X-Message-Number: 21787 From: Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 15:37:11 EDT Subject: What is life? --part1_35.3864b70f.2bffd267_boundary Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Assume we are a robot-populated society on a Moonlike world. Could basic science, for example physics, predict the possibility of life? I think no, and if there is a contrary opinion I would be happy to know the arguments. I know that a traditional argument is the complexity problem: Life is an emergent phenomenon coming from the intricacies of the world. I find that a little short and not an explanation. So there must be a true life explanation in basic physical and mathematical terms. I don't think life can be deduced from chemistry, The essential molecules of life work not by their chemical composition but by their shape. Usually, a polypeptide must be folded in a definite way by a chaperone complex before it can be used as an active protein. Very often a defined polypeptide can be folded in many ways, only one is useful. So, life use chemistry to build its elements such proteins, but it is something else beyond that: It is about long range forces giving a definite shape. Nearly all basic science rests on points and displacement of points, that is vectors. To understand life, something else, as surface and volume would be used. P-branes in supersymetric theories do that in a rather unnatural way. I think a large part of the basic concepts of physics must be rebuilt with objects dealing with points, lines (vectors), surfaces and volumes. In mathematics, such structures are known as Clifford's algebras. The basic product in a Clifford's algebra is the sum of the inner and outer product, the cosine and sine product or their generalization in higher dimensions. The Clifford's algebra is the simplest and most fundamental way to introduce long range effects in two or three dimensions. Here, life could be introduced as an effect of basic physics. Such an understanding would go far beyond the actual observations and "cooking recipes" of biology. The effects in basic physics would be important too: For example Special relativity uses the global U(1) symmetry (the local one is taken by electromagnetism). There are scientific paper about a two dimensional relativity using the symmetry U(2). No experiment support them. If we think that the generalization of a vector space is a space built on Clifford's algebra, then the Clifford Relativity would use the group SO (4,2) this is something as spherical rotation in 6 dimensions: 4 space-like and 2 time-like. that symmetry is a subspace of the four dimensional Clifford's algebra. One parametrization of that relativity would introduce a "scale speed": objects would be able to get bigger or smaller. Yvan Bozzonetti. --part1_35.3864b70f.2bffd267_boundary Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=21787