With Borders scaling back so many of their stores, I have ended up buying more books than I normally would.
One I picked up is "What is Life?" by Ed Regis.
It is a good short read, although it is now 2 years old, which is a long time given the rate that "artificial life" is moving at. Since the book came out, Craig Ventor claims to have created the first artificial life.
One thing I did not know was that Schrodinger wrote a book with the same title in 1944 which predicted the existence of a DNA-like molecule; Crick actually credits Schrodinger with inspiring some of his early work.
Ed Regis points out that Schrodinger's book never actually defines what life is; that is left hanging. Interestingly, I felt the same about Regis's book. While he argues that life is defined by having an "embedded metabolism" that argument still seems weak. Carl Sagan pointed out, many years ago, that cars have a metabolism, which is hard to argue against. Regis adds the "embedded" component to attempt to differentiate real life; the embedded component implying that the metabolism generates structures within the life form. Where the argument is weak is in the (lack of) definition of structures; hybrid cars regenerate electricity on breaking - does this suffice? Or, you can certainly imagine using the energy generated by the engine being used to produce a "structure," as well as giving the car acceleration.
So, according to Regis, and having done a little searching around the topic, one is left with a feeling that we still do not actually know how to tell if something is alive. There is no definition of "life."
The conclusion is this: When Schrodinger opens up the box to check if the cat is alive or dead....he still can't tell! I wonder what this means to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics? Perhaps "the cat" is both alive and dead forever, but the uncertainty moves from the cat to the observer when the box is opened :-)
One I picked up is "What is Life?" by Ed Regis.
It is a good short read, although it is now 2 years old, which is a long time given the rate that "artificial life" is moving at. Since the book came out, Craig Ventor claims to have created the first artificial life.One thing I did not know was that Schrodinger wrote a book with the same title in 1944 which predicted the existence of a DNA-like molecule; Crick actually credits Schrodinger with inspiring some of his early work.
Ed Regis points out that Schrodinger's book never actually defines what life is; that is left hanging. Interestingly, I felt the same about Regis's book. While he argues that life is defined by having an "embedded metabolism" that argument still seems weak. Carl Sagan pointed out, many years ago, that cars have a metabolism, which is hard to argue against. Regis adds the "embedded" component to attempt to differentiate real life; the embedded component implying that the metabolism generates structures within the life form. Where the argument is weak is in the (lack of) definition of structures; hybrid cars regenerate electricity on breaking - does this suffice? Or, you can certainly imagine using the energy generated by the engine being used to produce a "structure," as well as giving the car acceleration.
So, according to Regis, and having done a little searching around the topic, one is left with a feeling that we still do not actually know how to tell if something is alive. There is no definition of "life."
The conclusion is this: When Schrodinger opens up the box to check if the cat is alive or dead....he still can't tell! I wonder what this means to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics? Perhaps "the cat" is both alive and dead forever, but the uncertainty moves from the cat to the observer when the box is opened :-)
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