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Original Message -----
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,