HONORS MODULE: THE CHANGING MODEL OF LIFE

 

SOME THINGS TO THINK ABOUT AS YOU READ AND DISCUSS ROSEN

 

March 28: Preface:

 

Why do you think his manuscripts were not even refereed by the journal  Science when he submitted them?  Is that a sign that we should not take what he has to say too seriously?

 

What does he mean by people’s “uneasiness with previously presented paradigms”?    Are there problems that are real and yet systematically ignored by the scientific community?  Could this have anything to do with the Human Genome Project?

 

Introduction to Part I “On Biology and Physics”

 

What has been your idea of the relationship between biology and physics?  Does Rosen’s conform to it?

 

Understand why Rosen goes through the history of the Gödel Proof.  What is it? (You will need to do some poking around to answer this)  This is a central idea in all that follows.

 

Understand what Rosenn means when he says: “Roughly, that contemporary physics is to biology as Number Theory is to a formalization of it.”  (It will be helpful to look at the Modelling relation in Appendix A of this syllabus.)

 

What makes something “non-computable”?