On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said:

…Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975

and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.

Harry Kroto

Nick Gathergood, David-Birkett, Harry-Kroto

I have attempted to respond to all of Dr. Kroto’s friends arguments and I have posted my responses one per week for over a year now. Here are some of my earlier posts:

Arif Ahmed, Sir David Attenborough, Mark Balaguer, Patricia Churchland, Aaron Ciechanover, Noam Chomsky,Alan Dershowitz, Hubert Dreyfus, Bart Ehrman, Stephan Feuchtwang, David Friend,  Riccardo Giacconi, Ivar Giaever , Roy Glauber, Rebecca Goldstein, David J. Gross,  Brian Greene, Susan Greenfield, Stephen F Gudeman,  Alan Guth, Jonathan Haidt, Hermann Hauser, Roald Hoffmann,  Bruce Hood, Herbert Huppert,  Gareth Stedman Jones, Shelly Kagan, Michio Kaku,  Stuart Kauffman, George Lakoff,  Lawrence Krauss, Harry Kroto, Elizabeth Loftus,  Alan Macfarlane, Peter Millican, Marvin Minsky, Leonard Mlodinow,  Yujin Nagasawa, Alva Noe, Douglas Osheroff,   Saul Perlmutter, Herman Philipse,  Robert M. Price, Lisa Randall, Lord Martin Rees,  Oliver Sacks, John Searle, Marcus du Sautoy, Simon Schaffer, J. L. Schellenberg,   Lee Silver,  Peter Singer,  Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Ronald de Sousa, Victor Stenger, Barry Supple,   Leonard Susskind, Raymond Tallis, Neil deGrasse Tyson,  .Alexander Vilenkin, Sir John Walker, Frank Wilczek, Steven Weinberg, and  Lewis Wolpert,

It is with a heavy heart that I blog this morning about Lisa Jardine. I had composed this post several months ago and this morning I googled her name and discovered that she had passed away on October 25, 2015. I had just written her the month before she passed away. I felt like I knew her personally after listening twice to Alan MacFarlane’s  in-depth interview of her (videos below). Needless to say I did away with my previous post and did it all over again. She lived a truly amazing life and her parents were very exceptional people.  (On March 21, 2014 I did a post on her father Jacob Bronowski.)

(Jacob Bronowski with his daughter in 1961)

Lisa Jardine

Founding Director (1944 – 2015)

Lisa Jardine CBE FRS was Professor of Renaissance Studies at University College London and Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, as well as theUCL Centre for Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Projects. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Honorary Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and Jesus College, Cambridge. She held honorary doctorates of Letters from the University of St Andrews, Sheffield Hallam University and the Open University, and an honorary doctorate of Science from the University of Aberdeen.

She was a Trustee of the V&A Museum for eight years, and was for five years a member of the Council of the Royal Institution in London. She was Patron of the Archives & Records Association and the Orange Prize. For the academic year 2007-8 she was seconded to the Royal Society in London as Expert Advisor to its Collections. From 2008 to 2014 she served as Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority – the UK government regulator for assisted reproduction. In December 2011 she was appointed a Director of The National Archives. In November 2011 she was appointed an Honorary Bencher of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple. In 2013-14 she served as President of the British Science Association, which in 2012 made her an Honorary Fellow. In 2015, she was to her great delight elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

Lisa Jardine published over fifty scholarly articles in refereed journals and books, and seventeen full-length books, both for an academic and for a general readership, a number of them in co-authorship with others. She was the author of several best-selling general books, including Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, and biographies of Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke. Her book on Anglo-Dutch reciprocal influence in the seventeenth century, entitled Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory, published by HarperCollins UK in 2008 and HarperCollins USA in 2009 won the prestigious Cundill International Prize in History. Her last book, a collection of essays entitled Temptation in the Archives, was published by UCL Press as a freely available open access book.

Wikipedia notes:

Lisa Jardine

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lisa Jardine
Jardine in 2015, portrait from the Royal Society
Born	Lisa Anne Bronowski 12 April 1944 Oxford, England
Died	25 October 2015 (aged 71)[1]
Cause of death	Cancer
Nationality	British
Alma mater	University of Cambridge (BA, MA, PhD) University of Essex (MA)
Occupation	Historian
Employer	Queen Mary University of London University College London
Spouse(s)	Nick Jardine (m. 1969; dissolved 1979) John Robert Hare (m. 1982)
Children	2 sons, 1 daughter[2]
Parent(s)	Jacob Bronowski Rita Coblentz
Awards	CBE (2005) PhD FRS (2015)[3][4]
Website	www.livesandletters.ac.uk/people/lisa-jardine
Lisa Jardine’s voice MENU 0:00 Recorded December 2008 from the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time

Lisa Anne Jardine, CBE FRS^[3] FRHistS (née Bronowski; 12 April 1944 – 25 October 2015) was a British historian of the early modern period. From 1990 to 2011, she was Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies^[5] and Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary University of London. From 2008 to January 2014 she was Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA).^{[6][7][8][9][10]}

Jardine was a Member of Council of the Royal Institution, until 2009. On 1 September 2012, she relocated with her research centre and staff toUniversity College London (UCL) to become founding director of its Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities.^[1]

Education and early life[edit]

Jardine was born on 12 April 1944 in Oxford,^[2][11] the eldest child of Jacob Bronowski and the sculptor Rita Coblentz.^[12] Her father was the subject of herConway Memorial Lecture, “Things I Never Knew About My Father”, delivered at the Conway Hall Ethical Society on 26 June 2014.

Jardine was educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Newnham College, Cambridge, and the University of Essex.^[2] For two years she took theCambridge Mathematical Tripos before, in her final year and under the influence of Raymond Williams, she read English. She studied for an MA in the Literary Theory of Translation with Professor Donald Davie at the University of Essex. She was awarded a PhD from the University of Cambridge with a dissertation on Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (subsequently published by Cambridge University Press).^{[citation needed]}

Career and research[edit]

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Jardine was Professor of Renaissance Studies at University College, London, where she was Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities and Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. She was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Honorary Fellow of King’s College, and of Jesus College, Cambridge.

She was a Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum for eight years, and was for five years a member of the Council of the Royal Institution in London. She was Patron of the Archives and Records Association and the Orange Prize. For the academic year 2007–08 she was seconded to the Royal Society in London as Expert Advisor to its Collections. She was a Trustee of the Chelsea Physic Garden.^[4]

From 2008 to Jan 2014, Jardine served as Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority – the UK government regulator for assisted reproduction. In December 2011 she was appointed a Director of The National Archives.

Jardine published more than 50 scholarly articles in refereed journals and books, and 17 full-length books, both for an academic and for a general readership, a number of them in co-authorship with others (including Professor Anthony Grafton, Professor Alan Stewart and Professor Julia Swindells). She is the author of several best-selling general books, including Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, and biographies of Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke. Her book on Anglo-Dutch reciprocal influence in the 17th century, entitled Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory, published by HarperCollins UK in 2008 and HarperCollins USA in 2009, won the prestigious Cundill International Prize in History.

Jardine wrote and reviewed widely for the media, and presented and appeared regularly on arts, history and current affairs programmes for TV and radio. She was a regular writer and presenter of A Point of View, on BBC Radio 4: a book of the first two series of her talks was published by Preface Publishing in March 2008 and a second in 2009. She judged the 1996 Whitbread Prize for fiction, the 1999 Guardian First Book Award, the 2000 Orwell Prize and was Chair of Judges for the 1997 Orange Prize and the 2002 Man Booker Prize.

During the first semester of the 2008/9 academic year, Jardine was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, jointly sponsored by NIAS and the Royal Library in The Hague. From 2009 to 2010, she was a Scaliger Visiting Fellow at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and held the Sarton Chair and received the Sarton Medal at Ghent University in Belgium. She sat for several years on the prestigious Apeldoorn British Dutch Conference Steering Board, and was a member of the Recommendation Committee Stichting Huygens Tentoonstelling Foundation, set up to oversee the Constantijn and Christian Huygens Exhibition in the Grote Kerk in The Hague in 2013.

In June 2015 she was the guest on BBC Radio 4‘s Desert Island Discs. Her musical choices included “Why” by Annie Lennox, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” by Bob Dylan and “Once in a Lifetime” byTalking Heads. Her book choice was the full 12 volumes of P.S. Allen’s Latin Letters of Erasmus of Rotterdam.^[13]

She was the author of many books, both scholarly and general, including The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolutionand On a Grander Scale: the Outstanding Career of Sir Christopher Wren. Her 2008 book Going Dutch won the 2009 Cundill Prize in History at McGill University, the world’s premier history book prize worth $75,000. On 26 January 2011, Jardine appeared in a BBC documentary investigating her father’s life and the history of science in the 20th century.^[14]

She was noted for her cross-disciplinary approach to intellectual history and has been called “the pre-eminent historian of the scientific method.” ^[15][16] On her death in October 2015, she was celebrated for her commitment to her students, and “her deep empathy for outsiders of all kinds—rebels, misfits and migrants.” ^[15][17][18]

Awards and honours[edit]

Jardine was President of the Antiquarian Horological Society,^[29] a learned society focused on matters relating to the art and history of time measurement.

Jardine was a former chairman of the governing body at Westminster City School for Boys in London (which her younger son attended), and a former Chair of the Curriculum Committee on the governing body of St Marylebone Church of England School for Girls also in London. She was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015.^[4] Her certificate of election reads:

“

Lisa Jardine, CBE is Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities at UCL. Previously she spent 23 years at Queen Mary, University of London, serving as Head of the English Department, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and as Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies. In her earlier career, after a degree in mathematics and English and a PhD on Francis Bacon, she taught at the Warburg Institute, Cornell University and then for 12 years at Cambridge.She is a prolific and distinguished historian, with a special interest in the history of science, and has had wide impact on public life through her broadcasts and general writings, and her service on many public bodies. Among her 20 books, several of which have won major awards, are works on Bacon, Erasmus, Wren and Hooke. She has advised the Society on its archives, and, during a period of formal secondment to the Society, she edited the on-line ‘Hooke Folio’, published in 2007; she gave the Wilkins Lecture in 2003. She is in great demand as a lecturer, and has given Tanner Lectures in both Cambridge and Yale. She has received numerous honorary doctorates and fellowships; in 2012 she received the British Academy President’s Medal. She has served on the Arts and Humanities Research Council and as Trustee of the V and A Museum. In 2008 she was appointed chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HEFA). She is the 2012/13 President of the British Science Association – a signal honour for a historian – and continues as a frequent broadcaster, noted for her ‘Points of View’ on Radio 4 and most recently for her ‘Seven ages of science’ series. For nearly four decades, Lisa Jardine has combined high-level scholarship with extensive outreach, and has been extraordinarily energetic and effective in spanning the ‘two cultures’. She has, in particular, been an enthusiastic advocate of the Society; election as an Honorary Fellow is recognition that she richly deserves and would deeply appreciate.[3]

”

Jardine held honorary doctorates of Letters from the University of St Andrews, Sheffield Hallam University and the Open University, and an honorary doctorate of Science from the University of Aberdeen.^[7] In November 2011, she was made an Honorary Bencher of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple. She was awarded the Francis Bacon Award in the History of Science by theCalifornia Institute of Technology in 2012, and collected the Bacon Medal for this award at the annual History of Science Society meeting in San Diego in September 2012. In November 2012 she received the British Academy President’s Medal. In 2013–14 she served as President of the British Science Association, which in 2012 made her an Honorary Fellow.

Personal life[edit]

In 1969, she married the scientist Nicholas Jardine,^[30] with whom she had a son and a daughter. Their marriage was dissolved in 1979.^[2][31] In 1982, she married the architect John Hare,^[32] with whom she had one son.^[2][31] She was the cousin of television director Laurence Moody and actress Clare Lawrence Moody.

Jardine died of cancer on 25 October 2015, aged 71.^{[33][34][35][36]}

• In  the third video below in the 113th clip in this series are her words and  my response is below them. 

50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)

Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)

A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)

____________________________________________

The Case for God? (Part 1 of 2)

The Case for God? (Part 2 of 2)

Interview of Lisa Jardine, part one

_____Quote from Dr. Jardine:

“When I got my exhibition to Cheltenham, which is a Church of England foundation, I had to go in on the Jewish quota; there were 800 girls in the school and eight Jews (there were eight Catholics too); what that meant was when I became a boarder, when they went to chapel, I had Hebrew lessons; so most of my religious education I owe to Cheltenham Ladies College; I received no religious training of any sort from my family, but because of Cheltenham I received a full Jewish training and the ability to read classical Hebrew; I did during that period fast on one Day of Atonement and that is the closest I have ever come to religious practice… we are a secular family…”

I would describe this quote as a confessional statement of agnosticism or atheism and my response would be to point to a very obvious fact that many secularists have not examined thoroughly and that is the question “Is the Bible historically accurate?”Here are some of the posts I have done in the past on the subject: 1. The Babylonian Chronicle, of Nebuchadnezzars Siege of Jerusalem, 2. Hezekiah’s Siloam Tunnel Inscription. 3. Taylor Prism (Sennacherib Hexagonal Prism), 4. Biblical Cities Attested Archaeologically. 5. The Discovery of the Hittites, 6.Shishak Smiting His Captives, 7. Moabite Stone, 8. Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, 9A Verification of places in Gospel of John and Book of Acts., 9B Discovery of Ebla Tablets. 10. Cyrus Cylinder, 11. Puru “The lot of Yahali” 9th Century B.C.E., 12. The Uzziah Tablet Inscription, 13. The Pilate Inscription, 14. Caiaphas Ossuary, 14 B Pontius Pilate Part 2, 14c. Three greatest American Archaeologists moved to accept Bible’s accuracy through archaeology., 

Without God in the picture you should embrace NIHILISM. That is exactly was the band KANSAS meant in their huge hit DUST IN THE WIND. Actually two members of KANSAS later put their faith in Christ. You can hear DAVE HOPE and Kerry Livgren’s stories from this youtube link:

(part 1 ten minutes)

(part 2 ten minutes)

Kansas – Dust in the Wind (Official Video)

_____________________________

In September of last year I wrote Professor Jardine the following letter and mailed it on the 28th of September. I have no idea if she ever got a chance to read it.

September 28, 2015

Professor Lisa Jardine, Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority
London,

Dear Dr. Jardine,

I watched the film series Ascent of Man and it motivated me to dig deeper concerning the science that deals with our origin. Since I am a Christian I did also take a look at both sides of the issue. That led me ultimately to the writings of Francis Schaeffer who I am going to quote today. I wish your father had a chance to live longer and I am sorry that you lost him after his 66th birthday. He was truly an outstanding communicator and I was always captivated by his works.

I must tell you how much I enjoyed your in-depth interview that you gave Dr. Alan Macfarlane. His series of interviews have been helpful to me and I wish more people would take time to ask questions as he does. Thank for you taking the time to do that interview. 

Recently I had the opportunity to come across a very interesting article by Michael Polanyi, LIFE TRANSCENDING PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY, in the magazine CHEMICAL AND ENGINEERING NEWS, August 21, 1967, and I also got hold of a 1968 talk by Francis Schaeffer based on this article. Polanyi’s son John actually won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. This article by Michael Polanyi concerns Francis Crick and James Watson and their discovery of DNA in 1953. Polanyi noted:

Mechanisms, whether man-made or morphological, are boundary conditions harnessing the laws of in
animate nature, being themselves irreducible to those laws. The pattern of organic bases in DNA which functions as a genetic code is a boundary condition irreducible to physics and chemistry. Further controlling principles of life may be represented as a hierarchy of boundary conditions extending, in the case of man, to consciousness and responsibility.

I would like to send you a CD copy of this talk because I thought you may find it very interesting. It includes references to not only James D. Watson, and Francis Crick but also  Maurice Wilkins, Erwin Schrodinger, J.S. Haldane (his son was the famous J.B.S. Haldane), Peter Medawar, and Barry Commoner. I WONDER IF YOU EVER HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO RUN ACROSS THESE MEN OR ANY OF THEIR FORMER STUDENTS?

Below is a portion of the transcript from the CD and Michael Polanyi’s words are in italics while Francis Schaeffer’s words are not:

My account of the situation will seem to oscillate in several directions, and I shall set out, therefore, its stages in order. 

I shall show that:

1. Commoner’s criteria of irreducibility to physics and chemistry are incomplete; they are necessary but not sufficient conditions of it. 
2. Machines are irreducible to physics and chemistry. 
3. By virtue of the principle of boundary control, mechanistic structures of living beings appear to be likewise irreducible. 

4. The structure of DNA, which according to Watson and Crick controls heredity, is not explicable by physics and chemistry. 

5. Assuming that morphological differentiation reflects the information content of DNA, we can prove that the morphology of living beings forms a boundary condition which, as such, is not explicable by physics and chemistry (the suggestion arrived at in the third item). 

…Now, from machines let us pass on to books and other means of communication. Nothing is said about the content of a book by its physical-chemical topography. All  objects conveying information are irreducible to the terms of physics and chemistry. 

I could throw the article away for some of you that understand what DNA is because Polanyi has shot Francis Crick’s theory through the head and its dead. The argument is: Suppose someone describes a book to you and they only describe it in terms of its physical and chemical properties. What then do you know about the information transmitted by the book? Zero!! Somebody could run a chemical analysis of the book but it would carry nothing about the information contained in the book. That is impossible. This is something added to the chemical and physical properties.

Might machines and machine-like aspects of living things not be shown one day to result from the working of physical or chemical laws? 

We can exclude this for machines. Our incapacity to define machines and their functions in terms of physics and chemistry is due to a manifest impossibility, for machines are shaped by man and can never be produced by the spontaneous equilibration of their material. But morphological structures are not shaped by man, could they not grow to maturity by the working of purely physical-chemical laws? 

So he says it is inconceivable for machines but what about the machine-like parts of man.

Such a highly improbable arrangement of particles is not shaped by the forces of physics and chemistry. It constitutes a boundary condition, which as such transcends the laws of physics and chemistry. 

This of course is his big argument.

Laplace thought we would know all that can be known in the world if we knew the course of its atoms. But for this he required a complete map of atomic positions and velocities to start with. Physics is dumb without the gift of boundary conditions, forming its frame; and this frame is not determined by the laws of physics. 

Polanyi says here you need to know these boundary conditions and without this physics is dumb and the frame is not determined by the laws of physics. There is something else in the structure of what is there. Thinking of my constant emphasis on Jean Paul Sartre’s statement “the basic philosophic question is not that something is there rather than nothing being there.”

Then Albert Einstein’s statement “the universe is like a well formulated word puzzle and only one word fits.” The world has a form but it is so definite that it is like a well formulated word puzzle. Two steps in the structure of the universe. First, something is there that must be explained. Second, the niceness of its form and its order.

What Polanyi is saying is if you are going to understand what is there you must not only understand merely the chemical and physical laws but you have to be faced with the boundary conditions which constitutes the form. Do you understand? For some of you this may be a little abstract but it won’t be abstract if you get into a discussion with your university friends if you can really get a hold of it.

The boundary conditions of the physical-chemical changes taking place in a machine are the structual and operational principles of the machine. We say therefore that the laws of inanimate nature operate in a machine under the control of operational principles that constitute (or determine) the boundaries. Such a system is clearly under dual control. 

In the machine made by man you have a dual control. Firstly, the devices of engineering, that is how you are going to make it. For instance, your plans for making a bridge or watch. Secondly,  the laws of natural science. The laws of physics and chemistry and the material you use to make the bridge or watch.

________

Thank you for your time. I know how busy you are and I want to thank you for taking the time to read this letter.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher,

P.O. Box 23416, Little Rock, AR 72221, United States, cell ph 501-920-5733, everettehatcher@gmail.com

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John C. Polanyi, Michael Polanyi, and Eugene P. Wigner around 1934, on the lawn of the. Polanyi home in Didsbury Park, Manchester,

Adrian Rogers on Darwinism

________

Related posts:

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