Biocurious

/ a biophysics blog

Philosophical Saturday: George Wald

Posted 5 April 2008 by PhilipJ under &

George Wald made considerable progress in our understanding of the chemistry and physiology of vision (which just so happens to be the area I find myself in now). He won the Nobel Prize (physiology or medicine) in 1967, and his lecture in Stockholm opened with a beautiful description of experimental science:

I have often had cause to feel that my hands are cleverer than my head. That is a crude way of characterizing the dialectics of experimentation. When it is going well, it is like a quiet conversation with Nature. One asks a question and gets an answer; then one asks the next question, and gets the next answer. An experiment is a device to make Nature speak intelligibly. After that one has only to listen.

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Philosophical Friday: Svante Arrhenius

Posted 23 November 2007 by PhilipJ under &

Svante Arrhenius is perhaps most famous as a Nobel laureate (1903, for electrolytic dissociation), but he also wrote a text which would be of some interest to many readers of this site (or at least, me), titled Quantitative Laws in Biological Chemistry. Published in 1915, it contains chapters on the velocity of biochemical reactions, chemical equilibria, temperature effects on rates, etc.

But most interesting to me, given that we are in an age where the quantification of biology is a big idea, is this choice quotation:

[B]iological chemistry can not develop into a real science without the aid of the exact methods offered by physical chemistry.

What’s old is new again.

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Brain in a jar

Posted 13 October 2007 by PhilipJ under

Dinosaur Comics was deep yesterday:

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Philosophical Friday: Ludwig Boltzmann

Posted 7 December 2006 by PhilipJ under &

I’ve just finished reading David Lindley’s biography of Ludwig Boltzmann, called Boltzmann’s Atom. He’s quite fascinating, because while other prominent scientists of his day often had a myriad of interests, Boltzmann’s entire career spanning some 30 years was spent almost exclusively on understanding the properties of gases. He firmly believed that atoms were real (a highly contested idea largely until the work of Einstein on diffusion), and battled with Ernst Mach who took an ultra-realist philosophy towards science: theorising in general he frowned upon, and he doubly hated theoretical work with constructs that he felt you could never possibly see, even in principle. Boltzmann’s kinetic theory, relying on atoms which obeyed Newtonian mechanics, was a common Machian example of exactly how theoretical physics was heading down an incorrect path.

Near the end of his life, however, Boltzmann also became interested in Darwin’s ideas, and life as a perfect example of thermodynamics. Now we commonly think about entropy when discussing almost all aspects of biological physics, so it was very prescient for Boltzmann to say, in 1900:

The overall struggle for existence of living beings is therefore not a struggle for raw materials—the raw materials of all organisms are available in excess in the air, water, and ground—nor for energy, which in the form of heat is plentiful in every body, but rather a struggle for entropy, which becomes available in the flow of energy from the hot sun to the cold earth.

Update—A couple of ScienceBloggers had a discussion about Karl Popper yesterday, if you’re in the mood for more philosophy of science.

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Science is like the real number line

Posted 18 September 2006 by PhilipJ under

Shamelessly quoting RRResearch, the PI from a lab I’m collaborating on a project with:

Scientific knowledge is like the “real number line” used in introductory math classes. In the line, every point is a number, but no matter how close together two points (or numbers) are, there are always infinitely many other points separating them. The real world similarly contains infinitely many things to discover. No matter how much we find out about something, there are always many more important things to find out. I use this analogy for beginning science students, who are often concerned that all the important discoveries have already been made.

This is a totally awesome way to think about science. Every question answered leads to new questions to tackle. Whether you agree with John Horgan’s hypothesis in The End of Science that all the fundamental discoveries in science are complete, I think it would be hard to argue that all the important discoveries in science have been made. There are always going to be things we don’t understand, and there will always be enquiring minds trying to figure things out.

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The character of science

Posted 31 May 2006 by PhilipJ under &

I’m reading The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman, and the first lecture has a very simple explanation, in the context of planetary motion, of how modern science started:

The times after Copernicus were times in which there were great debates about whether the planets in fact went around the sun along with the earth, or whether the earth was at the centre of the universe and so on. Then a man named Tycho Brahe evolved a way of answering the question. He thought that it might perhaps be a good idea to look very very carefully and to record exactly where the planets appear in the sky, and then the alternative theories might be distinguished from one another. This is the key of modern science and it was the beginning of the true understanding of Nature – this idea to look at the thing, to record the details, and to hope that in the information thus obtained might lie a clue to one or another theoretical interpretation.

It was such a good idea that we haven’t had to change the process yet, some 500 years later.

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