Gerald E. Marsh » Essays in Science

Quantum Mechanics and Motion: A Modern Perspective

admin — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 18:47:33 +0000

Physics Essays Vol. 23, pp. 242-247 (2010)

This essay is an attempted to address, from a modern perspective, the motion of a particle. Quantum mechanically, motion consists of a series of localizations due to repeated interactions that, taken close to the limit of the continuum, yields a world-line. If a force acts on the particle, its probability distribution is accordingly modified. This must also be true for macroscopic objects, although now the description is far more complicated by the structure of matter and associated surface physics.

Quantum Mechanics and Motion-A Modern Perspective

The Demystification of Emergent Behavior

admin — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:25:20 +0000

Emergent behavior that appears at a given level of organization may be characterized as arising from an organizationally lower level in such a way that it transcends a mere increase in the behavioral degree of complexity. It is therefore to be distinguished from chaotic behavior, which is deterministic but unpredictable because of an exponential dependence on initial conditions. In emergent phenomena, higher-levels of organization are not determined by lower-levels of organization; or, more colloquially, emergent behavior is often said to be “greater than the sum of the parts”. This essay is intended to demystify at least some aspects of the mystery of emergence.

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The Problem of the “Prebiotic and Never Born Proteins”

admin — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:42:36 +0000

It has been argued that the limited set of proteins used by life as we know it could not have arisen by the process of Darwinian selection from all possible proteins. This probabilistic argument has a number of implicit assumptions that may not be warranted. A variety of considerations are presented to show that the number of amino-acid sequences that need have been sampled during the evolution of proteins is far smaller than assumed by the argument.
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