Nanotechnology is engineering on a very small scale: atom by atom. One critical consideration in nanotech is that it works at a scale quantum mechanical effects are important. I love this stuff. I am of the opinion that contemporary science is much too devoted to distinctions among layers of reality defined by scale. So ... physics deals with atoms, chemistry with molecules, biology with organisms. Each presumes its own set of laws and generally ignores rthe laws of the level below it, aside from general hand-waving acknowledgements when diplomatic. Yet the walls among the disciplines are falling down. That is a subject for other days, it simply explains why I find nanotechnology -- not so much science as a branch of engineering, operating on the border between physics and chemistry. Only days ago a team of researchers from two great universities, the University of Toronto on the one hand and Rice University on the other, reported the first measurements of the ul...
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The Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year went to Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan. Apparently, they independently discovered a new more efficient way of linking molecules to each other, creating new synthetic chemicals. The new way is called "asymmetric organocatalysis." It means -- well, I'm not very sure what it means. A member of the chemistry Nobel committee explains why it has mattered. "This new toolbox is used widely today, for example in drug discovery, and in fine chemicals production and is already benefitting humankind greatly." Drug discovery. Hmmm. Is this the Nobel Committee's indirect way of congratulating the researchers toiling in the field of Covid vaccine and treatment? Another question comes to mind, concerning List. News reports say that he is "professor at and director of the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research." What a name? Max Planck was a subatomic physicist, wasn't he? Did he do any "coal research"...
The world needs more forthright retractions. The tendency, given the nature of the human ego, is to defend one's own record. This is a temptation perhaps especially for highly intelligent people, who bend their intelligence to defend what they see as their legacies, and thus find themselves looking back and fighting defensive wars. Frances Arnold is obviously very intelligent -- she is a recent winner of the Nobel in Chemistry! -- yet she resisted whatever temptation in that direction she may have felt. https://retractionwatch.com/2020/01/02/nobel-winner-retracts-paper-from-science/?utm_source=quora&utm_medium=referral Three cheers!
Yes, I know 'Nobel season' is over, the articles (and blog posts, including a couple here) that it regularly generates have been written and for the most part forgotten, though they might be taken out of drawers again next October when related cogitations come into play. But I want to revisit the institution of the Nobel Prize for a second, in the process harkening back to 1977. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry that year went to Ilya Prigogine "for his contributions to non-equilibrium thernodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures." The fascinating thing is, not only that Prigogine's contribution was fallacious, but that it was known to be such (by researchers on the cutting edge of chemistry, if not to the members of the Nobel committee) before the prize was awarded. What is non-equilibrium thermodynamics? Well, let's take that mouthful apart. Thermodynamics is the study of heat and its relationship to matter. In chemistry (as distinct...
The question for the day, how closely related are these two contentions, by MP: 1. "While tacit knowledge can be possessed by itself, explicit knowledge must rely on being tacitly understood and applied. Hence all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge. A wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable." 2. "The information in DNA could no more be reduced to the chemical than could the ideas in a book be reduced to ink and paper: something beyond physics and chemistry encoded DNA."
On the 16th and 17th of November I posted here discussions of the "error theory" in meta-ethics [hereafter ET in ME]. This is nihilism by a somewhat fancier name. It is the view that our statements about right and wrong mean what they sound like they mean to untutored ears, they mean that we are making claims of knowledge about actions, situations, duties, etc. -- but they are always wrong, because we never really have such knowledge. I put off the matter of my own evaluation of error theory. But here we go. Note that a key argument is simply how ":queer" a sort of thing a moral fact is if it exists. Why does the error theorist think moral judgments are inherently "queer"? Mackie put it this way, to say that they are knowable facts is also to say that they are "intrinsically action guiding," independent of the "desires or purposes" of the one who is guided. Of course it is open to the opponent of ET/ME to say "it doesn't ...
I have now and then wondered, as my mind wandered, whether there can properly be said to be such a creature as the "philosophy of chemistry." Biology has philosophical controversies specific to itself: the explication of the concept of natural selection for example, or the age-old reductionism-versus-holism thing. Physics, likewise, has its own philosophical controversies. Indeed, much that goes by the name "philosophy of science" seems actually to be a philosophy of physics.The nature of space and time. Statistical mechanics, etc. But chemistry? Wouldn't any effort to assign specific philosophical controversies to chemistry inevitably veer in one or the other of those directions? So I mused. Bu t it appears there really is a "philosophy of chemistry." Philosophers working this field debate whether chemistry is the study of substances or reactions -- stuff or events. In the words of Joachim Schummer, " Substance philosophers define a che...
... a scientific scandal, involving a woman who received a chemistry Ph.D. at august Columbia University, and was a candidate for a Ph.D. in molecular biology at Heidelberg University in Germany, only recently came to my attention. Here's a photo of the Columbia Quad. The story is so fascinating that even the date of the investigative documents involved (2010) can't keep me from going over the ground here. Here's a link, for those who want to go further into the matter than I plan to go here: https://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/89/8932sci1.html . Because federal grant money was involved, the HHS Department's Office of Research Integrity did a thorough review of the matter. The culprit, Bengu Sezen, claimed to have developed a way of selectively activating C-H bonds. Think of the words "hydrocarbon" and "carbohydrates" and you have two good reasons for caring about the C-H bonds. The selective activation of C-H bonds continues to be an activ...
A Hillel Schwartz essay, originally written in the late 1990s, when millennial thoughts had a calender-driven appeal, and had become enmeshed in a technical issue concerning computer dating, has the title I've provided for this blog post. Schwartz starts off in a self-conscious and jokey manner. It takes him awhile [a while?] to settle down and warm to his own topic. When he does settle down he says that eschatology is.... apparent in the fairy tales of Charles Perrault and in the Penny Merriments collected by Samuel Pepys, so many of which have to do with acts of inversion, mistakings of low for high and high for low, and the triumph of a youngest child (like Perrault) over elder siblings. It was apparent in the alembic by which alchemy subsided into chemistry, where hermetic procedures became basic laws of often inverse relationship among qualities (volume, temperature, pressure) and states of matter, such that liquids could suddenly if more explicitly transmute into gas ...
Nobel week is a fascinating time of year. Each day brings an announcement of one of the prizes, in a way that starts with the hard sciences and seems to build toward the politically contentious pair -- Peace and Economics. The news in the hard sciences is intriguing (and political in its own way surely, though I am happily abstracted from the sort of academic politics that would manifest itself in such matters). It is intriguing because the bestowal of an award on someone who certainly ISN'T a household name, like the chemists Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell, and William Moerner this year, forces various bright science journalists to explain their life work to the rest of us. And I always enjoy getting some easily digestible field about a subject to which I never otherwise give any thought at all. Here is the prize committee's own explanation of the work of the three chemists who win this year. Click . I've put a photo of Eric Betzig at the top of this post...
The September issue of HARPER's included a review by David Quammen of three recent books on the subject of the Neanderthals. What caught my attention, and made me want to commonplace a bit of this, was Quammen's digression onto the two different sorts of biology in general. There are biologists who look at their field as a batter of applied chemistry -- molecules interacting and compounding. There are also biologists who look at life on the level of the organism, or on the still broader level of the whole populations or ecosystems. Reductionists versus holists, if you will, although those words are judgment freighted. Quammen speaks of organismic versus molecular biology. Here's a passage, without further comment. You may have missed this argument, unless you work in the field or are somehow involved with the allocation of university budgets and buildings. It has been quiet and internecine but bitter, and traceable back to the late 1950s and early 60s, when Edward O...
Continuing yesterday's thoughts. Back in 1989, two chemists claimed to have created a simple table top apparatus that would work at room temperatures and that would create excess energy in amounts that, the chemists contended, had no explanation other than the incredible one: atoms were fusing. The scientists were: Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann. They were both sufficiently distinguished that the claim could not be dismissed lightly. Pons had a Ph.D. from the University of Southampton; Fleischmann from the Imperial College, London. That's Fleischmann in the photo that goes with this text, holding part of the apparatus, which was a little more complicated than Dogbert's. Their claims set off a frenzy of speculation about what this would mean. Some thought it would be bad news -- that the human race could not be trusted with the prospect of unlimited energy this implied. The more usual view was that this was great good news -- an apparently insatiable hunger ...
Almost five years ago now there was a of excitement in some quarters about the discovery of water on the moon. Those who found the news stirring included fans of the science fiction master Robert Heinlein, who remembered that the water on the moon as a crucial plot point of one of Heinlein's best-loved novels. I made that point at the time myself, in the blog that was a precursor to this one. Now it appears the discovery was not so much as discovery as a plausible inference. And the dry moon has advocates who are chipping away at that inference. Such is the progress of science. Sometimes those of us who follow it are delighted at a result, and sometimes we have to abandon that delight. It doesn't survive the testing. Ah, Bartleby. Ah, humanity.