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PLEASE DON'T READ Nick's post: "Schroedinger's "What is Life?""

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Nick Thompson

PLEASE DON'T READ Nick's post: "Schroedinger's "What is Life?""

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 ([hidden email])

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]

----- Original Message -----

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email]

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 ([hidden email])

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

Steve Smith

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

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 ([hidden email])

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]

----- Original Message -----

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email]

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 ([hidden email])

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

Sarbajit Roy (testing)

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

Hi Steve

" The chances of drawing a glass without any marked molecules is 1/1000, supporting ES's claim."

I don't think the maths works quite that way. Some glasses would have exactly 1000 molecules, some would have 1000 -/+ 1, or 2 .. -/+999. Presuming that the distribution is a "normal" distribution, there would be an exceedingly small probability of getting a glass with zero marked molecules.

Furthermore since there is the equally remote probability that a single glass would contain all the marked molecules (just like we started out with), the distribution would be skewed away from a normal one..

This is just an off the cuff observation. I could brush up my prob-stats if reqd (and eat humble pie if wrong).

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 9:35 AM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

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

Steve Smith

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

sarbajit roy wrote:

Hi Steve

" The chances of drawing a glass without any marked molecules is 1/1000, supporting ES's claim."

I don't think the maths works quite that way. Some glasses would have exactly 1000 molecules, some would have 1000 -/+ 1, or 2 .. -/+999. Presuming that the distribution is a "normal" distribution, there would be an exceedingly small probability of getting a glass with zero marked molecules.

Furthermore since there is the equally remote probability that a single glass would contain all the marked molecules (just like we started out with), the distribution would be skewed away from a normal one..

This is just an off the cuff observation. I could brush up my prob-stats if reqd (and eat humble pie if wrong).

I'm not that confident in my own stats without careful review. My number was just a rough revision of Nick's computation to put it back in perspective (from his minor but significant error in what is in the numerator and what is in the denominator). I'm not confident in this myself (without some study/review that I'm not willing to do at the moment) to support or refute your estimations.

In any case, we all seem to agree (including Erwin Schrodinger) that when we wash our humble pie down with that glass of water, it is likely to have some of those marked molecules in them (if the Nazi scientists at Vemork, Norway spilled any of their heavy water down the river, we would be assured of drinking some of that as well, right?)

How about whale piss from Moby Dick? Any of that in the glass of water (a little harder to detect)? As for the heavy water (deuterium oxide), I believe the natural concentration in water in the wild is something like 10^-7 by mole (rather than mass), making it 14 orders of magnitude more likely to be in your glass than ES's postulated glass.

Don't the "laws of large (and small) numbers" lead one down strange passages. How do we think about these "laws" in the light of the "why theorems?" thread.

I must be avoiding some kind of important work.

- Steve

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 9:35 AM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

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
============================================================
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

Eric Charles

FW: molecules in a cup [was DON"T READ]

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Ack, wrote this right before John sent his email.....

Sarbajit, et al,
Technically it would be a binomial distribution of some ugly sort. There would be some skew, or at least a tail cut off in one direction earlier than the other, but for many purposes a normal distribution approximates the binomial distribution.

The probability of getting a glass with 0 molecules in it, if there was random distribution, would be quite small. Based on the numbers given, the change of drawing any given molecule, if drawing one at a time, would be 1/8x10^21. However, you are drawing 8x10^24 molecules at a time. So, on average you should have 1000 molecules per glass. However, the probability of getting any specific number of molecules per glass is quite small. If we use the approximation of the normal curve, and this is just the type of situation in which that is ungodly helpful, the standard deviation of the number of molecules in any glass is (I hope) 31.6 molecules. So 99% of the glasses you draw will have between 918 and 1082 molecules from the original glass. 99.99% of the sample glasses will have between 877 and 1123 molecules from the original glass.

I really hope that is right, I think it is,

Eric

P.S. The standard deviation of the binomial distribution = the square root of (the number of trials x the probability of a success x the probability of failure). In this case we have (8*10^24) trials, with a probability of success = (1/8x10^21), and a probability of failure = (1-the prob of success). The z-scores marking off 99% of the distribution are plus and minus 2.58, for 99.99%, z=3.90.

P.P.S. I might be horribly off because of how low the probability of a success is. I think the ridiculously high number of trials mitigates that, but I'm not sure how much.

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 02:22 PM, sarbajit roy <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Steve

" The chances of drawing a glass without any marked molecules is 1/1000, supporting ES's claim."

I don't think the maths works quite that way. Some glasses would have exactly 1000 molecules, some would have 1000 -/+ 1, or 2 .. -/+999. Presuming that the distribution is a "normal" distribution, there would be an exceedingly small probability of getting a glass with zero marked molecules.

Furthermore since there is the equally remote probability that a single glass would contain all the marked molecules (just like we started out with), the distribution would be skewed away from a normal one..

This is just an off the cuff observation. I could brush up my prob-stats if reqd (and eat humble pie if wrong).

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 9:35 AM, Steve Smith <sasmyth@...> wrote:

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
============================================================
FRIAM
Applied
Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St.
John's
College
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at
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Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601

Gary Schiltz-4

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

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

On Apr 27, 2010, at 1:50 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> How about whale piss from Moby Dick? Any of that in the glass of water (a little harder to detect)?

It should be easy to detect, since whale piss is made of the radioactive element Urineium :-)
============================================================
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