If you’re interested in the intersection between science and literature, you might be interested in my recent musings on Julio Cortázar’s book From the Observatory, recently published in English.
And even if you’re not interested in my musings, you should still check out the book.
150 years later, biology still suffers from the tension between creating a rigorous theory and creating a descriptive narrative of experimental results:
From Toulmin and Goodfield’s The Architecture of Matter, p. 331:
[Claude] Bernard not only succeeded in stating acceptable terms for reconciling physiology with physics and chemistry, but also demonstrated in his own experimental enquiries how this compromise was worked out in practice.
Today Bernard is thought of as a scientist – as one of the founders of modern physiology – and so he was. But he spoke of his own work as ‘experimental medicine’, and the name is significant. For, throughout the two hundred years which separated him from Harvey and Descartes, the central problem had been to combine the natural philosopher’s theoretical vision with the medical anatomist’s fidelity to experience. (This was the problem Hippokrates dismissed as insoluble.) The secret of Bernard’s success ay in his capacity to bring these two elements in physiology into fruitful intellectual harmony. Both in his original researches and in his analysis of physiological method, Bernard treated the animal frame as a functioning whole. Though his experimental work was rigorously quantitative and chemical, he always saw the particular process he was studying in their relation to the rest of the body; and this made him the natural successor to Harvey and Galen, as much as to Liebig and Descartes. As we shall see, it also made him less dependent that his predecessors on the hypothesis of a ‘vital principle’. For he showed that the special characteristics of organisms could be explained as resulting from the complexity and interconnectedness of their bodily processes, without the need to introduce any uniquely ‘vital’ cause into one’s account.
Today we still have trouble straddling the line between what Eric Davidson calls “bits of causality swimming in a sea of phenomenology” and rigorous, quantitative theories that explain how complex interactions between ordinary physical molecules give rise to living processes.
Wow, definitely a must-read for anyone who likes physics, history of science, and understanding why trends and fads in science come and go. (Read an excerpt at Scientific American.) Kaiser, a physicist and historian of science at MIT tells the story of a group of physicists who, finishing their PhDs in the late 60’s/early 70’s, emerged from graduate school into a job market whose bottom had just dropped out as the Defense Department funding for physics was sharply reduced from its earlier Cold War peak. Jobless and bored with the traditional questions of physics, these hippie physicists became obsessed with some non-traditional questions, and through a convoluted series of causal links, influenced the resurgence of interest in quantum entanglement and the emergence of the now billion-dollar business of quantum computing.
The post-WWII physics boom had been characterized by a ‘shut up and calculate’ attitude, as physicists focused on research questions that fell within or built upon the existing mainstream framework laid down in the 30’s and 40’s. Ignored were questions about the ultimate foundations of quantum mechanics that had long troubled Einstein. Students who showed an interest in such questions were quickly redirected. Continue reading “Go read How the Hippies Saved Physics”
A new paper in PLoS One suggests that we humans may be afraid of the dark and associate evil goings on with the full moon because that is when lions try to eat us. Continue reading “Walking in the moonlight. . .with lions”
On this day in 1822, Gregor Mendel was born. Forty-three years later he would give birth to genetics when he reported his discovery of the laws of inheritance from pea hybridization experiments. It took about forty more years for his work to be rediscovered and applied.
The Finch and Pea is half-named in honor of Mendel’s pea hybridization experiments. The discovery of genetics combined with Darwin’s ideas about evolution form the foundation of modern biology (along with molecular methods from physics – but they do not have a model organism that makes a cool pub-y name).
Happy 189th Birthday, Gregor! You look great.
The Finch and Pea 