May 23, 2007
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Details
From the May 18 Harvard Crimson:
“Paul B. Davis ’07-’08, who contributed to a collection of student
essays written in 2005 on the purpose and structure of a Harvard
education, said that ‘the devil is in the details’….”
Related material:“In philosophy, reductionism is a theory that asserts that the nature of complex things is reduced to the nature of sums of simpler or more fundamental things.” –Wikipedia
“In the 1920′s… the discovery of quantum mechanics went a very long
way toward reducing chemistry to the solution of well-defined
mathematical problems. Indeed, only the extreme difficulty of many of
these problems prevents the present day theoretical chemist from being
able to predict the outcome of every laboratory experiment by making
suitable calculations. More recently the molecular biologists have made
startling progress in reducing the study of life back to the study of
chemistry. The living cell is a miniature but extremely active and
elaborate chemical factory and many, if not most, biologists today are
confident that there is no mysterious ‘vital principle,’ but that life
is just very complicated chemistry. With biology reduced to chemistry
and chemistry to mathematics, the measurable aspects of the world
become quite pervasive.” –Harvard mathematician George Mackey, “What Do Mathematicians Do?“Opposed to reductionism are “emergence” and “strong emergence“–
“Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic.” –Mark A. Bedau
Or comfortably.
