Re: [FRIAM] PLEASE DON'T READ Nick's post: "Schroedinger's "What is Life?""

[Steve Smith]

Nick - I read it through before seeing your retraction.  As you may recognize by now, your fallacy is probably not a consequence of your being an English (Psychology?) Major but actually just not reading the statement of the problem carefully enough.   The 10^24 (molecules) vs the 10^21 glasses (cups?)  might be about right and your math is good (1000 molecules per glass on average)... but the conclusion (1/1000 chance of drawing a glass with a marked molecule) is reversed.   The chances of drawing a glass without any marked molecules is 1/1000, supporting ES's claim.   I'd say you did good (right up to that premature send thingy) for an English Major. I read ES's "What is Life" years ago and was deeply inspired by it's directness and simplicity (and lack of jargon) and timeliness (1949?) well before much was done to tie life to information theory.   I look forward to your continued "book reports". - Steve 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 (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]         ----- Original Message ----- From: Nicholas Thompson To: friam@redfish.com 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 (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]       ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

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