I have a minor quibble with Lord Rees' stance - physics isn't about "simple" things, but rather physicists do their work by deliberately simplifying them in a way that isn't always possible with Biology.
For example, determining orbits of the planets and their moons in our Solar System is astonishingly complex if you want to take into account the truly accurate gravitational interactions between all the bodies involved (see the N-body problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem) and N-body simulation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_simulation) on wikipedia if you're interested) but because of the nature of the system we can simplify it by simply ignoring the smaller interactions - it's not entirely accurate when we do this, but it's a close enough approximation for what we need.
Biologists do the same thing in some situations (such as modeling large populations) but the technique is less generally applicable.
Btw: 10-20 has just 19 zeros after the decimal point >;-)
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baggyeyes
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-16 08:45 am (UTC)I have a minor quibble with Lord Rees' stance - physics isn't about "simple" things, but rather physicists do their work by deliberately simplifying them in a way that isn't always possible with Biology.
For example, determining orbits of the planets and their moons in our Solar System is astonishingly complex if you want to take into account the truly accurate gravitational interactions between all the bodies involved (see the N-body problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem) and N-body simulation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_simulation) on wikipedia if you're interested) but because of the nature of the system we can simplify it by simply ignoring the smaller interactions - it's not entirely accurate when we do this, but it's a close enough approximation for what we need.
Biologists do the same thing in some situations (such as modeling large populations) but the technique is less generally applicable.
Btw: 10-20 has just 19 zeros after the decimal point >;-)