Clemens Lode's Blog, page 2
May 13, 2019
The Origin of Life
How would you create a life-like model of your face? A simple approach is to cover your face with papier-mâché, let it dry, detach it from your face, then fill the inside of the mask with plaster, let that dry as well, and detach the papier-mâché from the plaster. The result of this process is a plaster cast of your face—a representation, not an actual copy of your face.
Now, this only works because you have copied but one simple layer, namely the surface. Real three-dimensional copying (incl...
April 29, 2019
Artificial Life
It is raining DNA outside. On the bank of the Oxford canal at the bottom of my garden is a large willow tree, and it is pumping downy seeds into the air. […] [spreading] DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow trees that will shed a new generation of downy seeds. […] It is raining instructions out there; it’s raining programs; it’s raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn’t be any plaine...
April 15, 2019
Chemical Evolution
It is mere rubbish, thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.
—Charles Darwin, Letter To J. D. Hooker [Darwin, 2012]
What are some specific examples in nature of complex processes or entities assembling themselves, with no other help but environmental influences?
As we have learned in the first book [Lode, 2016], philosophy is hierarchical. Before we can know how we should act, we have to know what exists, how we know, and who we are. And on...
April 1, 2019
Basics of Evolution
What are the three major properties a system needs to have in order to evolve?
Still, it needs to be said that the light of evolution is just that—a means of seeing better. It is not a description of all things human, nor is it a clear prediction of what will happen next.
—Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing [Konner, 2003, p. xviii]
The purpose of the theory of evolution is to explain the wide array of life forms on Earth. Knowledge about the origin of species allows us to better understand why...
March 18, 2019
Evolution
It makes one wonder what the evolutionary tree of this idea [the theory of evolution] would look like, were it an organism that could be mapped out by fossil record rather than words. The concept is one that faded nearly into obscurity, only now to be revived with slight mutation. What I personally gather from this is that survival of ideas depends less on the actual quality of the idea, but rather the climate into which it is introduced. Quite literally, survival of the fittest, but not nece...
March 4, 2019
The Big Bang
If the “big bang” created the universe, and if nothing existed before the big bang, where did the big bang come from?
Imagine an infinite sea of energy filling empty space, with waves moving around in there, occasionally coming together and producing an intense pulse. Let’s say one particular pulse comes together and expands, creating our universe of space-time and matter. But there could well be other such pulses. To us, that pulse looks like a big bang; in a greater context, it’s a little...
February 18, 2019
Chaos Theory
Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.
—Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law [Feynman, 1994, p. 28]
How can structure emerge from chaos? Why isn’t everything just “noise”? And how does “complexity” differ from “chaos”?
Example
Imagine a droplet of honey falling into a bowl of yogurt. After you stirred the yogurt a few times, circles of long threads of honey emerge. Some more st...
February 4, 2019
Interpretations of the Quantum Theory
Why could the many worlds interpretation be called ontologically wasteful?
An approach to explain what is going on at the ontological level is the so-called many worlds interpretation. Instead of claiming that until something is measured, it is not defined, it states that at all times, we have a definite history. This means that Schrödinger’s cat is always either alive or dead, no matter whether you open the box or leave it closed. In that regard, the many worlds in...
January 21, 2019
Copenhagen Interpretation
What is the ontological view of the Copenhagen interpretation?
The unexplained mystery of thermal radiation (among others, like the photoelectric effect) led to the theory that light comes in packages: the quantum theory. The first interpretation to explain the quantum theory epistemologically was the Copenhagen interpretation. It was first formulated in 1927 by Niels Bohr, John von Neumann, and Werner Heisenberg, and became the most popular explanation of what is actually going on at the qua...
January 7, 2019
Development of Quantum Mechanics
Is light a wave or a particle?
[…] when we allow for the dynamics of gravity and quantum mechanics, we find that [our] commonsense notion is no longer true. This is the beauty of science, and it should not be threatening. Science simply forces us to revise what is sensible to accommodate the universe, rather than vice versa.
—Lawrence Krauss, A Universe From Nothing [Krauss, 2012, p. 151]
Quantum mechanics could just as well be called “wave mechanics” [cf. Bell, 1988, p. 187]. That is to st...
