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25 Oct 2024 Book Reviews
Anaximander and the Birth of Science, by Carlo Rovelli Anaximander, the pre-socratic Greek philosopher, was the inventor of science, according to Carlo Rovelli, a physicist and science writer. Born in Miletus in 610 BCE, Anaximander was a disciple of Thales, who thought all things are made or water. Anaximander went further, saying, "Rainwater is water from the sea and rivers that evaporates because of the Sun's heat." This was new because it did not require the agency of the gods. It was consistent with his principle of "necessity," which I understand as cause-and-effect. He thought that Earth was a finite body floating freely in space, and, "The Earth was originally covered in water, which slowly dried up." He thought all animals evolved from fishlike creatures. He was the first thinker to write in prose, not verse. He drew the first map of the (Mediterranean-centered) world.

Rovelli's history of science, ranging from Pythagoras and Parmenides to Schrodinger and Einstein, is affirming, but slightly too optimistic for me. (Occasionally, theories need discarding.) With wide scholarship, he believes that science can prosper without religion, and he speculates about the origin and pervasiveness of religion. Overall, it's a very readable review of the history of western scientific thought. I especially enjoy the boldness and clairvoyance of some early scientists.

Anaximander and the Birth of Science, by Carlo Rovelli,
Penguin Random House, 28 Feb 2023.
What Difference Does It Make? acknowledges 20th century nihilism and suggests a genetic basis for religion.

17 Oct 2024
There is 'essentially a bottomless pit' of viruses to discover — Artem Babaian, computational virologist, U. Toronto
"AI scans RNA 'dark matter' and uncovers 70,000 new viruses," by Smriti Mallapaty,
Nature, 11 Oct 2024.

16 Oct 2024 Book Reviews
Chandra Wickramasinghe thinks cultural prejudice has prevented open consideration of panspermia. Otherwise, its strong supporting evidence would have entitled it to a more prominent place in our textbooks. In a 9-page paper, he reminds us that panspermia and other profound new ideas have histories of neglect or even prejudicial exclusion.
"Panspermia versus Abiogenesis: A Clash of Cultures," by Chandra Wickramasinghe, doi:10.31275/20222199, Journal of Scientific Exploration [
local pdf], 22 May 2022.
Giordano Bruno by Ingred D. Rowland

Giordano Bruno by Ingred D. Rowland reminds us that active opposition to unorthodox scientific ideas is not new. With excellent scholarship and fluent translation, Rowland tells the story of this brilliant, difficult, defrocked monk. Born in 1548, educated in Naples, he perfected a system of memorizing that amazed aristocrats and bishops. He lectured and turored in philosophy, science and theology, not omitting his own radical ideas — which got him in trouble with the catholic church. Facing excommunication, he absconded to Paris, Oxford, and various cities in Germany, seldom staying very long. Ultimately he was arrested for heresy in Padua and brought to Rome for trial. He would not abjure his beliefs, such as that God will forgive all sinners, so he was condemned and burned alive in 1600. Rowland's biography is thoroughly researched, engaging, edifying, lyrical, and highly recommended.

Among Bruno's unorthodox tenets was that the universe is infinite and contains countless inhabited worlds. He thought that anything less would diminish the grandeur of God. Supporting evidence was sparse, but the basic cosmology, with a spherical Earth orbiting the sun, was at least as old as Aristarchus. Bruno used thought experiments to ask, for example, how could the entire sky rotate around our little world? Soon after he was gone, Galilleo saw that Jupiter had four moons, and the case became much stronger. Interestingly, Kepler thought that Bruno's speculations were more inspired than Galileo's observations. And Galileo, acutely aware of Bruno's fate, did abjure his own beliefs.

Giordano Bruno: Philosopher / Heretic, by Ingred D. Rowland, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 19 Aug 2008.
Thanks Thanks for the book, Genevieve Christy.

10 Oct 2024 What'sNEW about HGT
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is an important source of novelty in eukaryotic genomes. (This admission has taken too long.) ...bacterial HGTs ...may contribute to the striking evolutionary success of diatoms.
"Phylogenomic fingerprinting of tempo and functions of horizontal gene transfer within ochrophytes," by Richard G. Dorrell et al,
10.1073/pnas.2009974118, PNAS, 08 Jan 2021; and commentary: Institut Curie, 25 Jan 2021.
Viruses... has lots about HGT.

10 Oct 2024
Micro-RNAs are seen to play a role in gene regulation, even in the human genome. This has potentially huge implications for medicine. Two genomicists who first observed them are now awarded Nobel prizes. Their research is one example of the growth and far reach of genomics. Genomicists may observe new types of genetic operators and learn what roles they play. They may also see which sequences are "new," and infer where they came from and when they were installed. But in my observation, neo-darwinism offers no guidance or insight, and is most often surprised by the discoveries.
"Discovery in Tiny Worm Leads to Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine...,"
The New York Times, 07 Oct 2024.
"'Out of the blue' discovery of RNAs that regulate genes wins Nobel," Science, 07 Oct 2024.
"Medicine Nobel awarded for gene-regulating 'microRNAs'," Nature, 07 Oct 2024.
"Cell papers on discovery of microRNA recognized by 2024 Nobel Prize...," Cell, 08 Oct 2024.
Robust Software Management lists some of life's features that dumbfound today's theory of evolution.
06 Jan 2017: Gary Ruvkun, one of the new Nobelists, also has thoughts about panspermia and the origin-of-life.

07 Oct 2024 Book Reviews
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? by Thomas Nagel Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. That's how this little book of two essays begins. The first essay was first published with the same title fifty years ago, and it became influential. Now, in the second essay, "Further Thoughts: The Psychophysical Nexus," Nagel enhances and restates his case for a monistic account of the apparent mind-body dualism. He suggests the two are perhaps ...inseparable aspects of some one thing, for which we do not at present have a concept....

Admittedly, it's not my area. I have never understood exactly what "the problem of consciousness" is. May I innocently suggest that human consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, ultimately, of our genetic programming. This allows us to place consciousness on a separate analytical plane from that of the human body, without denying strict materialism. For an analogy, the programming underlying Conway's Game of Life yields a rich taxonomy of scurrying and flying screen images, yet these would be he impossible to anticipate from even a complete understanding of the programming.

Actually, Nagel briefly considers this, yet he prefers a more radical view. Perhaps [conscious states] are emergent, relative to the properties of atoms or molecules. But if they are not, this view would imply that the fundamental constituents of the world, out of which everything is composed, are neither physical nor mental but something more basic. I'm too conservative for that. Still, Nagel is thought-provoking and knows his subject.

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? by Thomas Nagel, ISBN:9780197752821,
Oxford University Press, 2024.
10 Feb 2013: review of Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel, 2012.
12 Apr 2023: a glimpse of Conway's Gane of Life with an example of a surprising image (click to animate).
"A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications," by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, Aug 2024. Categorizes ~200 different approaches to the subject.

01 Oct 2024 Book Reviews
Quanta and Fields by Sean M. Carroll There is certainly room for future generations to clarify the situation in inportant ways. I welcome this admssion in Quanta and Fields, a new book by physicist Sean M. Carroll. He is far more comfortable with quantum theory (QT) than the author of the book I reviewed yesterday. For example, Carroll does not much worry about the difference between observing a phenomenon, and disturbing/affecting it. But the subatomic details of QT get very deep, mathematical discussion. If you are interested and well-informed already, this book will be useful.

Both books acknowledge that QT is incomplete. Whereas Kay thinks the underlying philosophy is entirely nonsensical, Carroll only admits that QT is puzzling. But, as he amply demonstrates, it works! The theory of evolution has the opposite crisis. The underlying philosophy — neo-darwinian mutation and selection — is clear enough, but it doesn't work!

Quanta and Fields: The Biggest Ideas in the Universe by Sean M. Carroll,
Penguin Random House, 01 May 2024.
Testing Darwinism... explains that the theory of evolution does not pass basic tests.

30 Sep 2024 Book Reviews
Escape from Shadow Physics, by Adam Forrest Kay Quantum Theory has been a secondary preoccupation of mine since I was in college. I have never been satisfied with the prevailing Copenhagen interpretation — and neither has Adam Forrest Kay. His new book forcefully explains why dissatisfaction is warranted, with a thorough history of how the subject developed, and how it took a very wrong and lasting turn. I was surprised to realize that there was murkiness under the science I learned in high school. I originally thought that spin parity could be explained without entanglement. Ultimately I learned that Bell's inequality proves that local hidden variables cannot be the solution. (On this point Kay thinks otherwise, I believe.)

Kay advocates a speculative research avenue to restore clarity and logic to the subject. He starts by noticing another medium that also exhibits both wave and particle phenomena simultaneously, called hydrodynamic quantum analogues (HQA). It would be a return to the "pilot-wave" theory of DeBroglie and Bohm. I entrely support imaginative exploration of this sort, but I did not carefully follow his endorsement of this model. It reminded me of an analogy with gears and vortices of James Clak Maxwell's, when he was a student. For quantum theory, I suspect that the historical success of both wave and particle physics may have blinded us to an underlying reality that requires concepts and vocabulary that we do not currently have.

For history of quantum theory, Kay is excellent. He also digresses to other subjects where science went wrong, such as the phlogiston theory, where he writes, "Because fake problems are hard to solve, the way out is to drop them." I thought immedately of today's theory of evolution, where the hardest questions — how did this or that genetic program originate? — apparently have been dropped.

Escape from Shadow Physics: The Quest to End the Dark Ages of Quantum Theory by Adam Forrest Kay, 423 pages, ISBN:1399609599,
Basic Books, 18 Jun 2024.
Robust Software Management lists examples of genetic programs that look unaccountable.
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