What is the most advanced, complex subject in chemistry?

Quote: Originally posted by Mr. Wizard

It's called life.

Quote: Originally posted by Mr. Wizard

It's called life. [ etc ]

Quote: Originally posted by Sedit

Franklyn to answer that question it would take a 10 page theological writeup of the definition of f"free will".

Quote: Originally posted by Sedit

Question Franklyn: When an object is hot and you touch it do you have the free will to hold your hand there until you hand is completely chared off? Or is the electrochemical reactions in your body forcing you to do something your not thinking about by withdrawing your hand from a heat source?

Quote: Originally posted by Sauron

The failure to explicitly exclude the life sciences from the original query in this thread, doomed this thread from the start.

hahha

I also feel that life, is something entirely beyond chemistry.

That is not to say that there is a god, but that there is simply a force about living organisms that cannot be explained by kinetics and thermodynamics alone.

Chemical reactions, though they can be self sustaining, do not "try" to fend off equilibrium. Living creatures actively try to keep from dying. They actively seek food and escape predation. Animals also seek pleasure, which is not a necessity for sustaining the chemical reactions of life.

And yet though animals do try to stay alive most of the time, they also have the choice to lay down and die. People commit suicide all the time, and domestic animals sometimes starve themselves to death when their owners die.

So it cannot be argued that life is "programmed" to survive, because we have the ability to override our programmed instincts. Though usually people can't help yanking their hand from a hot surface, some people can if they try hard enough. Take the monk who set himself on fire. Though instinct would tell him to cry and flail in pain, he managed to sit silently still until the very end. Maybe the monk is an extreme case, but disequilibrium tells us not to cut our veins or leap from buildings, yet plently of people do it each year.

Thus, we cannot say that life arises from a series of reactions that coincidently sum up to a self-sustaining cycle that avoids equilibrium. Once a chain reaction starts, it only ends when it runs out of reactants. It does not ever say to the universe "hmm... ok I've had enough of this. Time for me to stop here" and break the cycle on its own. Living creatures, on the other hand, do. They have the power to continue the cycle, staving off equilibrium, or to end it early. That is something chemistry can never accomplish on its own.

It might not be god, but there is definately another force that drives life.

[Edited on 6/20/2009 by Saerynide]

"you first postulated problem will eventually fall to raw computer power and advances in software'"

Not to mention possibly new math *might* be needed. Last I looked they were investigating at possible ways to exploit the problem structure to make the thing less dependent on brute-force.

sparky (~_~)

Quote: Originally posted by Sauron

Saerynide your post id judt the sort of psuedoscientific prattle I was hoping to see excluded from this thread. Your premise is: we don't understand life yet so therefore we cam mever understand life, smf yhst id ridiculous on its face. Save the cracker barrel philodphical homilies for the pulpit or sitting round the pot bellied stove at the general store. This is a SCIENCE FORUM and I say there is nothing man is not meant to know.

I don't know what prompted such a response, but I do know this: I never said we can never understand life, nor did I ever hint that there was anything man was "not meant to know."

If you think I am trying to preach the existence of god or a soul or anything metaphysical of that sort, I can tell you that science is my only religion.

There are many things we do not understand and which science has not been able to explain yet. That does not mean to say that science can never explain them - it only means we have not found the answer yet. Evolution should have eliminated homosexual animals, and yet gay monkeys have been observed in the wild. That doesn't mean Darwin's theory of evolution is wrong, but instead that it is incomplete. We don't understand time travel, and we have not yet found the Higgs boson. It's just a matter of whether our science and technology is good enough to answer those questions. In fact, I can't wait for the LHC to produce some results.

So we have not found the answer to why organisms are alive. Someday, we will find the driving force. But with only the chemistry we have now, we cannot reproduce life - we need something more, another theory, another driver, more than kinetics and thermo alone perhaps? That's all I said.

We understand how a neuron works. The neuron alone is not self-aware, but a group of neurons forming a brain creates consciousness, and we don't understand why yet. We can't stick a bunch of neurons together in a petri dish and hope to get a self-aware entity - at least not with our current understanding of biology. But I'm sure in the future, we will find a theory that explains it all.

Edit: And yes, I think I would agree the hardest field in chemistry would probably have to do with molecular orbital theory and maybe predicting bulk properties using stat mech (at least they're the hardest I've ever been exposed to , and no, I didn't like them very much).

[Edited on 6/20/2009 by Saerynide]