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Science is taking on a new aspect which is neither purely physical nor purely biological. It is becoming the study of organisms. Biology is the Study of the larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms.
"There are a million points of light in the universe traveling a million miles an hour away from us, yet they are so far away they appear to be standing still." "Estimate for # of planets in visible universe: 10^25, which = # molecules in a cup of water" Robert Garisto, PRL "I'm is Juliet Retenford and my favorite…
Imagine you had to take an art class in which you were taught how to paint a fence or a wall, but you were never shown the paintings of the great masters, and you weren't even told that such paintings existed. Pretty soon you'd be asking, why study art? That's absurd, of course, but it's surprisingly close to the way…
The adult Sagan always sounded like the smartest person in the room, but in the papers we encounter this interesting note in a 1981 file, right after “Cosmos” hit it big: “I think I’m able to explain things because understanding wasn’t entirely easy for me. Some things that the most brilliant students were able to see…
The basic physics of thermonuclear energy is seductively simple. Fission produces energy by atomic fracture, fusion by tiny acts of atomic union. Every atom contains at least one proton, and all protons are positively charged, which means that they repel one another, like identical ends of a magnet. As protons are…
It is called a tokamak—old Soviet shorthand for a more precise and geometrical name, toroidalnaya kamera s aksialnym magnitnym polem, or “toroidal chamber with an axial magnetic field.” Sakharov’s rough sketch depicted a doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber, or torus, ringed with electromagnets, and that is how iter’s core…
Those reductionists who try to reduce life to physics usually try to reduce it to primitive physics—not to good physics. Good physics is broad enough to contain life, to encompass life in its description since good physics allows a vast field of possible descriptions. There is no reason why living beings should be…
January 24, 1936 Dear Phyllis, I will attempt to reply to your question as simply as I can. Here is my answer: Scientists believe that every occurrence, including the affairs of human beings, is due to the laws of nature. Therefore a scientist cannot be inclined to believe that the course of events can be influenced…
Another way of describing the revolution in physics is to say that the key moves and acts, physicists do not care; 'matter' to them means 'to matter'. moves and acts, physicists do not care; 'matter' to them means 'to matter', to make a difference. But our language is still geared to express 'states of being', rather…
The difference between a piece of stone and an atom is that an atom is highly organised, whereas the stone is not. The atom is a pattern, and the molecule is a pattern, and the crystal is a pattem; but the stone, although it is made up of these pattems, is just a mere confusion. It's only when life appears that you…
Every species of living thing can make a copy of itself by exchanging energy and matter with its surroundings. One feature common to all such examples of spontaneous “self-replication” is their statistical irreversibility: clearly, it is much more likely that one bacterium should turn into two than that two should…
The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines. They try to test our imagination in the following way. They say, "Here is a picture of some people in a situation. What do you imagine will happen next?" When we say, 'I can't imagine,' they may think we have a weak…
Everything is made of atoms. That is the key hypothesis. The most important hypothesis in all of biology, for example, is that everything that animals do, atoms do. In other words, there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to…
A scientific observation is always a committed observation; it confirms or denies one's preconceptions; one's first ideas, one's plan of observation; it shows by demonstration; it structures the phenomena; it transcends what is close at hand; it reconstructs the real after having reconstructed its representation.
THE FOLLOWING IS QUOTED FROM BERGAN EVANS ON NORBERT WEINER, NUCLEAR PHYSICIST The second concept Wiener has to establish is that of entropy. Probability is a mathematical concept, coming from statistics. Entropy comes from physics. It is the assertion-- established logically and experimentally-- that the universe, by…
In thinking about hidden layers, it’s important to distinguish between the routine efficiency and power of a good network, once that network has been set up, and the difficult issue of how to set it up in the first place. That difference is reflected in the difference between playing the piano (or, say, riding a…
Two neurons can communicate with each other at a synapse, which is the computational unit in the brain. The typical cortical synapse is less than a micron in diameter (10-6 meter), near the resolution limit of the light microscope. If the economy of the world is a stretch for us to contemplate, thinking about all the…
The Mechanic's Wisdom. Probably the most characteristic attitude of the mechanic toward the forces and materials with which he deals is unquestioning acceptance of the fact that he cannot change or anywise modify the laws of nature or the qualities of materials. The mechanic, like the rest of us, wants to accomplish a…
IN 1583 Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), a youth of nineteen attending prayers in the baptistery of the Cathedral of Pisa, was, according to tradition, distracted by the swinging of the altar lamp. No matter how wide the swing of the lamp, it seemed that the time it took the lamp to move from one end to the other was the…
Mortal as I am, I know that I am born for a day, but when I follow the serried multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the earth; I ascend to Zeus himself to feast me on ambrosia, the food of the gods.