(no subject)

Physicist Susskind calls this state diagram "a bad law" because it doesn't preserve information. To generalize a bit: as scientists physicists study and teach "good laws." By contrast, most of what life scientists study and represent are bad laws because a living organism oozes information that's is never stored. If we think that a cell is the unit of biology, imagine how much data we'd have to record in order to preserve all states of e.g. a cancer cell in a living body.

People place so much hope into genetics because it appears to be one of the few "good laws" in biology and we, being taught as physicists, know how to study and teach them. Obviously, genetics is too coarse-grained to adequately represent a living organism. The nature, or at least the promise, of the current technological revolution is to move deeper into life, by capturing and recording(!) lots of biological data. This confluence of biology and computer sciences can enable us to discover new good laws and learn haw to make relevant predictions closer to the pulse of life. In an imperfect analogy, we are still inventing accounting methods that eventually revolutionized business practices.

( Read more... )