January 03, 2019 Thursday
Bedtime Story
Interdisciplinary Science of Biophysics
In the study of action potential biology was broken down in the great tradition of methodological and theoretical reductionism to physics, chemistry and recording of date in the language mathematics.
In fact the Nobel Prize in Physiology and
Medicine of 1991 was given to men who were masters of interdisciplinary science
of biophysics which covers all scales of biological organization from molecular
to organismic to populations.
Note the recurring theme of “biological
organization” in our bedtime stories.
While biophysics seems apparently to be
hybrid of just two sciences of biology and physics it is factually a science
with almost limitless boundaries having components of sciences as diverse as
biochemistry, molecular biology, physical chemistry, physiology,
nanotechnology, bioengineering, computational biology, biomechanics,
developmental biology, systems biology among others.
It is becoming increasing clear to us, and
Mon Ami states so vehemently each time I converse with him, that the
breakthroughs in problems that confronts us such as the problem of
consciousness will come from scientists with interdisciplinary expertise such
as mathematics, computer science, neuroscience, and most surprising of all
expertise in games such as chess and Go.
Discoveries that are made today in
astrophysics and cosmology require multiple teams consisting of several
scientists and engineers working in different nations and collecting data from
telescopes that are not even located on our planet.
Mon Ami often likes to give the example of
Demis Hassabis a child prodigy in chess who was born to a Greek Cypriot father
and Chinese Singaporean mother who got the intellectually-stimulating and
fertile ground of North London to seed his mind with top class education.
Immense lot of chance factors and genetics
reshuffling went in that resulted in the lottery of this brilliant mind as you
can see from his biological parentage.
This intelligent brain of Demis Hassabis
that rose out of series of rare chance events occurring over millions of years
now hopes to “solve intelligence”.
Even if Hassabis does not achieve what he
plans out to do, his work will stimulate others to attack the problem by merely
giving them the impetus that the problem is solvable.
It is no more a problem of if but simply
when.
To be more concrete Hassabis hopes to merge
the knowledge from neuroscience and machine learning and incorporating them
into the latest development of the computing hardware to create increasingly
powerful general-purpose learning algorithms.
Hassabis and his team hope to exploit these
powerful general-purpose learning algorithms to create artificial general
intelligence or AGI.
AGI essentially means creating machines
that intellectually would be as intelligent as human (whether we are
intelligent I often wonder); meaning machines capable of reasoning, learning,
planning, representing knowledge and using natural language to attain a defined
goal.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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