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Howard, I appreciated your last post. It was far more reasonable
than some of your more personal criticisms of my father in the recent past. I
have a few comments, which I promise are also reasonable:
HP: Again, no physicist would dispute that we do not
have the "correct"
laws. It follows that we must be "misinterpreting" some
basic attributes of
the universe. However, it certainly does not follow that
physicists
intentionally or thoughtlessly overlooked life or "beguiled
themselves" or
"shirked their task" with "disastrous" consequences as Rosen
charges.
I noticed, sometime around the late 1980's, that the tone of
attack or challenge that my father faced at conferences had begun to change. It
moderated more and more over the next decade, to the point that he began to
receive "fan" mail (which astonished him to the very roots of his soul...). It
was kind of funny in fact; "Jude, what do you make of this..." he said,
holding out a hand-written letter that was his first, ever, fan letter.) He
observed that letter with more suspicion than any of the strange species of mold
growing on stuff in his fridge. He was going to throw it out, but I kept it. The
point to bear in mind is that Life, Itself was written before that sea-change
took place and he was still "in the trenches". To say he was over-reacting would
be unfair, because he had watched several of the most productive "centers" for
studying these issues fall under the boot of devout reductionists in university
administrations and faculties. It was still happening, at Dalhousie, in the
early 1990's, which is why he took early retirement. The administration there
had all but dissolved the BioPhysics department and was requiring all professors
to teach first and second year courses, using the argument of sheer numbers (If
you are teaching 3 classes of 500 students each, you are more productive
than if you have three PhD students and write a book. If you were writing a
book, they acted like you "had too much time on your hands"!)
There are many, many stories he could tell of wars waged
against a more expanded scientific paradigm by those who had a vested interest
in preserving the status quo. Those were the days when Watson and Crick were
demi-gods and the limitations of that approach hadn't been made manifest, yet.
So whatever the state of physics is now, it's an improvement-- and I think it's
quite possible that my father's work may have had a hand in that improvement.
However, the fact remains that physics is still being taught as a variation on
Newtonian Mechanics, with Einstein's improvements.
HP: most physicists as
real individuals (not as abstract
"Physics" or what masquerades as physics
taught in high school and freshman
courses) do not disagree basically with
Rosen, or us, that physical models
of natural laws are inadequate to
explain life
The word "masquerades" is rather harsh, isn't it? Worse than
"impoverished," really. Hmmmm ... Well, In any case... I've had fairly
recent conversations with high school physics teachers on this subject and
their response is that they are not in a position to change the curriculum. On
the other hand, when asked whether they believe that "physical laws are adequate
to explain life", they generally reply that "we don't know enough of them, yet."
In other words, they rarely question the ones that they consider "proven".
But as we can see from simulations; two things can look very much alike on the
outside, yet the underlying causality can be radically different. I think this
is the case with many of the seemingly" proven" laws of Physics. They
only hold up under artificial circumstances and fail completely in many natural
venues, like ecosystems or the human body.
For whatever it's worth, Howard, I have no intention of waging war
on Physics in my father's name; I believe my father's work is actually full of
respect for physics/science in general even while being clear-eyed about the
flaws and limitations. He didn't want to tear anything down to be replaced with
something completely different; he wanted to see the foundations expanded so
that physics could be what it had the potential to be; the general science upon
which all others can be based (which it considers itself to be, already,
but is not).
Judith
Judith, Tim, Steve, John, and all,
What
I am trying to get across to this group is that most physicists as
real
individuals (not as abstract "Physics" or what masquerades as physics
taught in high school and freshman courses) do not disagree basically with
Rosen, or us, that physical models of natural laws are inadequate to
explain life. It is counterproductive make your fellow searchers after
truth into opponents when they are not. For example:
Judith:
Today's physics is still based on laws ("Physical Laws") that are
not
entirely "congruent" with Natural Law/s. So while I believe that all
systems, including living systems, behave in ways consistent with natural
laws of the universe, I do not think Physics has accurately figured out
what most of those laws are.
HP: No physicist could have said it
better. There is total agreement here.
You go on:
Judith: I also
think my father was right about the fact that Physics has
misinterpreted a
substantial number of basic attributes of the universe.
So, words like
"violate" or "evade" are inapplicable when it comes to
"laws" that aren't
really laws.
HP: Again, no physicist would dispute that we do not have
the "correct"
laws. It follows that we must be "misinterpreting" some
basic attributes of
the universe. However, it certainly does not follow
that physicists
intentionally or thoughtlessly overlooked life or
"beguiled themselves" or
"shirked their task" with "disastrous"
consequences as Rosen charges.
In fact, history shows quite the
contrary. Before Rosen began thinking
about it, a number of prominent
physicist, starting with Bohr ("Light and
life" Nature, 131, 421, 1933)
and Schroedinger (What Is Life, 1945) , began
to seriously question
whether life was really covered by physics. They were
not vitalists, but
they were skeptical that physics was adequate. There was
a common feeling
that something fundamental was being overlooked, and this
feeling led
physicists, like Bernal, Astbury, Bragg, Delbruck, and others
to actually
switch from studying particles to studying biology. (This group
was the
start of what is called molecular biology today.)
Gunther Stent (in
Phage and the Origin of Molecular Biology) points out
that the motivation
for many of these physicists was the expectation that
studying life might
lead to the discovery of new "laws of physics." He says
it was the hope of
some that the study of life "would prove
incomprehensible within the
framework of physical knowledge." (See review
by John Kendrew,
Scientific American 216, Mar. 1967, p. 141, and Stent,
"That was the
molecular biology that was." Science, 160, 390-395, 1968)
The
literature on physics's relation to biology is too large to even
outline.
I will give you only one more quote from Rosenfeld (a close
colleague of
Bohr) with whom Rosen would have agreed.
Rosenfeld asks: Will a
physico-chemical analysis of the molecular processes
underlying biological
phenomena provide a complete and exhaustive
description of these
phenomena? And he answers: The concept that
immediately comes to mind is
that of "function," the usefulness of which in
biological investigation
nobody will deny. And the idea of function, with
its implication of
finality, seems to be incompatible with the type of
causality exhibited by
a purely physical description." (Theoretical Physics
and Biology, Marois,
ed. Interscience, 1969)
Today there is still no consensus on how
important and/or adequate quantum
mechanics is for models of life. There
is, however, a general feeling that
the deepest problem is with the act of
encoding or measurement that is at
the heart of the modeling relation. All
physicists agree that the process
of measurement is not usefully
describable by physical laws, whatever they
are, because it is an
epistemological problem. Pauli and Von Neumann have
clearly stated this
problem. Rosen's words are that encoding is unentailed
by nature or the
model of nature, but this is in complete agreement with
their
position.
Rosen's ideas also produce no basic disagreement with
physicists over the
necessity for multiple complementary models
(irreducible to and not
derivable from each other). This was well
established in physics early in
the last century.
The only problem
left with Rosen's ideas that I can see is whether we can
find a useful
biological model that does not have what he calls
"states." What is
or is not a state is not yet a clearly defined concept.
I agree with
John K: "We need to begin with [say, Judith's or Rosen's]
basic
principles/assumptions in the Rosennean view, then work out, rather
than
endlessly battling over the results of one view vs another." It is
just my
opinion that the development of a Rosen-based biological model can
be done
better without introducing the physicist as a villain.
Howard
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