——
The Higgs boson was named for him. It was a key element of the Standard Model, which encapsulated all human knowledge so far about elementary particles.
-
Share full article
-
- Read in app
Peter Higgs, who predicted the existence of a new particle that came to be named after him (as well as God) and sparked a half-century, worldwide, billion-dollar search for it culminating in champagne in 2012 and a Nobel Prize a year later, died on Monday at home in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was 94.
The cause was a blood disorder, said Alan Walker, his close friend and fellow physicist at the University of Edinburgh, where Dr. Higgs was an emeritus professor.
Dr. Higgs was a 35-year-old assistant professor at the university in 1964 when he suggested the existence of a new particle that would explain how other particles acquire mass. The Higgs boson, also known as “the God particle,” would become the keystone of a suite of theories known as the Standard Model, which encapsulated all human knowledge so far about elementary particles and the forces by which they shaped nature and the universe.
Dr. Higgs was a modest man who eschewed the trappings of fame and preferred the outdoors. He didn’t own a television or use email or a cellphone. For years he relied on Dr. Walker to act as his “digital seeing-eye dog,” in the words of a former student.
A half-century later, on July 4, 2012, he received a standing ovation as he walked into a lecture hall at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, in Geneva and heard that his particle had finally been found. On a webcast from the laboratory, the whole world watched him pull out a handkerchief and wipe away a tear.
“It’s really an incredible thing that it’s happened in my lifetime,” he said on the webcast.
Declining to stick around for the after-parties, Dr. Higgs flew right back home, celebrating on the plane with a can of London Pride beer. CERN, which has shelves of empty Champagne bottles commemorating great moments lining its control room, asked if it could have the can, but Dr. Higgs had already thrown it away.
Peter Ware Higgs was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, in May 29, 1929, the son of a BBC sound engineer, Thomas Ware Higgs, and Gertrude Maude (Coghill) Higgs, who managed the household. He grew up in Bristol.
His interest in physics was tweaked when he was attending the same school, Cotham Grammar School, as had Paul Dirac, the great British theorist who was one of the fathers (there were no mothers) of quantum mechanics. That theory, which describes the forces of nature as a game of catch between force-carrying bits of energy called bosons, would be the same field in which Dr. Higgs would rise to fame.
At the age of 17, Peter moved to City of London School, where he studied mathematics. A year later, he entered King’s College London, graduating in 1947 with a bachelor’s degree in physics. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in 1954 for research on molecules and heat.
How The Times decides who gets an obituary. There is no formula, scoring system or checklist in determining the news value of a life. We investigate, research and ask around before settling on our subjects. If you know of someone who might be a candidate for a Times obituary, please suggest it here.
After temporary research posts at the University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London and University College London, he took a permanent job as a lecturer at Edinburgh in 1960. Dr. Higgs had come to love the city during his college days when he used to escape on hitchhiking trips to the Scottish Highlands.
During those years he also became active politically in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Greenpeace. But he dropped out of both when they grew too radical for his taste.
It was in the disarmament movement that he met and fell in love with a fellow activist, Jody Williamson. They married in 1963. She died in 2008. Dr. Higgs is survived by their two sons, Christopher, a computer scientist, and Jonathan, a musician, and two grandchildren.
At Edinburgh, Dr. Higgs redirected his research from chemistry and molecules to his first love, elementary particles.
Edinburgh was the birthplace of James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), who had accomplished the first great unification of physics, showing that electricity and magnetism were different manifestations of the same force, electromagnetism, which constitutes light. It would be Dr. Higgs’s fate to push physics to the next step, toward a theory that could be written on a T-shirt, by helping to show that Maxwell’s electromagnetism and the so-called weak force that governs radioactivity are different faces of the same thing.
As is often the case in the zigzag progress of science, however, that was not what Dr. Higgs thought he was doing.
“At the time,” he recalled in an interview in Edinburgh in 2014, “the thought was to solve the strong force.”
The strong force holds atomic nuclei together. According to theory, the particles that carry that force — bosons — should be massless, like the photon that transmits light. But while light crosses the universe, the strong force barely reaches across an atomic nucleus, which, by quantum rules, meant that the particle carrying it should be almost as massive as a whole proton.
So how did the carriers of the strong force become so massive?
Adapting an idea that Philip W. Anderson of Princeton had used to help explain superconductivity, Dr. Higgs suggested that space was filled with an invisible field of energy, a cosmic molasses. The field would act on some particles trying to move through it like an entourage attaching itself to a celebrity trying to make it to the bar, imbuing them with what we perceive as mass. Call it spooky action everywhere.
In some situations, he noted, a bit of this field could flake off and appear as a new particle.
His first paper on the subject was rejected, however, so he rewrote it, “spicing it up,” as he put it, with a new paragraph at the end emphasizing the prediction of the new particle, which would come to be called the Higgs boson.
It turned out that François Englert and Robert Brout, of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, had beaten him into print by seven weeks with a similar idea. Shortly thereafter three more physicists — Tom Kibble, of Imperial College London; Carl Hagen, of the University of Rochester; and Gerald Guralnik, of Brown University — chimed in.
“They were first, but I didn’t know until Nambu told me,” Dr. Higgs said in an interview, referring to Yoichiro Nambu, a University of Chicago physicist and also a Nobel laureate, who edited the journal. There was no internet then, he said, his voice trailing off, implying that if he had seen their paper he would probably never have written his own.
“At the beginning I wasn’t sure it would be important,” Dr. Higgs went on. Neither did anybody else.
In fact, theories of the strong force, which Dr. Higgs had set out to study, subsequently went another way. But his paper and his particle would be decisive for the so-called weak force.
Unknown to Dr. Higgs, the American physicist Sheldon Glashow had proposed a theory in 1961 that unified the weak force and electromagnetic forces, but it had the same problem of how to explain why the carriers of the weak part of the “electroweak force” weren’t massless.
Dr. Higgs’s magic field would have been just the ticket, but he and Dr. Glashow didn’t know each other’s work, although they had just missed each other.
One of Dr. Higgs’s duties as a beginning professor at Edinburgh in 1960 was to supply daily refreshments for a Scottish summer conference held there. Dr. Glashow, who was attending, and his friends would stash wine bottles provided by Dr. Higgs in a grandfather clock and then come back and stay up all night draining them and talking about the electroweak unification.
Dr. Higgs, meanwhile, was in bed. “I didn’t know they were stealing my wine,” he said in the interview.
The boson became a big deal in 1967 when Steven Weinberg, of the University of Texas in Austin, made it the linchpin in unifying the weak and electromagnetic forces. It became an even bigger deal in 1971, when the Dutch theorist Gerardus ’t Hooft proved that the whole scheme made mathematical sense.
Dr. Higgs said Benjamin Lee, a Fermilab physicist who later died in a car crash, christened it the Higgs boson during a conference in about 1972, perhaps because Dr. Higgs’s paper was cited first in Dr. Weinberg’s paper.
The name stuck, not just to the particle, but to the molasses field that produced it and the mechanism by which that field gave mass to other particles — somewhat to the embarrassment of Dr. Higgs and the annoyance of the other theorists.
“For a while,” Dr. Higgs recalled, laughing, “I was calling it the “A.B.E.G.H.H.K.H mechanism,” reeling off the names of all the theorists who had contributed to the theory (Anderson, Brout, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen, Higgs, Kibble and ’t Hooft).
Interest in the boson came and went in waves. Dr. Higgs’s first round of interviews came in 1988, when CERN started up a new accelerator named LEP, for Large Electron Positron collider. One of its main goals was to find the Higgs boson. There was another round when LEP was closing down in 2000 despite claims by some scientists that they had seen traces of the Higgs boson.
Dr. Higgs was skeptical. “They were pushing the machine beyond its limit,” he recalled.
By then he had given up doing research, concluding that high-energy particle physics had simply moved beyond him.
He was trying to work on a fashionable new theory called supersymmetry, which would further advance the unification of forces, but “I kept making silly mistakes,” he said. Indeed, he told the BBC later that his lack of productivity would probably have gotten him fired long ago were it not known that he had been nominated for a Nobel Prize.
In recent years, Dr. Higgs lived in a fifth-floor apartment in the historic New Town neighborhood of central Edinburgh, around the corner from the birthplace of Maxwell, the great Scottish theorist, who grew up in the neighborhood.
Even before the Nobel sealed his place in history, he had become one of the tourist attractions of the city, a sort of walking monument to science, recipient of the 2011 Edinburgh Award for his “outstanding contribution to the city.”
Dr. Higgs continued to teach until he retired in 1996, but his lack of research kept him out of the fray and the fury that has resulted from the discovery of his boson. In 1999, he turned down an offer of knighthood, but in 2012 he was named a Companion of Honor by Queen Elizabeth II.
The next year he joined his idols Dirac and Maxwell in immortality by way of the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with Professor Englert. But being in the fray was never his thing. On the day the physics prize was supposed to be announced, he decided that it would be a good time to leave town.
Unfortunately, his car wasn’t working. Stuck in town, he decided to go to lunch. But on the way a neighbor intercepted him and told him he had won the prize.
“What prize?” he joked.
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
:
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the nationality of the physicist Gerardus ’t Hooft. He is Dutch, not Belgian. It also misspelled the given name of a Nobel laureate in physics at the University of Chicago. He is Yoichiro Nambu, not Nachiro.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know atnytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more
Dennis Overbye is the cosmic affairs correspondent for The Times, covering physics and astronomy. More about Dennis Overbye
——
Show captionAs public disagreements go, few can have boasted such heavy-hitting antagonists.
On one side is Richard Dawkins, the celebrated biologist who has made a second career demonstrating his epic disdain for religion. On the other is the theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, who this year became a shoo-in for a future Nobel prize after scientists at Cern in Geneva showed that his theory about how fundamental particles get their mass was correct.
Their argument is over nothing less than the coexistence of religion and science.
Higgs has chosen to cap his remarkable 2012 with another bang by criticising the “fundamentalist” approach taken by Dawkins in dealing with religious believers.
“What Dawkins does too often is to concentrate his attack on fundamentalists. But there are many believers who are just not fundamentalists,” Higgs said in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. “Fundamentalism is another problem. I mean, Dawkins in a way is almost a fundamentalist himself, of another kind.”
He agreed with some of Dawkins’ thoughts on the unfortunate consequences that have resulted from religious belief, but he was unhappy with the evolutionary biologist’s approach to dealing with believers and said he agreed with those who found Dawkins’ approach “embarrassing”.
Dawkins, author of the best-selling book The God Delusion, has been accused many times in the past of adopting fundamentalist positions.. In a 2007 post on his website titled “How dare you call me a fundamentalist“, Dawkins wrote: “No, please, do not mistake passion, which can change its mind, for fundamentalism, which never will. Passion for passion, an evangelical Christian and I may be evenly matched. But we are not equally fundamentalist. The true scientist, however passionately he may ‘believe’, in evolution for example, knows exactly what would change his mind: evidence! The fundamentalist knows that nothing will.”
The criticisms have not led the biologist to soften his stance on religion. In a recent interview with al-Jazeera, he implied that being raised a Catholic was worse for a child than physical abuse by a priest. Responding to a direct question from the interviewer Mehdi Hassan, Dawkins related the story of a woman in America who had written to him about abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of a priest, and the mental anguish of being told that one of her friends, a Protestant girl, would burn in hell.
“She told me that, of those two abuses, she got over the physical abuse, it was yucky but she got over it. But the mental abuse of being told about hell, she took years to get over,” said Dawkins. “Telling children such that they really, really believe that people who sin are going to go to hell and roast forever, that your skin grows again when it peels off, it seems to me intuitively entirely reasonable that that is a worse form of child abuse, that will give more nightmares because they really believe it.”
Dawkins did not respond to a request to comment directly on Higgs’s “fundamentalist” charge.
In the El Mundo interview, Higgs argued that although he was not a believer, he thought science and religion were not incompatible. “The growth of our understanding of the world through science weakens some of the motivation which makes people believers. But that’s not the same thing as saying they’re incompatible. It’s just that I think some of the traditional reasons for belief, going back thousands of years, are rather undermined.
“But that doesn’t end the whole thing. Anybody who is a convinced but not a dogmatic believer can continue to hold his belief. It means I think you have to be rather more careful about the whole debate between science and religion than some people have been in the past.”
He said a lot of scientists in his field were religious believers. “I don’t happen to be one myself, but maybe that’s just more a matter of my family background than that there’s any fundamental difficulty about reconciling the two.”
In 1963 Higgs predicted the existence of a force-carrying particle, part of an invisible energy field that filled the vacuum throughout the observable universe. Without the field, or something like it, we would not be here. The field clings to the smallest fundamental particles and gives them mass. The field, which switched on moments after the big bang, allowed particles to come together and form all the atoms and molecules around today.
In the interview, the physicist spoke about the announcement on 4 July that the Higgs boson had finally been found. He said he had received a call from a colleague at Cern a few days earlier who had told him he would regret it if he did not come along. At the announcement, Higgs began to cry.
“What was so overwhelming really was the response of the audience at Cern. It wasn’t like a scientific seminar, it was like the end of a football match when the home team has won, and that was what was overwhelming to me, to be a part of that … It [bursting into tears] was a reaction to the emotions around me and the feeling that, well, it’s arrived at last! That was hard to deal with.”
Many scientist believe that the discovery means that Higgs is odds on for a future Nobel prize. He was relieved, however, that the Nobel committee had skipped over the discovery for the physics award this year. “I was relieved, simply because since the beginning of July I’ve been so busy dealing with requests to do this and that, that I was glad not to have that on my schedule as well, so I have described it as a reprieve.”
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
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, Horace Barlow, Michael Bate, 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, Theodor W. Hänsch, Brian Harrison, Hermann Hauser, Roald Hoffmann, Bruce Hood, Herbert Huppert, Gareth Stedman Jones, Steve Jones, Shelly Kagan, Michio Kaku, Stuart Kauffman, Lawrence Krauss, Harry Kroto, George Lakoff, Elizabeth Loftus, Alan Macfarlane, Peter Millican, Marvin Minsky, Leonard Mlodinow, Yujin Nagasawa, Alva Noe, Douglas Osheroff, Jonathan Parry, Saul Perlmutter, Herman Philipse, Carolyn Porco, 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,
In the third video below in the 150th clip in this series are his 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)
________
Below are two letters I wrote to Dr. Higgs and in the letter from September 2015 I respond to his quote:
_
Enjoy the pictures of an amazing life
Harry Kroto with his father above
Margaret with David and Stephen
leaving Liverpool for Canada 1964
Kroto and his wife, Margaret.
______________
June 11, 2016
Dear Dr. Higgs,
Since I wrote you last I was very sad on April 30th to learn of the passing of the great scientist Harry Kroto. Not only was Harry Kroto a Nobel Prize winning chemist but judging from comments of his close friends, Kroto was an even better man personally.
Tim Logan, chair of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Florida State: “What always brought out the best in Harry was his wife, Margaret. Margaret and Harry were always together, until the end of Harry’s life. She served as his business manager, scheduling his many speaking engagements around the world, organizing the travel, and supporting him in many, many ways. What I found so remarkable is that even after 57 years together, they were so obviously in love. Harry would include photos and sketches he made of her in his lectures, and he always acknowledged her as his moral compass.”
HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHY I WAS PROMPTED ORIGINALLY TO WRITE YOU? It was because Harry Kroto took the time in 2014 to correspond with me. After I wrote him in the spring and summer of 2014 he emailed me twice and then sent me a letter in November of 2014. In that letter he referred me to a film series Renowned Academics talk about God that featured your comments.
Furthermore, your full interview appears on the VEGA website which Kroto founded, and he was so proud of his videos from the VEGA website that he played some of them during his speech at a BEYOND BELIEF CONFERENCE (he actually spoke there in 2006, 2007 and 2008 and all those speeches are on You Tube). I have always been fascinated by brilliant individuals and 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. ISN’T IT AMAZING THAT JUST LIKE KROTO’S FAMILY POLANYI HAD TO FLEE EUROPE BECAUSE OF HITLER’S INSANE GRUDGE AGAINST THE JEWS!!!!I know you don’t believe in God or the Devil but if anyone was demon-possessed it had to be Hitler.
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.
__
Francis Schaeffer (30 January 1912 – 15 May 1984[1]) and his wife Edith (November 3, 1914 – March 30, 2013)
James Watson (1928-) and Francis Crick (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004)
Michael Polanyi, FRS[1] (11 March 1891 – 22 February 1976)
John Charles Polanyi, (born 23 January 1929)
___
John Scott Haldane (2 May 1860 – 14/15 March 1936)
| J. B. S. Haldane | |
|---|---|
Haldane in 1914
|
(5 November 1892 – 1 December 1964)
Maurice Wilkins (15 December 1916 – 5 October 2004)
Erwin Schrödinger (12 August 1887 – 4 January 1961)
Sir Peter Medawar ( 28 February 1915 – 2 October 1987)
Barry Commoner (May 28, 1917 – September 30, 2012)
I am sending you this two CD’s 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.
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
September 21, 2015
Dear Dr. Higgs,
On You Tube I saw this quote from you:
I think you have to be rather more careful about the whole debate between science and religion than some people have been in the past. I certainly know a lot of scientists in my field who are believers and I accept that. I don’t happen to be one myself, but maybe that’s just more a matter of my family background than that there’s any fundamental difficulty about reconciling the two.
I like your attitude towards the subject of God. You seemed to keep an open mind.
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:
- Commoner’s criteria of irreducibility to physics and chemistry are incomplete; they are necessary but not sufficient conditions of it.
- Machines are irreducible to physics and chemistry.
- 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).
…The relationship between the two controls–the devices of engineering and the laws of natural science--is not symmetrical. The machine is a machine by having been built and being then controlled according to the principles of engineering. The laws of physics and chemistry are indifferent to these principles; they would go on working in the fragments of the machine if it were smashed. But they serve the machine while it lasts; machines rely for their operations always on the laws of physics and chemistry.
You can think of it for example in an automobile. The man building the automobile must take in account the structural properties he uses. But when the automobile is junk and put into the automobile graveyard and smashed by the giant press into a small piece of metal it is still open to the same analysis and it has the same chemical and physical properties. The mere fact of these same chemical and physical properties existing does not mean we still have the automobile.
____________
Stephen C. Meyer, Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute; on October 7, 2008 wrote the article, “A Scientific History and Philosophical Defense of the Theory of Intelligent Design,” and here is a portion of it:
Just as the mathematicians at Wistar were casting doubt on the idea that chance (i.e., random mutations) could generate genetic information, another leading scientist was raising questions about the role of law-like necessity. In 1967 and 1968, the Hungarian chemist and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi published two articles suggesting that the information in
DNA was “irreducible” to the laws of physics and chemistry (Polanyi 1967: 21; Polanyi 1968: 1308-12). In these papers, Polanyi noted that the DNA conveys information in virtue of very specific arrangements of the nucleotide bases (that is, the chemicals that function as alphabetic or digital characters) in the genetic text. Yet, Polanyi also noted the laws of physics and chemistry allow for a vast number of other possible arrangements of these same chemical constituents. Since chemical laws allow a vast number of possible arrangements of nucleotide bases, Polanyi reasoned that no specific arrangement was dictated or determined by those laws. Indeed, the chemical properties of the nucleotide bases allow them to attach themselves interchangeably at any site on the (sugar-phosphate) backbone of the DNA molecule. (See Figure 1). Thus, as Polanyi (1968: 1309) noted, “As the arrangement of a printed page is extraneous to the chemistry of the printed page, so is the base sequence in a DNA molecule extraneous to the chemical forces at work in the DNA molecule.” Polanyi argued that it is precisely this chemical indeterminacy that allows DNA to store information and which also shows the irreducibility of that information to physical-chemical laws or forces. As he explained:
- Suppose that the actual structure of a DNA molecule were due to the fact that the bindings of its bases were much stronger than the bindings would be for any other distribution of bases, then such a DNA molecule would have no information content. Its code-like character would be effaced by an overwhelming redundancy. […] Whatever may be the origin of a DNA configuration, it can function as a code only if its order is not due to the forces of potential energy. It must be as physically indeterminate as the sequence of words is on a printed page (Polanyi 1968:1309).
________
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
Related posts:
FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 53 THE BEATLES (Part E, Stg. Pepper’s and John Lennon’s search in 1967 for truth was through drugs, money, laughter, etc & similar to King Solomon’s, LOTS OF PICTURES OF JOHN AND CYNTHIA) (Feature on artist Yoko Ono)
The John Lennon and the Beatles really were on a long search for meaning and fulfillment in their lives just like King Solomon did in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Solomon looked into learning (1:12-18, 2:12-17), laughter, ladies, luxuries, and liquor (2:1-2, 8, 10, 11), and labor (2:4-6, 18-20). He fount that without God in the picture all […]
FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 52 THE BEATLES (Part D, There is evidence that the Beatles may have been exposed to Francis Schaeffer!!!) (Feature on artist Anna Margaret Rose Freeman )
______________ George Harrison Swears & Insults Paul and Yoko Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds- The Beatles The Beatles: I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking […]
FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 51 THE BEATLES (Part C, List of those on cover of Stg.Pepper’s ) (Feature on artist Raqib Shaw )
The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA Uploaded on Nov 29, 2010 The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA. The Beatles: I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis […]
FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 50 THE BEATLES (Part B, The Psychedelic Music of the Beatles) (Feature on artist Peter Blake )
__________________ Beatles 1966 Last interview I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking and writing about them and their impact on the culture of the 1960’s. In this […]
FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 49 THE BEATLES (Part A, The Meaning of Stg. Pepper’s Cover) (Feature on artist Mika Tajima)
_______________ The Beatles documentary || A Long and Winding Road || Episode 5 (This video discusses Stg. Pepper’s creation I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking and writing about […]
FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE PART 48 “BLOW UP” by Michelangelo Antonioni makes Philosophic Statement (Feature on artist Nancy Holt)
_______________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: _____________________ I have included the 27 minute episode THE AGE OF NONREASON by Francis Schaeffer. In that video Schaeffer noted, ” Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. It expressed the essence of their lives, thoughts and their feelings.” How Should […]
FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 47 Woody Allen and Professor Levy and the death of “Optimistic Humanism” from the movie CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS Plus Charles Darwin’s comments too!!! (Feature on artist Rodney Graham)
Crimes and Misdemeanors: A Discussion: Part 1 ___________________________________ Today I will answer the simple question: IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE AN OPTIMISTIC SECULAR HUMANIST THAT DOES NOT BELIEVE IN GOD OR AN AFTERLIFE? This question has been around for a long time and you can go back to the 19th century and read this same […]
FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE PART 46 Friedrich Nietzsche (Featured artist is Thomas Schütte)
____________________________________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: __________ Francis Schaeffer has written extensively on art and culture spanning the last 2000years and here are some posts I have done on this subject before : Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 […]
FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 45 Woody Allen “Reason is Dead” (Feature on artists Allora & Calzadilla )
Love and Death [Woody Allen] – What if there is no God? [PL] ___________ _______________ How Should We then Live Episode 7 small (Age of Nonreason) #02 How Should We Then Live? (Promo Clip) Dr. Francis Schaeffer 10 Worldview and Truth Two Minute Warning: How Then Should We Live?: Francis Schaeffer at 100 Francis Schaeffer […]
FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 44 The Book of Genesis (Featured artist is Trey McCarley )
___________________________________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: ____________________________ Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race?) Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical flow of Truth & History (intro) Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of History & Truth (1) Dr. Francis Schaeffer […]
___
The Daily Hatch 