Sorry, everybody: somehow I pressed the send button, when I meant to save it
for further thought. The last sentence is just nuts.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]
----- Original Message -----
From: Nicholas Thompson
To: [email protected]
Sent: 4/26/2010 9:50:50 PM
Subject: Schroedinger's "What is Life?"
All,
I am working my way through this book, and, rather than write one huge email
that nobody reads, I thought I would write some short ones that somebody might
read.
It's a splendid little book, very cleanly and economically written. S. is not
beset with jargonophilia. The basic idea of the book (correct if wrong,
please) is that living systems are orderly systems that fight off disorder
with order. Although written many years before the double helix, he is
struck by the fact that the elemental particles of genetic inheritance are so
very small that their absense of vulnerability to quantum processes is next to
miraculous.
Right now I just have questions, so I will start with a question.
S. writes, channelling Lord Kelvin:
Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water; then pour the
contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to
distrubute the marked molecules uniformly through out the seven seqs; if then
you took a glass of water anywhere out ot the ocean, you wound find in it about
a hundred of your marked molecules.
I am sorry this HAS to be wrong. However many molecules there are in a glass,
there are a gazillion glasses of water in the ocean, and isnt the probability
of coming up with any part of any one of them, vanishingly small.
Ok, work it out, thompson: There are, apparently, 8x 10^21 cups of water in
the ocean. and 8 x 10^24 molecules in each cup. Which means to this former
english major that there are a thousand times as many molecules of water in the
glass as there are glasses of water in the ocean in the ocean. So, my chance
of drawing any one of the hundred marked molecules by chance is one in a
thousand, right?
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]
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