Re: Questioni su riduzione da chimica a fisica da Dirac a oggi

From: Aleph <weissenblau_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 6 May 2014 08:04:10 -0700 (PDT)

Il giorno martedì 6 maggio 2014 00:57:29 UTC+2, Giorgio Pastore ha scritto:

> Dove c'e' una differenza di vedute e' nello status della chimica e
>
> neanche tutta ma solo quella tirata in ballo esplicitamente da
>
> multivac85 e cioe' la cosidetta chimica teorica. Li' non vedo proprio la
>
> problematica riduzionismo si/no/quale come attuale. Vedo una situazione
>
> in cui c'e' (oggi, non 40 anni fa) una fortissima coincidenza di vedute
>
> e le differenze tra fisici e chimici sono pratiamente inesistenti.

In rete si trova parecchio, con disomogenea qualità, sull'argomento.


Come contributo alla discussione ho trovato questo sintetico intervento che mi trova vieppiù d'accordo e che secondo me illustra bene la fallacia di un generale approccio riduzionista.


I came across the following quote by the Nobel Prize winning chemist William Lipscomb (think diborane, carbonic anhydrase) with which I generally concur:


"Chemistry is not 'physics with less rigor'. In chemistry there are discoverable guiding principles for systems which are too complex for a "first principles" approach. The nature of chemistry is very difficult to explain to most physicists, in my experience!"






In chemistry there are emergent phenomena that cannot be simply reduced to physics. One has to think at the level of molecules and not just atoms, especially for understanding chemical reactions. This is especially true for understanding biochemical reactions. Knowing about quarks won't directly help you to understand the structure of DNA but knowing about hydrogen bonds definitely will. Of course the same caveats apply to thinking about biology as 'applied chemistry'. The fact is that every science comes with its own set of fundamental laws. These laws are strictly reducible to 'lower-level' laws in a philosophical sense, but the lower-level laws don't directly lead to the higher-level fundamental ones. Thus, an understanding of the lower-level laws, no matter how thorough, does not automatically imply an understanding of the higher-level ones.

Saluti,
Aleph
Received on Tue May 06 2014 - 17:04:10 CEST