Paul Flocken
Posts: 290
Joined: Dec. 2005
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| Quote (oldmanintheskydidntdoit @ Feb. 27 2008,09:07) | DaveScot has apparently been learning about the SLOT
| Quote | The second law and chance doesn’t prevent ordered systems from developing, it makes them more and more improbable as the order increases. The improbabilities in any specific case above the quantum scale is found through the use of statistical mechanics. For instance law and chance can form lots of regularly shaped stone blocks but the probabilities become prohibitive in the stone blocks getting stacked into pyramids such as those in Egypt. Law and chance can concentrate and melt gold into lots of shapes but the chances become prohibitive in chance melting gold into interchangeable machined parts like gears. The chances become even more prohibitive that interchangeable machined parts would be assembled together into a larger mechanism.
However, introduce an intelligent agent into the picture who can form abstract thoughts of improbable arrangements of matter and then manipulate matter to instantiate the abstract into physical reality and then the most improbable things become routine.
The contour lines of stability you suggest are indeed process structuralism and it does indeed require the discovery of laws which describe those lines. We know the laws that describe the contour lines of stability that form snowflakes and precipitates and planets and stars but we don’t know of laws which describe contour lines of stability for the formation polymeric amino and nucleic acids into precisely machined interchangeable parts that further assemble by law and chance into larger hideously complex nanometer scale self-modifying, self-replicating factories. The supposition that there are contours of stability imposed by law that make these things not improbable in statistical mechanics is indeed process structuralism. Statistical mechanics will accomodate any laws which change the probability of any kind of order emerging by law and chance. Find those laws, or principles, or tendencies, or whatever you want to call them, describe them either empirically or mathematically, and then we can talk further. Merely supposing that these undercurrents of structural contours exist is no more than wool gathering. Statistical mechanics underpins all analysis of order in nature, all prediction of how matter behaves by law and chance in non-quantum domains, and is extremely successful in its predictive capacity. |
It strikes me that DaveScot could prove his point via mathematics rather then verbiage. |
Is this the right question to ask?:
What does statistical mechanics have to do with how atoms chemically bond and chemically interact?
I found a relevant(I think) line at wikipedia:
| Quote | | The study of long chain polymers has been a source of problems within the realms of statistical mechanics since about the 1950's. One of the reasons however that scientists were interested in their study is that the equations governing the behaviour of a polymer chain were independent of the chain chemistry.(bolding added) |
Does that mean the motions of atoms and molecules in space(to be sure, a very oversimplified definition of statistical mechanics) is not relevant to the organic chemistry of living things? Or, at least, minimally relevant? Louis?
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"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."-John F. Kennedy
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