Well of course the elements have properties and structure (where did these come from?); and I didn’t say that they were in any way inessential to the carrying out of biological functions. All I was trying to suggest is that the “machine model” implicit in classical (i.e., Newtonian) physics cannot describe complex material systems in nature, of which life forms are the preeminent example.
A Newtonian approach starts from the premise that our cell, as a material system, is to be studied and understood in the same universal terms as any other material system. That means: it must be analyzed down to a family of constituent particles. These particles define or specify a formal state space, or phase space; … the original system, the cell, is then imaged by some special set of points in this space. To find the dynamical laws, we must look empirically at the different kinds of particles we have resolved our cell into; we must determine from them, in isolation, how they can interact with things around them. Specifically, we must determine both how they respond to forces imposed on them and how they impose forces on each other. From these a set of dynamical relationships (i.e., a constraint) can be written down, which specify the necessary entailments, the necessary recursions, valid on our whole space of states or phases. A fortiori, these entailments determine also the behaviors of our original system; they are recaptured in terms of the state transition sequences imposed by the general recursion rules on the special set of states that represent our original organized system. The only thing remaining is to mandate the initial conditions; we must specify one of those special states; otherwise, we will find ourselves studying some other disposition of those same particles but one that is artifactual as far as our original system was concerned.Needless to say, Rosen probably comes across to, e.g., a physical chemist as some kind of radical, fire-breathing underminer of Newtonian orthodoxy. Which, by the way, he wasn’t, IMHO FWIW. What he does say is that biology is not a "special case" of physics; rather biology is the general, and physics, the special case of that general. Rosen does appear to be rather convinced about this. :^) (He wouldn't be the first.)In empirical terms, then, the very first step in the analysis of an organized system (e.g., our cell) is to destroy the organization. That is, we kill the cell, sonicate it, osmotically rupture it, or do some other drastic thing to it. We must do this to liberate the constituent particles, which are then to be further fractionated…. [I]n [the] Newtonian picture, we lose nothing by this process; once the analysis is complete, we can recapture everything about our original cell, merely by specifying any convenient initial state of it.
There are many things wrong with this picture. [LOLOL!!!] … One of them … is this: if I give you another, different cell, then the entire analysis must be repeated for that new cell. There is nothing in the fact that the subject of analysis is a cell that can shorten the analysis or indeed help in any way, and when we get done, there is nothing in the resulting picture to tell us that the systems we have analyzed were cells. A consistent reductionism in biology thus converts it into a catalog or encyclopedia of individual analyses of this kind, cell by cell, organism by organism, ad infinitum. Indeed, people are actually engaged in trying to do this kind of thing at the present time.
In any case, I can epitomize a reductionist approach to organization in general, and to life in particular, as follows: throw away the organization and keep the underlying matter.
The relational alternative to this says the exact opposite, namely: throw away the matter and keep the underlying organization — Robert Rosen, Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life. Itals in the original.
The equation is a statement of the equivalence of matter and energy. Mass is measure of the energy tied up in the interaction of energy with the Higgs field. Mass is a measure of the energy which is referred to as matter, it is not simply a property of something else.
Still, I shall beg your forgiveness to insist that Einstein was doing what we might call “cosmic geometry,” not particle physics….
Oh, you have written so much of interest, spunkets. Skipping down the text, for instance: “The energy behaves according to it's nature, or essence. There is nothing, or anyone that ‘tells it what to do’.” Oh my. Shades of the divinization of energy here (in a double sense)! Are you suggesting that energy is causa sui [i.e., self-caused], and thus in a condition of universal perseity [i.e., in which a thing is acting out of its own inner nature]?
In the human past, such descriptions have usually been been reserved to God.
Questions, questions, questions. Please share your thoughts, spunkets? Thank you so very much for writing!
Assertions that "you're doing it wrong" seem to be as common as dirt.
Exactly what the "right way" to do it is seems to elude explicit articulation.
lol