August 11, 2019 Sunday
Bedtime Story
Carl Ludwig and His Luminaries
Carl Ludwig and his scintillating
luminaries came to a joint consensus that life and all its processes could be
explained (or perhaps ought to be explained) by fundamental physical laws and
basic chemical reactions that operate upon the inorganic world.
These were the men who were grooming up in
the post-Darwinian world (world after November 24, 1859) when all of a sudden
in one magnificent stroke life had stopped occupying a sacred ground.
Until then “life” had an easy run with
simple childish concepts such as vital force or odic force – all concealed but
alternative forms of the concept of soul that still holds a great appeal to
many of us.
But these men understood that life to be
defined through physical and chemical processes, that is as thermodynamic
systems with an organized molecular structure that is capable of reproducing and
evolving as survival dictates.
Just so that you understand how far we have
come today in understanding biology and life (in stark contrast to how it stood
during the times of Ludwig, Bowditch, Bois-Reymond and others) let me point out
an extract from a famous 1880 lecture of du Bois-Reymond (one of the peers of
Carl Ludwig) that he had delivered to the Berlin Academy of Sciences.
In this lecture he had stated that science
and physiology would never be able to explain these following seven “world
riddles” and that we humans would remain ignorabimus (a word also used by the
mathematician David Hilbert in 1900 at the International Congress of
Mathematics held in Paris but in a contrary manner – ‘In mathematics, there is
no ignorabimus’).
This is a subcategory of general belief
among some that scientific knowledge is limited or has inherent limitations.
Bois-Reymond probably held similar views on
biology and listed out these “seven riddles” or “seven shortcomings” of science
as follows:
(1) The ultimate nature of matter and force
(2) The origin of motion
(3) The origin of life
(4) The apparently teleological
arrangements of nature, not an “absolutely transcendent riddle”
(5) The origin of simple sensations, a
“quiet transcendent” question
(6) The origin of intelligent thought and
language, which might be known if the origins of sensations could be known, and
(7) The question of free will
The question of knowability is fundamental
question raised in epistemology and has troubled greatest of the philosophers
and mathematical logicians in their quest for the search of truth.
The United States Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld made a very interesting statement on February 12, 2002 to the
Department of Defense regarding the Iraqi government and its alleged possession
of weapons of mass destruction:
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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