joigus

As a Zen master would put it: Just wake up!

To those involved in this thread, please try to add some info about the thing. You don't have to write a PhD dissertation, a pointer would be enough. Thank you.

Actually, Wonderful Life is more about Cambrian, although it does talk about Ediacaran. To me, Edicacaran is even more fascinating. The more primitive, the more fascinating.

Rocks and shrimp, very nice. I wonder if the shrimp is venomous. Blue is generally associated to venomous.

I know, I know. I didn't mean to say that these membrane proteins were there at the beginning. I just meant that the "minimum common factor for life" so to speak, is a pathway in which electron carriers (molecules that capture electrons, but not too strongly, so they can be "robbed" of them, are very mobile, etc) play the role of taking these electrons to the ultimate electron acceptor, and get recycled so as to get the cyclic pathway going. ATP synthase and the similar membrane-protein machine in photosynthesis (I forget the name now) are big, sophisticated proton-pumping machines that must have arisen much, much later. But the common theme is (seems to me to be): Some "light" electron acceptors act as electron carriers, while some protein in the pathway graciously takes these electrons and consummates the final oxidative reaction. Is that picture anything like right?

Here's where we disagree. Remember the Aztecs believed in Quetzalcoatl since time immemorial, then came Hernán Cortés, and they immediately identified him with the feathered-serpent-god. Did he look at all like a serpent? No. But myths have a way of hovering there for centuries, and even millenia, in people's minds, until something happens that breaths life into them again. I think there's an element here of how myths operate in the mind of people. It's as if they're there waiting for something significant, memorable, to happen, and "fit the bill."

(My emphasis.) Yes!! Very interesting. Thank you. The most important factor of life is the controlled use of electron carriers in a recyclable way (photosynthesis, ATP production by ATP-synthase.) If you take a look --schematically-- at the chemical pathways, these electron carriers always go round and round and get recycled, getting ready to carry electrons again. I think RNA must be part of the picture too. I'll take a look at the main salient aspects ASAP.

True story.

Flavius Josephus was nearly contemporary --started giving his account a few decades after the "facts". While his focus wasn't on Jesus of Nazareth, he provides a good account on the contextual scenario for the appearance of such figure (relevance of the Essenes). IMO, this contextual scenario is very important and shouldn't be ignored. The case for the existence of a real Jesus, I think, is reinforced by the fact that these different "Jesus-like figures" had been appearing ever since the time of the Greek takeover of official Jewish religion that led to the Maccabean revolt (against the Seleucid kingdom) 200 y before. John the Baptist is a famous example. Another famous one is the Teacher of Righteousness from the Dead Sea Scrolls. While this teacher of righteousness has been robustly, IMO, ruled out as a good candidate for Jesus, his existence goes to prove that the existence of a Jesus figure is very plausible. Political/religious leaders, will tend to adopt strategies that suited their predecessors. And at the time it was very fashionable to go to the desert and start preaching alternative versions of the Jewish law that could find a wide-enough following. Life of Brian paints a hilarious picture of this cauldron of ideas and beliefs. Never mind how the collective memory works, by adding more and more layers of narrative that make the whole thing very confusing. Sometimes previous myths are refused into the new story --here I'm trying to address Richard Carrier's main arguments, although he's a scholar, and I'm just a person who tries to apply common sense almost every minute of the day. Similar cases can be made for David and Solomon, Mohammed, and even Gilgamesh. I'm in no doubt that there was (some kind of) a Gilgamesh king of Uruk. He probably didn't, almost single-handedly, kill a giant in the forests of Lebanon, as the Epic of Gilgamesh tells us, but he just didn't pop out of a vacuum. I'm relying heavily on memory, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Nice mix-and-match. Thank you for taking the time. I have to tell you, I had you very much in mind when I came up with the topic. Pre-Cambrian life fascinates me too. I absolutely relished S.J. Gould's Wonderful Life, which is perhaps more widely known. Thank you.

Sounds like a kind of topic that's particularly close to my heart. These ones too: As to, Duly noted. These kind of topics are a little bit off my radar. But the topic is fascinating. Thank you for the Peebles reference, @MigL. I think I'd heard about it, but haven't read it. I suppose it's a bit outdated now, but duly noted as well. Thanks all for the contributions.

Yes, you've mentioned it before. It seems to meet my criteria. I cannot be totally sure. I don't know the book. But that doesn't necessarily mean anything... I'm aware of the ambiguity of my request!

Is there a book, or a few, that not many people know, but blew your mind? The rules: 1) Scientific books: Anthropology, Biology, Chemistry, Engineering, Linguistics, Mathematics, Paleontology, Physics,... The lot! But mainstream science. 2) Not "bibles" of the scientific literature, but can be relatively unknown books from famous author. For example: Dirac's Principles of Quantum Mechanics is not allowed, but Dirac's Lectures on Quantum Mechanics, could be OK. Not best sellers. 3) They can be either technical, or popular science Here's mine: The Quantum Theory of Atoms, molecules, and Photons by John Avery It's a book by a quantum chemist that takes you on a journey of basically everything essential about the quantum. The title is very telling of what it does. Tell me about your hidden treasure.

Interesting thread, even if in speculation land. When you say 'become', do you mean in evolutionary terms? I do believe language operates in some kind of discrete version of a continuous experience, but I have to do my homework on this thread yet...

Very much like wanting to participate in these forums but not abiding by the rules. The rules are for everybody.

To me, this kind of question can be understood anywhere from, Did that Jesus really exist? (the particular one that the Gospels mention) to, Did some kind of Jesus really exist? (a character of the time whose figure morphed through the centuries into the one we know) The answer to the first one is (almost 100% sure): No The answer to the second one is (almost 100% sure): Yes Trying to determine very precisely, or beyond any doubt, something that's quite blurry to start with, I think is pretty hopeless. I remember an ad many years ago that said about a cosmetic product something like: Your hair will be 29.5% times more lovely (something like that.) Similar logic. Some Moses did exist too. Probably. And an Arthur, and an Achiles, but nothing like Charlton Heston, Sean Connery, or Brad Pitt, or the literary figures before them, embelished by the likes of the Bible's authors, Chrétien de Troyes, and Homer.

Neanderthals did indulge in some inbreeding though. That's probably bound to happen when the girl next-door lives, eg, 100 miles NE. My picture of human evolution is getting closer and closer to a turbulent river with thousands and thousands of eddies, and rivulets of genetic flow diverting off course and rejoining the main stream later, or getting lost forever. When I look at the crania of these humans in Jebel Irhoud... The experts say it's modern human, though they look so neandertalish. I don't know what modern humans are anymore.

It may be interesting to notice that the EM contribution to mass is negligible in most macroscopic cases. If you plug in the values of \( \varepsilon_{0} \), \( c^{2} \) and assume 'typical' values for the field \( \boldsymbol{E} \) the order of Volts/metre, volumes the order of cm3, you get for this charged macroscopic object a correction to mass of its uncharged state the order of one proton mass or thereabouts. This is, of course, due to the high value of the speed of light.

Agreed. Once you have any gauge field, you have mass. It's a package deal. It's a contribution to total mass. The Higgs is different, I think. But that's another topic.

I didn't mention the Higgs. I didn't mean to mention the Higgs. I don't think the Higgs has any bearing on OP. Why the Higgs came up at all is a mystery to me. EM weighs, that's all I meant to say. And that, I said.

OK. I don't know whether you retracted from your question or from a previous point. But keep in mind the Higgs mechanism is an ad hoc mechanism. Brilliantly insightful, to be sure, but ad hoc nonetheless. IOW: We don't really understand where mass comes from. It's nice to have a multiplet of particles that gives mass to everything else. The Higgs floats around while the Goldstone bosons from the multiplet (not the Higgs, this is not faithfully reflected in the literature) provide mass to all fermions and short-range bosons. But where do the completely disparate mass spectrum comes from? I don't think we've developed a picture in the way that the OP seems to suggest, that mass differences could be explained by means of field self-interaction, and self-interaction alone. That's a fair point.

Somebody would think it's a weak confirmation, but here's one: No charged particle with zero rest energy (relativistic mass) has been found. So the EM field has inertia. Always. To which I will add a prediction: No charged particle with zero rest energy (relativistic mass) will ever be found.

Thanks for confirming this. In the case that a classical calculation were valid, you would have to add the EM contribution to the mass as \( \triangle m_{\textrm{EM}}=\frac{\varepsilon_{0}}{2c^{2}}\int_{0}^{\infty}\left(\left\Vert \boldsymbol{E}\right\Vert ^{2}+\left\Vert \boldsymbol{B}\right\Vert ^{2}\right)dV \) Well, it's because it's really when you go down to something as elementary as an electron that the question becomes really intractable classically.

Now that I think about it, @exchemist wasn't necessarily talking about the electron... For some reason, I was thinking about the electron.

This calculation cannot be done classically. You've hit the same wall that a generation of physicists (Abraham, Einstein, Lorentz) and a notorious mathematician (Poincaré) hit a century ago*. If the electron is point-like and static (static cannot be, we know this from QM), then the Poynting-vector approach (that @Markus Hanke referred to) gives you infinity, as the integral of \( \frac{\varepsilon_{0}}{2}\int_{0}^{\infty}\left\Vert \boldsymbol{E}\left(r\right)\right\Vert ^{2}dV \) is divergent. So the classical calculation is nonsense. The possibility that the electron is a little sphere of charge is even worse, as it is impossible to make it relativistically consistent. The pedestrian way of seeing it is that discontinuous charge densities in space-time do not bode well for relativistic invariance. You need fields that are smooth everywhere. The modern way of dealing with it is using QED (the fully-relativistic, quantum-mechanical version) and attribute part of the energy to self interaction of the electron. We could phrase it as 'the electron tries to move, emits a quantum of radiation, and suffers radiation reaction.' These virtual processes contribute to the energy. Unfortunately, for all I know, nobody has come up with a way of plugging in the fields (involving the electron's charge), and deriving from there the mass of the electron. The mass of the electron has to be plugged in by hand. This, I think, is an outstandingly-good question. By no means just a good question. Edit: * A century-odd, which was also an odd century.