¿Cómo es posible la ciencia?
En cuanto a los niveles de las teorías, pienso que para explicar un átomo es necesario conocer la interacción de protones, neutrones y electrones, por lo menos, sin necesidad de saber de quarks. Una vez los quarks se unen en un protón ya no es del todo necesario saber su composición, ya es como un ladrillo, se dio un salto cualitativo (un fenómenos emergente). Lo mismo pasa con las moléculas, donde ya necesitamos saber más de átomos que de partículas elementales. Y así sucesivamente. Si llegamos a la biología, tenemos otro tipo de fenómenos nuevos que no requieren saber de quarks o átomos. Sin embargo, hay fenómenos de carácter macro influenciados por fenómenos micro que requieren un estudio especial (por ejemplo, el cáncer).
How does math make the complex cosmos understandable?
Albert Einstein once wrote, “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”
unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in biology
such very simple mathematics has such great explanatory power
somehow these scales get separated through something which we typically call emergence. The great benefit of that is that we don’t have to solve everything all the way down in order to understand something
physicists call this universality
But these different levels of description that I alluded to, you know, all of these are different ways of describing something at different length and time and space scales.
you don’t need to worry about what happened below
the only reason you can do this sort of calculation is because there’s these separations of scales and energy and time and space
may be that there’s some areas of science where that is not true. And then you may not be able to be successful in those things.
the reason physics is so successful is because we only ask very simple questions.
First of all, let me ask the easy questions, the ones that don’t depend on too much. First I understand those things, and then later on we’ll get to the other ones
not everything depends on everything else
You thought you could do science, biology in this case, using the same sort of elegant mathematical principles that are so powerful in physics, but you completely get egg on your face when you try them, without really understanding more about the scientific phenomena that are relevant in biology.
all science starts with asking questions. And if you don’t know how to ask questions, you can’t do science.
trying to understand how these machines are able to do so much more than what they were designed to do
there’s great opportunity to use them to solve problems, which are very, very hard