Posted on 01/28/2005 4:28:41 PM PST by metacognative
Y2K again.
I can't understand why some people have a narrow definition of mater. If it interacts with matter, it is matter. We may not know what it is or know how to talk about it yet, but if we can detect the interaction we can study its properties.
If we can't detect the interaction then we have nothing to study and not a whole lot to talk about.
Don't be so logical.....
The "C" types are not supposed to have that portion of DNA......
m=E/c2
or
E=mc2
Yeah.........
woodathunk
My feeling is that force fields have gotten good enough to get the overall protein behavior about right. You're obviously going to have to do some scaling - just as you don't try to solve the electronic wavefunction to do a protein, you solve it for a fragment and then fit it with a force field - so we'll fit proteins on a larger scale to some sort of potential in order to get at their interactions. People are starting to do this; they're fitting entire domains as single elements and modelling how they move relative to each other.
A lot of it is a question of whether you have confidence the fine-grained interactions will average out over a coarser grained model. So far, so good.
Could be, RightWhale.
Do you draw any distinction between a "parallel universe" and putative/hypothetical extra space or time dimensions (i.e., "above" or "beyond" the 3+1D of our little space-time bailiwick)?
Very well put, RobRoy! :^) Thanks!
That's mass. What is matter?
We still haven't come to a preliminary agreement on what 'matter' is. The way{s} we are using the term is most definitely neither cosmological nor philosophical.
Hi spunkets! I missed this earlier. Hope it's not too late to reply!
It may well be that the bird's sense of the acceleration is what triggers the ensuing flight. But we were asking whether the bird was in fact a purely material system (in contradistinction to a living system); and as such, wholly subject to the physical laws. It seems to me that, if it were, then we would be able exactly to plot its path, once it is on the wing.
How would you propose to do this?
I figure matter-energy is the ultimate complementarity (e.g., Lorenz transformable quanties) in the physical universe. That is neither a strictly cosmological, nor a philosophical observation. I gather it's simply the meaning of E = mc2....
Although I also recognize that not all particles have mass.... Can you suggest a cosmological reason for this? Seriously, I'm just wondering whether you have a view on this.
Thanks for writing, RW!
It's very, very complicated. We haven't yet spotted the carrier particle for mass--the Higgs boson. Not all matter is mass, in fact, any manifestation of anything would not be matter but would be material. Not all particles have mass, but momentum is a different thing. Photons have no mass, but carry momentum. Momentum is not inertia. Matter is what all that is made of. That is to include everything, electrons, gravity fields, string fields, fermions, bosons, whatever. Yes, a thought is material, something made of matter. You know matter, matrix, and mother are all the same word in different dialects.
Can we predict the path of a tornado? Can we eve predict when and where the tornado will form? Can we do this 24 hours in advance? If we can't does this mean a tornado is not physical?
In what conceptual sense is the emergent property of matter that we call life different from other emergent propteries, such as the properties of water as opposed to those of its constituent elements?
To quote Descartes,"I think, therefore I am."
Or to quote DUmmies, "I don't think, therefore I voted for Kerry." :-)
self awareness, for one thing, seems relatively non-trivial. As well as confusion, mistakes, humor, morality, or
(to quote Doonesbury)
Horniness.
Full Disclosure: It was part of a strip with B.D. arguing philosophy with other football players in the huddle. Early 70's vintage.
"Horniness is NOT an emotion, dummy.!"
"Hold it, let's take a vote!"
Hmmm… Name any intrinsic attribute that applies to life that does not apply to water or basic elements.
Yes. But who's the father?
I got to thinking about massive and massless particles on my drive home tonight. Particles that have mass generally are subject to Lorenz transformation. Particle or wave, each of the complementarities (Bohr's term) is a temporal aspect or representation of their fundamental, essential unity.
Now the massless particles are another kind of beastie altogether. They seem to enjoy (dubious word) similarly complementary relations. But they do not "transform" into one another; they annihilate one other. Quarks never show up without their "complementarity," antiquarks. And the only reason quark-antiquark show up in the first place, apparently, is to mutually destroy one other.
Now this is probably going to sound fanciful, but on the basis of the above and other data, I am looking at a fundamentally "dualistic universe" at the deepest levels of reality. Not necessarily in the sense of Cartesian dualism -- whatever that is; certainly the interpretation of that has "evolved" over time. And probably not in ways of which Descartes would have approved.
But i digress. What I was getting at is the photon, another famous massless particle as you point out. If there is a fundamental, dualistic structure of reality, where is, what is, the photon's complementarity?
And down deep in my bones somewhere, I find that an extraordinarily important question. The sense i have of the situation is that photons somehow stitch together the entire fabric of universal reality, and in particular evolutionary biology. "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be."
I'm sure that must sound like some kind of fairy tale. And i do apologize to my scientist friends; but a philosopher -- RightWhale -- is raising philosophical issues. And i wanted to reply to him as a philosopher.
Thank you so much for writing, RightWhale.
I'm getting worried about you, BB.
It's there. In symmetry theory. The particle hasn't been seen, but it will be very massive if the theory is right. Every particle that carries a field {boson} has a fermion as complement. That goes for the graviton also, although I don't remember if either the graviton or its complement has been seen for sure. I don't think so, but soon, soon.
Since there are so many kinds of particles, a spectrum of them, some physicists are looking for what causes the spectrum rather than just looking for more particles-- that would be a more fundamental research.
In what conceptual sense are we required to accept as our initial premise that “life” is an “emergent property of matter?” Aren’t you arbitrarily narrowing the scope of possible analytical outcomes by so doing, with possible prejudice to any truthful description of reality?
It seems to me obvious that “life” found a way to “emerge” (or evolve) from “matter.” All I allege is that “matter” did not “write the program” stipulating this result.
So I’ll continue to argue that life cannot be understood as an emergent property of matter. In addition to the necessary physical basis (which obeys the universal laws of physics), life requires something more just in order to be alive. Science seems to be testing these waters (assuming they can be tested at all) mainly through physics, information theory, and mathematics these days. They may be on to something.
As you note, water is more than the sum of its constituent parts. You could take any of those parts in isolation, or in any combination, and “interview them.” But they would fail to explain the nature of the whole of which they are the parts and participants.
You asked: “Can we predict the path of a tornado? Can we even predict when and where the tornado will form? Can we do this 24 hours in advance? If we can't does this mean a tornado is not physical?”
I think you are trying to compare apples and oranges here. I will concede that the tornado is a self-organizing system. But is that necessarily the same thing as an emergent system? There is an emergent system that I know of, called the human race, that not only has the power to organize itself (in some fashion) at the individual, family, and societal levels; but it organizes (or disorganizes, depending on your point of view) the surrounding physical/ecological environment, as well.
Tornados don’t “organize” anything. The point about tornados is they ineluctably “deconstruct” most everything in their path.
Thank you so much for writing, js1138.
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