/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.9456664]

>Universe tends towards a more disorganized state
>Somehow it just happened to mash enough elements together to create a biological machine so complex we still can't even begin to comprehend it's function by pure chance
I honestly don't understand how people can buy this bullshit. I could drop pieces of lego for many times the lifespan of the universe and still never expect them to create a replica of the Taj Mahal, why do people seriously entertain the idea that you can just mash amino acids together for millions of years and create a cell? It's ludicrous.

[Anonymous No.9456694]

>>9456664
this only happened because life is more efficient at creating disorganized states

[Anonymous No.9456699]

>gr8 b8 m8 r8 8/8
But in case you're actually retarded:
disorganized is just a word to help non stem majors understand entropy. The better interpretation is that the universe always tends toward its lowest energy states. Your body is at a lower energy than if every atom in your body was by itself and not part of a molecule.
>we cant even begin to understand its complexity
Complexity is just many simple systems working in tandem

[Anonymous No.9456730]

do you have infinite amount of legos? if you do then yeah you get taj mahal as long as it's physically possible

[Anonymous No.9456738]

>>9456730
Only if you also have infinite time. 13.4 billion years is not infinite time.

[Anonymous No.9456743]

>>9456738
there is no need to have infinite time for that

[Anonymous No.9456756]

>>9456664
You probably would create a replica of the Taj Mahal. Assuming that it would be 50 bricks wide, tall, and deep, that's 125,000 bricks. Say the Taj Mahal takes up 40% of that volume, or 50,000 bricks. Each time you drop a brick, it lands somewhere in the 50x50 area, meaning it's a 1/2,500 chance that it lands at a particular space. This means making a Taj Mahal out of a random 50,000 bricks is a 1/125,000,000 chance. If each drop of a brick takes half a second, then dropping 50,000 bricks takes 25,000 seconds, or about 7 hours. Since you have to do this 125,000,000 times to expect to get the Taj Mahal, it will take on average 3,125,000,000,000 seconds to complete each Taj Mahal. This is almost exactly 100,000 years. In the current age of the universe, you would have been able to do this 140,000 times.

Now remember that we find alcohol, methane, ammonia, and other organic compounds on asteroids and comets, meaning there are certainly environments that make their formation favourable. Equally, there will be environments that make the formation of a simple lifeforms favourable. But it took a very long time and a lot of chance.

[Anonymous No.9456760]

>>9456664
>I could drop pieces of lego for many times the lifespan of the universe and still never expect them to create a replica of the Taj Mahal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_recurrence_theorem

[Anonymous No.9456771]

>>9456756
>Assuming that it would be 50 bricks wide, tall, and deep, that's 125,000 bricks.
A lego brick is 3.1cm long. The Taj Mahal would take millions of lego bricks to build

[Anonymous No.9456772]

>>9456756
>>9456760
>tfw what is a snowflake?

[Anonymous No.9456778]

>>9456738
If you drop infinite number of legos you instantly get infinite combinations and infinite number of taj mahals

[Anonymous No.9456780]

>>9456778
We're assuming there is a time interval between each piece being dropped.

[Anonymous No.9456782]

>>9456664
Ok sure let's assume life isn't of random origin. Then why does life obey physical (and chemical) laws? Life could behave in literally any way and have any properties since it isn't the result result random natural processes, why does it work exactly like other matter?

[Anonymous No.9456785]

>>9456780
why

[Anonymous No.9456793]

>>9456664
http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/86/20130475

[Anonymous No.9456794]

>>9456785
Because the OP said
> I could drop pieces of lego for many times the lifespan of the universe
Implying the pieces are being dropped over a period of time.

[Anonymous No.9456799]

>>9456794
he said nothing about how many legos he's dropping at once

[Anonymous No.9456803]

>>9456799
It stops being a useful analogy for abiogenesis if you assume he's dropping infinite legos though. Doesn't it defeat the point? Clearly not an infinite amount of chemical interactions were occuring on the primordial earth, it was a finite amount over time. So we use the analogy of a finite amount of lego dropping over time.

[Anonymous No.9456807]

>>9456803
I assumed we were talking about the universe as a whole

[Anonymous No.9456808]

>>9456799
Why you guys wasting energy on a shit trivial irrelevant topic.

[Anonymous No.9456812]

>>9456807
It's not a useful analogy for the universe as a whole either.

[Anonymous No.9456816]

>>9456803
>Clearly not an infinite amount of chemical interactions were occuring on the primordial earth
You have it backwards. Earth wasnt didnt have infinite chances, the universe as a whole had infinite chances and Earth was that one out of infinity that spawned

[Anonymous No.9456817]

>>9456812
yes it is

[Anonymous No.9456825]

>>9456816
>the universe as a whole had infinite chances
The universe is finite. It didn't have infinite chances.

[Anonymous No.9456829]

>>9456825
current evidence suggests that the universe is infinite though

[Anonymous No.9456831]

>>9456829
Infinity doesn't exist within reality. It's a concept, nothing more.

[Anonymous No.9456834]

>>9456831
I'm sorry but you're wrong

[Anonymous No.9456835]

>>9456829
There is no such consensus unless you cite.

[Anonymous No.9456838]

>>9456834
Actually I'm right. There are no infinities within reality.

[Anonymous No.9456841]

>>9456835
the observable universe has zero curvature which suggests it's spatially infinite, that's the best we can tell right now

[Anonymous No.9456842]

>>9456664
>a biological machine so complex we still can't even begin to comprehend it's function
>We're near to understanding aging.
>We're near to understanding the human brain.
>We already understand in great detail everything below the neck.
>We're near to being able to clone viable lifeforms.
>We've already created synthetic life:
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100526/full/465406a.html
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100526/full/465406a.html

[Anonymous No.9456846]

>>9456842
Oh, I should also add...

[Anonymous No.9456847]

>>9456838
how many points are there between 1 and 2?

[Anonymous No.9456852]

>>9456842
Oh and further developments:
>https://www.nature.com/news/minimal-cell-raises-stakes-in-race-to-harness-synthetic-life-1.19633

[Anonymous No.9456854]

>>9456794
>>9456799
>>9456803
>>9456778
>>9456780
>>9456756
>>9456664

So there are a number of problems with comparing dropping lego blocks and expecting a structure with abiogenesis. The first is that there is a relatively large energy barrier that needs to be overcome to get lego blocks into place. We have to elastically deform lego blocks while counteracting friction. We may not be able to store enough gravitational potential energy in the lego blocks to overcome these forces without the blocks breaking. In addition the number of ways lego blocks can come together is rather limited

There is also the phenomenon of jamming that makes a number of lego block configurations instant dead ends. So if we have a pin going in from the side of a hole as in pic related, it can be more difficult to remove than it is to put in. If the pin slides down the side, it eventually comes into contact with the side and now has a frictional force counteracting pulling it out that wasn't there before.

There is actually some interesting math being done to calculate the entropy of mechanical assemblies, so that engineers can design assemblies that are cheaper to assemble, or that self assemble like biological systems do.

[Anonymous No.9456855]

>>9456847
You're only proving my point that infinity is simply a concept. If you're talking about two objects in physical reality there are only a finite amount of points between them.

It's easy to prove that infinity is a bullshit concept. For one infinity to exist you must presuppose another. For example can you count to infinity? Not unless you have infinite time to do so. To count an infinite quantity takes infinite time, and when you're pulling out a second infinity out of your ass to justify the first it's fairly easy to see that it's simply an unrealistic concept.

Again, it's an idea, it exists purely in the world of abstract mathematics, it does not exist in any form within physical reality. Period.

[Anonymous No.9456859]

>>9456852
>inb4 near to curing hiv
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep22555
>inb4 near to curing cancer
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609999/us-doctors-plan-to-treat-cancer-patients-using-crispr/
And so on...

[Anonymous No.9456860]

>>9456855
and yet the universe is still infinite, really makes you think

[Anonymous No.9456867]

>>9456860
It isn't. Infinity doesn't exist. Size of the universe included. Sorry to shatter your dreams.

[Anonymous No.9456868]

>>9456867
sorry but there is no curvature so it's infinite as of now

[Anonymous No.9456872]

>>9456842
>>9456846
>>9456852
>>9456859
Anyway, my point being, it isn't the early to mid-1900s anymore, modern medicine is amazingly accurate now and we understand our bodies in such great complexity than ever before. So, these sort of arguments for the 'gaps', as it were, no longer hold water.

[Anonymous No.9456878]

>>9456664
>Somehow it just happened to mash enough elements together to create a biological machine so complex we still can't even begin to comprehend it's function by pure chance
No, it did not.

>why do people seriously entertain the idea that you can just mash amino acids together for millions of years and create a cell?
They don't.

The first start of life that popped out of the abiogenetic process was NOT a cell. It was something much MUCH more basic than that. Cells are not the lowest form of life possible, even if they are among the lowest forms that still exist today. It took something along the lines of half a billion years for life to evolve to the point of cells (exact details are vague, as evidence is hard to come by; these early forms of life didn't leave a lot of traces), followed by another two billion years before they got to the point of anything like the cells you and I are made out of (Eukaryotic life). That's more than half of the evolutionary history of the earth spent just in perfecting the cell, out of much more basic structures.

Those more basic structures we understand very well indeed (actually, there are also plenty of other singlecellular life forms we understand in excruciating detail), and are *vastly* more likely to form by pure abiogenetic chance, to the point that we can get a substantial part of the way there just by playing a few weeks in a laboratory. Of course, everything after that one starting point was NOT a matter of chance, but rather of evolution.

[Anonymous No.9456885]

>>9456852
>>9456842
>We're near to understanding aging.
bullshit.
>We're near to understanding the human brain.
we just found out that neurons exchange virus like particles containing RNA, we have no idea why.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/01/brain-cells-can-share-information-using-a-gene-that-came-from-viruses/550403/
>We already understand in great detail everything below the neck.
bullshit. Can we grow a new heart in the lab? A new organ was classified last year:
https://sciencealert.com/it-s-official-a-brand-new-human-organ-has-been-classified
>>>We're near to being able to clone viable lifeforms.
bullshit, we cloned dolly years ago, and commercial services are available to clone pets.
>>>We've already created synthetic life:
bullshit, they just took a bacterial genome that existed in nature and copied it using a computer. The genome wasn't designed from scratch. The more recent work they did was to try turning off each gene individually to see if it produced a viable organism:
https://www.nature.com/news/minimal-cell-raises-stakes-in-race-to-harness-synthetic-life-1.19633
They were able to get it down to 500 genes, but they don't know how 149 of them work.

[Anonymous No.9456890]

>>9456878
>to the point that we can get a substantial part of the way there just by playing a few weeks in a laboratory.
I don't think this is true. Last I checked scientists had only succeeded in creating a few basic amino acids in the most favorable conditions they could create. Proteins are made up of thousands of amino acids. It's like building a single brick out of mud and claiming you're a "significant amount of the way" towards creating the Empire State Building.

[Anonymous No.9456892]

>>9456841
It can be finite and flat.

[Anonymous No.9456894]

>>9456885
Ah yeah, but all that preceding knowledge was totally worthless. Where exactly do you draw the line? Sounds like a very ambiguous metric.
>Pic is you

[Anonymous No.9456895]

>>9456892
no it can't

[Anonymous No.9456897]

>>9456855
Looks like we got a genius nobel laureate over here.

[Anonymous No.9456902]

>>9456664
>check /sci/ again after 5+ years
>still thinly veiled atheist bait threads on the front page
never change

[Anonymous No.9456907]

>>9456855
You make alot of assumptions for one so sure. Plus the physical universe is described with abstract math. Plus the physical universe we perceive depends on how we measure it. You shouldnt be too invested in everyday intuitions of physical reality. Even the hardness of a table is somewhat counterintuitive.

[Anonymous No.9456911]

>>9456855
How many intervals of time between right now and two seconds time?

You believe time is discrete? What about spacial dimensions?

[Anonymous No.9456912]

>>9456885
Look up some jeremy england if you want plausible abiogenetic ideas.

[Anonymous No.9456914]

>>9456895
Either it can or oxford has no business in employing academia.

Is_the_Universe_finite_or_infinite_An_interview_with_Joseph_Silk

[Anonymous No.9456917]

>>9456664
I would recommend watching this fantastic talk by professor Sean Carroll. He covers your misunderstanding at the 35 minute mark, but the whole thing is worth a watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JsKwyRFiYY

[Anonymous No.9456922]

>>9456664
I would recommend watching this fantastic talk by professor Sean Carroll. He covers your misunderstanding at the 35 minute mark, but the whole thing is worth a watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JsKwyRFiYY

[Anonymous No.9456933]

>>9456890
>Proteins are made up of thousands of amino acids.
But proteins are not the most basic form of possible life. RNA can function as active biological machinery on its own -- poorly, but well enough for a starting point -- and yet can self-replicate.

And even RNA strands are still far removed from the most basic possible starting points of life. There are autocatalytic substances (molecules that promote the formation of more such molecules, in particular environments where their precursors are readily available), and other related things far more basic than an RNA strand (much less a true protein) that can start off the basic cycle of life.

All that is necessary for the fundamental starting point of life is a chemical structure that can self-replicate in an environment where its precursors are available by chance. When you have that, then you have evolution: different versions of the molecule can arise (for an autocatalytic substance is also quite capable of catalyzing different things in the presence of different precursors) that replicate into different things, which produce different relatively-complex chemical structures; and in an environment where many such complex structures occur, different replicators can arise which rely on those complex structures as precursors. Et cetera.

Now, we did not manage to produce all of that, in the laboratory. But I don't think it's a stretch to say we have gotten reasonably close to what this theory predicts as the first starting points of life. Not close to proteins, but close to the most basic structures that can eventually produce proteins. Followed by everything else. This doesn't even require amino acids to form by chance -- for all we know one of the autocatalytic systems synthesized them.

[Anonymous No.9456941]

>>9456907
>Plus the physical universe is described with abstract math
You need to be careful here. Just because we can describe reality mathematically it does not necessarily follow that every mathematical result is an accurate depiction of reality. String theory "works" mathematically, but we have no idea if it's even close to being true.

[Anonymous No.9456950]

>>9456912
I'm not arguing about abiogenesis, just some stuff a retard in this thread said. As for abiogenesis, there's been a cool result recently in how an analog of the citric acid cycle could develop, AND I CAN'T FUCKING POST IT BECAUSE 4CHAN THINKS IT'S SPAM
"Linked cycles of oxidative decarboxylation of glyoxylate as protometabolic analogs of the citric acid cycle" Springsteen et. al.

[Anonymous No.9456973]

>>9456771
>REPLICA

[Anonymous No.9457047]

>>9456911
>what is a planck time
All dimensions in reality have a fundamental resolution that cannot be surpassed. Nothing is a pure continuum, everything is quantised.

[Anonymous No.9457049]

>>9456664
Athiests btfo

[Anonymous No.9457056]

>>9457047
Try describing a field if everything is quantized, especially if your base unit so small as the Planck length. With that base you should be able to build up to stuff like Bernoulli's principle in aerodynamics.

But you can't, because a quantised model breaks down when confronted with any field.

[Anonymous No.9457094]

>>9456941
Infact i was suggesting the opposite. Accurate descriptions of reality are paradoxically unattainable as they are dependent on the lense in which we make our observations and the pen we make our descriptions. True reality is a difficult concept to aspire to and i think science is based on what works rather than whats true. Im just saying the boundary is not clear cut on what makes a concelt grounded in reality. And our own everyday intuitions are not necessarily always valid.

[Anonymous No.9457096]

>>9456941
And obviously by works i mean empirically.>>9456950

[Anonymous No.9457102]

>>9457056
I'm no physicist, but that's an interesting point.

[Anonymous No.9457106]

>>9457056
but like wave-particle duality

[Anonymous No.9457157]

>>9457047
You're literally retarded if you think time is discretized in units of the planck time.

Planck values (time, space, mass, etc) are just combinations of other fundamental constants that generally indicate at which scales our current theories no longer apply. There isn't reason to believe anything is special about them until the hypotheses that support their significance have actual evidence to support them

[Anonymous No.9457189]

>>9457157
As someone who has always been a bit confused by this part (and not the person you're replying to), can you clarify this a bit for me?

As I understand it, there are a couple of fundamental unit-independent physical constants, such as the speed of light; and if you have (say) a speed-of-light constant of dimension (distance / time) and another constant of dimension (distance / time^2), then you can divide the first by the second and get a universal unit of time and then a unit of distance not bound to any human anchor points. Okay. I think I understand that part.

Then, one might guess that these units are not just convenient universal units, but might hold special physical significance. Okay, I think I can see where that thinking comes from. And because most of these units are very small (many orders of magnitude below what we have experience with), one way they MIGHT hold physical significance is that space and time might be discrete on this level. Okay, I can see this as a hypothesis worth considering (although the Planck unit of mass is much larger than anything that might be a fundamental quantum, and does not appear to be particularly significant).

Is my understanding correct so far?

Now, just about every description of Planck units I have ever seen -- and I *think* that includes at least several non-pop-sciency ones -- seem to take for granted that these units are deeply significant somehow, with the discrete-quanta theory seen as something that is most likely true.

And I don't see why. Sure, I see how this significance is a realistic possibility worth exploring (even though the Planck unit of mass seems completely irrelevant), and my computer sciency intuition very much wants to discretize the whole damn thing. But is there any sort of evidence suggesting even a HINT of any of that? All the descriptions I have seen make the jump from "convenient" to "deeply significant" with no apparent rationale whatsoever; it's usually just taken for granted.

[Anonymous No.9457193]

>>9457056
Then how is QFT possible?

[Anonymous No.9457194]

>>9457189
[continued]

tl;dr Is the whole deep significance of Planck units just a pop science meme without real weight in actual physics? Or am I missing a connection here?

[Anonymous No.9457199]

>>9457056
Fields are not actual things. They're mathematical constructs to describe the behaviors of physical phenomena.

[Anonymous No.9457209]

>>9457157
As far as I understand it, it's not that it's specifically discrete at that point, but rather that it's impossible to measure anything below it. The idea of an perfect continuum means that it's infinitely divisible. Since these dimensions are not infinitely divisible, they cannot be measured to be a perfect continuum, and whether they are in reality or not doesn't matter. Whether time and space are discrete or not doesn't matter so long as the indivisible units of those dimensions are smaller than the Planck measurement limit.

>>9457189
Just take a look at the Planck momentum.

[Anonymous No.9457211]

>>9456664
>Universe tends towards a more disorganized state
>what is crystals

unlike lego, natural particles can interact with each other and that can create complex shapes and patterns, and these emerged structures can have qualities which single particles don't have.

[Anonymous No.9457212]

>>9456694
fpbp

[Anonymous No.9457214]

>>9457189

>Is my understanding correct so far?
Yes

>But is there any sort of evidence suggesting even a HINT of any of that?

Planck units are useful because, when using them, h = c = G = 1. Planck units are given some significance in some forms of string theory, loop quantum gravity etc, but all those models have very little evidence behind them.

To illustrate planck units: You can calculate the planck impedance to be ~29 Ohms. Does this mean that impedance is quantized in units of 29 Ohms?

[Anonymous No.9457217]

>>9456664
>mash enough elements together
>create a biological machine
please read Some introductory materials before posting here, ok thanks

[Anonymous No.9457256]

>>9457214
>h = c = G = 1
I get the feeling that setting G and ke to 1 is a mistake. Doesn't [math]4πG = \mu_0 = \epsilon_0 = 1[/math] make more sense? Mu and epsilon because of the whole multiply to give c^2 thing, and for the equation for Coulomb force in natural units to have the same π factor as the equation for gravitational force, 4πG should equal 1. But that's just assuming the units are used for the purpose of convenience, and don't have any physical meaning.

[Anonymous No.9457312]

>>9456664
The problem is you don't understand the world and you don't understand probability. If something can happen it will happen. The theory of natural selection applies down to the molecules. Those which are good at replicating will replicate. Any structures that support replication will be replicated. Life will naturally take a form of complexity even in the face of entropy. The fact that it took billions of years for us to even have what we have now is somehow less plausible than us just poofing into existence because God? The fact that some molecules replicate is the only thing necessary to eventually lead to life. Science hasn't figured everything out, not by a long shot, but there's no distinct point in the evolutionary timeline that just doesn't make sense. There's a link between every single step from protazoa to human.

[Anonymous No.9457327]

>>9456664
You realize there is a massive ball of entropy allowing us to have our cute biological machines on earth? We are not important on the cosmic scale.

[Anonymous No.9457328]

>>9456699
>The better interpretation is that the universe always tends toward its lowest energy states
specifically Gibbs free energy as opposed to something like internal energy

[Anonymous No.9457423]

>>9456914
keep memeing if it makes you happy

[Anonymous No.9457426]

>>9456664
surely (((no one))) would stand to gain from promoting such brainletism, would they?

[Anonymous No.9457437]

>>9456664
Asshole Creationist logic.
Organisms don't come together all at once.
The process starts simply. CO2, water, and methane spontaneously build amino acids.
Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment
and then learn something probability theory and how evolution works.
You don't need "infinite" time. 0.7 billion years seems to have been enough to get the project kickstarted on at least one world.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/history_of_the_earth

[Anonymous No.9457512]

>>9457426
I can't tell if you're saying OP is right or wrong?

[Anonymous No.9457533]

>>9456922
wow I didn't know about Carroll but he's great, thanks anon. that talk was awesome

[Anonymous No.9457539]

>>9456895
explain yourself or forever be known as "anon the brainlet"

[Anonymous No.9457690]

>>9456699
>Complexity is just many simple systems working in tandem
Fucking frogposter now you've done it

I swear if you idiots try to go and destroy the word "complex" along with "hard". It's already pretty difficult to call anything hard since there's always some retard who comes along and shouts the words "It's easy if you know how to do it" in a completely unironic fashion. Don't be the guy who starts calling out complexity in similar fashion as if it becomes any less complex knowing that breaking it into a bajillion pieces gets you a gorillion simple systems. It's not an answer for someone trying to understand something complex and not even a good side comment.

[Anonymous No.9457697]

>>9456664
>and still never expect them to create a replica of the Taj Mahal
false analogy. if you introduce some kind of scoring metric that rates how well you reproduced the taj mahal and produces a slight variation on the best performing replica, THEN you might expect it to make one in a couple billion years

[Anonymous No.9457705]

>>9456664
Consider the billions of years of energy spent to create complex life. Tell me that overall disorder hasn't decreased.

[Anonymous No.9457801]

>>9457539
finity is a brainlet meme, everything in the universe is infinite

[Anonymous No.9457985]

>>9456738
Yes, but you are forgetting that it's not only 13.4 billions years, but billions of different people (stars formed) that are also dropping infinite amounts of legos. Greatly increases the odds that the Taj Mahal may be created somewhere.

[Anonymous No.9458109]

>>9457985

If we assume MWI we're not talking about billions at all

[Anonymous No.9458208]

>>9457705
Consider the size of the universe and consider that living things export entropy (yes i know)

[Anonymous No.9458240]

>>9456664
>Universe tends towards equilibrium aka heat death
It will take a while. Until then it only slowly tends.
>Somehow it just happened to mash enough elements together to create a biol
Blame Sun for that. It's official, Helios literally created us.

[Anonymous No.9458248]

>>9456694
This, life organizes itself but accelerates entropy around it.

[Anonymous No.9458250]

>>9456846
>With almost no gradient at all earth goes from a slimy rock covered in bugs to being able to comprehend itself via humans out of fucking nowhere
Cool

[Anonymous No.9458275]

>>9456664
>I could drop pieces of lego for many times the lifespan of the universe and still never expect them to create a replica of the Taj Mahal
Yes, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blind_Watchmaker it was actually implemented, you can just go and try it.

[Anonymous No.9458302]

>>9456664
>More disorganized state
What?

[Anonymous No.9458332]

Stop with this wave function collapse nonsense. Pilot Wave is the correct theory. Copenhagen is a sham.

[Anonymous No.9459505]

>>9456664
What is the personal incredulity fallacy

[Anonymous No.9459532]

And yet here you are OP, shitposting with anime girls.