On Monday, July 22, 2019 at 8:31:35 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 22 Jul 2019, at 11:44, Philip Thrift <[email protected] <javascript:>> > wrote: > > > > *Why chemistry (and biology) is not physics* > > > https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/historical-contingency-and-the-futility-of-reductionism-why-chemistry-and-biology-is-not-physics/ > > > Partly why *I'm a materialist, not a physicalist*. > > But this has implications for arithmetical reality (?). > > > If Chemistry is not physics, it would mean that ours substitution level > would be in between QM and chemistry (something slightly more complex to be > sure, but it is a reasonable approximation). > > Now, I am not convinced by the paper above that chemistry is not reducible > to quantum mechanics, especially that chemistry count the most successful > application of quantum mechanics. > > I have no definite ideas on all this. The paper might confuse []p and []p > & p, like 99,9998% of materialist thinkers here. > > Bruno > > > It is a kind of a faith some have that chemistry from atoms to big organic molecules (if that is the right "spectrum" of chemical materials) can be reduced to physics. There is certainly a camp in the theoretical chemistry community that don't think it can.
There is also the list of unsolved problems in chemistry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_chemistry And then one gets to even "higher" chemistry like RNA and DNA at the "boundary" with biology. The demarcations of physics, chemistry, biology are human made fictions of course. @philipthrift @philipthrift -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/524075a3-8230-4872-8d5c-89c7f794860a%40googlegroups.com.
