Ciwan wrote:mraltair wrote:That's why I love Cox (Yes, I know what I said) he's so arrogantly proud of physics he doesn't hesitate to insult the other sciences and label them meta-sciences, you can almost see his tongue burrowing through his cheek but you can tell part of him believes it.
Coming back to Prof. Cox's point about one day not needing Chemistry and Biology ... I am a bit sceptical. Don't get me wrong, I love the guy.
But simply thinking of Biology and Chemistry on a quantum level might not be so productive to our understanding of such topics. Sure, if you come down to it, they might all be quarks and the such, but how fruitful is the outlook when trying to explain certain aspects of biology.
What do you think .. am I wrong?
Agree with that. Technically, yes, he's correct that everything's all ultimately reducible to basic physics, but it will never be practical to do so. He speaks of chemistry and biology, but why stop there? How about architecture? Why not dispense with the notion of "bricks" and "pillars" and simply go about designing buildings on the level of individual strings? And back to biology, does it make more sense to refer to something as a "cell" or a [insert here a 400,000 page document describing the mathematical limitations a very large, complex assortment of strings must conform to in order to qualify as what we have previously simply described as a "cell"]. Heirarchies of scale exist for the reason that describing complex phenomena in terms of the most basic interactions will always be prohibitively computationally expensive, which makes attempting to do so extremely pointless when we have the capacity to
greatly simplify things and still get an extremely accurate depiction of reality. The other thing is that ultimately, when describing something such as an organism, it doesn't really matter what's going on at the most fundamental levels of physics. What the sciences that deal with higher levels of complexity of matter ultimately deal with is empirical investigation of
how these complex entities behave, rather than why they behave that way at the most fundamental level. When studying cells, and empirically observing them behaving in a particular way, it doesn't really matter whether this is ultimately due to the vibrations of strings, invisible leprehauns or psychic emanations, so long as the overall behaviour on that level of scale is the same. What's happening 'under the hood' so to speak isn't all that relevant - it's simply the empirical observations at that level of scale that matter.
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