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News & ArtsTuesday, July 14, 2009
Science The End of Static Thinking
Posted by Charles Mudede on Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 8:48 AM
What does this piece of science news reveal?
The interaction represented produced the famous explanation of the structure of DNA, but the model pictured is a stiff snapshot of idealized DNA. As researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Houston note in a report that appears online in the journal Nucleic Acids Research, DNA is not a stiff or static. It is dynamic with high energy. It exists naturally in a slightly underwound state and its status changes in waves generated by normal cell functions such as DNA replication, transcription, repair and recombination.
That something in the nature of humans leads them to initially believe that substances in reality are static. This first concept, however, is always undone by the actuality of things being dynamic. For example, the brain was initially thought to be hard and final, but now the (correct) thinking is that it is soft and plastic. Similar to this tendency is the one that initially thinks that the center is where one is or lives. Also similar to this tendency is the one that initially thinks a place or location is altogether flat. The world was initially thought to be flat, and now we know it is not. The universe has been thought to be flat, but that concept is now deteriorating. The trick is to begin are thinking not with Parmenides but with Heraclitus. It would save our progress (our scientific advancement) time and energy.
2
Nature's form follows function. Flat is relative and can contain within itself eleven dimensions. Understanding our nature paralells our understanding of the universe.
3
Actually, if early man had been focusing on the 11 dimensions of a nonflat universe, that saber toothed tiger would have eaten him up.
So fail again. Simplifying things is essential to survival, then progress, then when you've changed the external reality you can afford to modify your conceptions and start to wonder if that poor tiget feels humiliated when you slaughter it and eat it and whether you should join PETA etc.
So fail again. Simplifying things is essential to survival, then progress, then when you've changed the external reality you can afford to modify your conceptions and start to wonder if that poor tiget feels humiliated when you slaughter it and eat it and whether you should join PETA etc.
4
As Hume pointed out, you are forced to assume that some things are a given, static and immutable to function. Being needs to involve more than existential paralysis.
That said, anyone who assumes that science provides us with an objective viewpoint on the world is fooling themselves just as much as a religious zealot. The universe does what it wants, mathematics and any of the empirical modes of analysis we can come up with, science being the current favorite in the First World, can only model.
I always find it funny and a sign of the creator's small mindedness that science fiction that takes place hundreds of years in the future has people using the same modes of science we use now, only with a few convenient extra theories tacked on. Five hundred or a thousand years from now quantum mechanics and Einsteinian gravity will be amusing footnotes.
That said, anyone who assumes that science provides us with an objective viewpoint on the world is fooling themselves just as much as a religious zealot. The universe does what it wants, mathematics and any of the empirical modes of analysis we can come up with, science being the current favorite in the First World, can only model.
I always find it funny and a sign of the creator's small mindedness that science fiction that takes place hundreds of years in the future has people using the same modes of science we use now, only with a few convenient extra theories tacked on. Five hundred or a thousand years from now quantum mechanics and Einsteinian gravity will be amusing footnotes.
5
SNACK ON MY METADIMENSIONAL BEEF STOCK.
KARLES U REFUTE THYSELF CUZ U PROOOV THAT THE REV-O-LOTION ISN'T POSSIBLŽE....
WHUT CAN A POOR KITTY MAN DOOO?
KARLES U REFUTE THYSELF CUZ U PROOOV THAT THE REV-O-LOTION ISN'T POSSIBLŽE....
WHUT CAN A POOR KITTY MAN DOOO?
6
Perhaps they could have saved some time by starting with Democritus.
One of the problems with philosophers, as you yourself have just demonstrated, is that they think they know something. People know fuck-all about how the universe really is. The things that we think we know, like science, are based on ideas and observation and educated guesses and tricks with numbers.
Take for example the equations that govern lift and drag for airplane wings. They're BULLSHIT, but they're a close enough fit to the experimental data that they work.
Your house isn't built on a foundation; it's built on ideas about what makes things stand up.
"By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color; but in reality only atoms and the void."
One of the problems with philosophers, as you yourself have just demonstrated, is that they think they know something. People know fuck-all about how the universe really is. The things that we think we know, like science, are based on ideas and observation and educated guesses and tricks with numbers.
Take for example the equations that govern lift and drag for airplane wings. They're BULLSHIT, but they're a close enough fit to the experimental data that they work.
Your house isn't built on a foundation; it's built on ideas about what makes things stand up.
7
Um, yeah, that's what science does. It makes simplifying assumptions to start, then incrementally improves them to cover more and more edge cases.
8
It's like a boiling stew inside your cells, with so much going on. You've got misreads, missense, folding errors, and silencing from DNA/RNA and fragments that it's hard enough just trying to keep track of the chains and multiple pathways your cells use to do things - and talk about redundant and non-optimal pathways.
It never really sits all nice and neat and coiled. Unless you freeze it. And I mean really really freeze it way down in the Kelvin range.
It never really sits all nice and neat and coiled. Unless you freeze it. And I mean really really freeze it way down in the Kelvin range.
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