The Biological Aspects of the "Non-Living" Universe.<br></b><b><br></b><br><div>Dear Plamen,<br><br></div>Perhaps the time is ripe for a Biologist / Life scientist to write a short book titled <b>"What is Physics?"<br><br></b></div>A good model on how to approach this is know to all (and available here: <a href="http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf" target="_blank">http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf</a>).<br><br></div>First published in 1944 (based on lectures in 1943; and ten years before the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA!) - the are several sections here which are invaluable to remind that new knowledge can surprise us in strange ways. For instance, the section titled: <b>Maximum size of a gene!</b><br></div><br></div>Based on what we know today it is evident that human knowledge has not stayed at that level expressed in 1944!<br><br></div><div>Biology is reminding us constantly to reach for rules at the sub-Planckian scales (both space and time beyond the Planck scale)<br><br>To a Biologist, sentiments conveyed in Wojciech Zurek's Letter to Nature (2001) "Sub-Planck structure in phase space and its relevance for quantum decoherence." seems so much like what happens in the inside of cells but at a meso-macro level!<br><br></div><div>Reminds one of some of the early exchanges and thoughts that Brian (Josephson) has rehearsed with some of us and also alluded to in <b>Conrad, Home & Josephson (1988)</b> and implications for appreciating
the subtle (beyond the physically 'tiny') and beyond and the<b> "<font face="Verdana">common substratum</font>"<br><br>That
the common substratum, the subtle and the human mind (currently
externalised), has a structure, and a common structure, the same internal structure
"and neither on its own contains the full story" needs appreciating better.<br><br></b>Life and biology offer the best probes for the subtle and beyond.<br></div><div><br></div><br><br><br><br></div><div>Thanks to Guy (Hoelzer) for mentioning Deacon. I copy below two excerpts to add to my comments:<br></div><br><div><b>"The Sacred Emergence of Nature"</b> (Ursula Goodenough, Washington University in St Louis, <a href="mailto:goodenough@wustl.edu" target="_blank">goodenough@wustl.edu</a> & Terrence W. Deacon; 2008)<br><br><u>PDF available at:</u> <br><br><a href="http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1066&context=bio_facpubs" target="_blank">http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1066&context=bio_facpubs</a><br><br></div>From the paper:<br><br><div style="font-size:28.2273px;font-family:serif">Emergence as a General Concept</div><div style="font-size:13.2837px;font-family:serif">...............................................................................................................................</div><div style="font-size:13.2837px;font-family:serif"><br></div><div style="font-size:17.4345px;font-family:serif">Emergent properties arise as the consequence of relationships between entities.<br><br></div>Robert
Laughlin (2005) intriguingly suggests that emergent properties arise
even at the level of relationships between subatomic entities—indeed, he
suggests that the very ‘laws’ of nature may prove to be emergent—but
since we are not trained in discourse at this level, we will begin with
relationships between atoms.<br><br>Another excerpt:<br><br><div style="font-size:17.4345px;font-family:serif">As different species’ genomes have been sequenced, an initially surprising finding</div><div style="font-size:17.4345px;font-family:serif">has been that complex organisms don’t have all that many more genes than do simple</div><div style="font-size:17.4345px;font-family:serif">organisms. A unicellular alga, for example, has about 17,000 genes, and a human has</div><div style="font-size:17.4345px;font-family:serif">about 23,000 genes. Moreover, well over half of these genes encode ‘housekeeping</div><div style="font-size:17.4345px;font-family:serif">proteins’—actin, myosin, metabolic enzymes, and so on—that are present in both</div><div style="font-size:17.4345px;font-family:serif">kinds of organisms. What has happened during evolution, then, is not so much the</div><div style="font-size:17.4345px;font-family:serif">acquisition of new genes as changes in the patterns of expression of existing gene</div><div style="font-size:17.4345px;font-family:serif">families such that <span style="color:rgb(255,0,0)"><u>novel combinations of proteins appear in a given cell at a given</u></span></div><div style="font-size:17.4345px;font-family:serif"><span style="color:rgb(255,0,0)"><u>time, interact with one another, and generate novel emergent properties.</u></span></div><br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 8:09 AM, Dr. Plamen L. Simeonov <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:plamen.l.simeonov@gmail.com" target="_blank">plamen.l.simeonov@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div><div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">Dear Alex and FIS,</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">what I can only say as (now) qualified non-expert in QT is that points 1-13 embrace a period in scientific research of really great minds (I did not see Feynman”s name in the list, but he is certainly meant under “others") a little bit more than 100 years. Please excuse my doubts, but I simply cannot start believing that human knowledge will stay at that level for ever. Some day there will be certainly another revolution in physics and/or biology or even another discipline that could embrace the 13 domains as special cases. I cannot understand why (quantum) physicists are sometimes so egocentric like monks with their domain that they try to explain even the behaviour of viruses with quantum interactions. I apologise for hurting someone’s feelings. </div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">Plamen<br><div><br></div></div></font></span></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
<br><div class="gmail_quote"><span class="">On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 2:39 AM, Alex Hankey <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:alexhankey@gmail.com" target="_blank">alexhankey@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><div class="h5"><div dir="ltr"><span style="font-size:12.8px">RE: I am not sure that QT is the ultimate theory of all things, but I think</span><br style="font-size:12.8px"><span style="font-size:12.8px">the effort is worth doing it, since we hardly have anything else to step on</span><br style="font-size:12.8px"><span style="font-size:12.8px">now.</span><span style="font-size:12.8px">I invite all those interested in this endeavor to join hands!</span><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">ME: Speaking as a theoretical physicist with 45 years experience and deep interests in the foundations of physics and the origins of quantum theory, I should like to comment that to really understand quantum theory so as to see how to patch up its faults is not easy, and requires many years study in many different subfields. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">It requires deep knowledge and understanding of all of the following subfields; </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">1. The Copenhagen interpretation as fully expressed by Henry Stapp. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">2. John Von Neumann's formulation, together with its limitations. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">3. The Many Worlds (Princeton) interpretation as most recently promoted by Tegmark. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">4. Einstein's objections as expressed in the EPR paradox, and </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">5. David Bohm's program of hidden variables to support Einstein, and </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">6. Bell's Theorem to experimentally distinguish Bohr;s and Bohm's approaches.</span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">7. Aspect's experiments (and Clauser's preceding it) showing that Bohr was right. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">8. Bernard D'Espagnat's important contributions, especially the Theorem for which he received the Templeton prize - physical reality is not 'strongly objective' on either macroscopic or microscopic levels. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">9. All the debate initiated by Gell-Man and others on how wave-functions collapse. and what happens to quantum correlations that are generated. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">10. David Deutsch's theory of quantum information. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">11. Anton Zeilinger's use of quantum fluctuations for 'quantum teleportation'</span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">12. The quantum theory of open systems by ECG (George) Sudarshan and others, the inherent limitations of their approach and its possible resolution. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">13. The debates on the relationship between quantum theory and classical physics, the shortcomings of Bohr's Correspondence Principle and how to overcome them. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">I should hate to say that this is a field for specialists, because I truly believe that non-experts can often cut through the Gordian knot in the middle of a field, simply because they have not adopted the world view of the experts in following the debates for decades up to that point, and are therefore not indoctrinated with a paradigm that in fact needs updating - often not obvious to those in the field itself.</span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">But like most advanced scientific fields there is a lot to digest! </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">(And my own views are radical, and almost as violent as the</span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">victor's approach to the Gordian Knot itself!)</span></div><span><font color="#888888"><div><div><br></div>-- <br><div><div dir="ltr"><div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;border-collapse:collapse">Alex Hankey M.A. (Cantab.) PhD</span><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;border-collapse:collapse"> (M.I.T.)<br>Distinguished Professor of Yoga and Physical Science,<br>
SVYASA, Eknath Bhavan, 19 Gavipuram Circle<br>
Bangalore 560019, Karnataka, India <br>Mobile (Intn'l): <a href="tel:%2B44%207710%20534195" value="+447710534195" target="_blank">+44 7710 534195</a> </span><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;border-collapse:collapse"></span><div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;border-collapse:collapse">Mobile (India) +91 900 800 8789</span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;border-collapse:collapse"><div style="font-size:12.8px">____________________________________________________________</div><div style="font-size:12.8px"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif"><br></span></div><div style="font-size:12.8px"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif"><a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00796107/119/3" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)" target="_blank">2015 JPBMB Special Issue on Integral Biomathics: Life Sciences, Mathematics and Phenomenological Philosophy</a></span></div></span></div></div></div></div>
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