Better late than NEVER, Roger. thanks for your input.
I am of course, as a soft scientist, fascinated by the soft underbelly of
hard science.
It would be great to have you back at Friam again. Hywl did a magnificent
job as our stand in physical chemist, but I am sure he would be grateful
for some assistance. There is an early group that has started coming at 9
pretty promptly, which includes Hywl, me, Frank, Carl, Paul, and... and
..... (damn!) others who are my best friends in all the world but whose
names just wont COME right now. (Sorry. Don't you HATE when that
happens.) Anyway, if time is the issue, if you came at nine next Friday,
we could promise to have your mind sucked totally dry and send you on your
way by ten.
Nick
> [Original Message]
> From: Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org>
> To: <wedtech at redfish.com>
> Date: 6/17/2007 3:01:57 PM
> Subject: Re: [WedTech] A complexity-minded chemist
>
> Very belatedly my $0.02 worth.
>
> I think that 2 H2 + O2 -> 2 H2O, and chemistry in general, are good
> examples of emergence, in the sense of properties emerging that were
> not predicted or even in principle predictable.
>
> There is nothing that I know of in physics or chemistry that has yet
> modeled the properties of water from first principles, and the
> modeling that is done is so semi-empirical, in the sense of hacking in
> tweaks to improve the fit to reality, that it's nearly as embarrassing
> as social science models.
>
> And that's true for most chemistry. While we may have discovered that
> molecules are made of atoms, and that atoms are made of positively
> charged nuclei and negatively charged electrons, and that the
> electrostatic attraction between the electrons and the nuclei holds
> molecules together, most of what we know about the properties of
> molecules in bulk is from observation.
>
> I was even thinking of beating up Henshaw today because chemistry as
> the reduction of substance to molecules which are systems of atoms
> subject to internal relations known as bonds and non-bonded
> interactions, makes network science, at nearly 200 years of age, one
> of the older exercises in reductionist explanation.
>
> -- rec --
>
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