Unsolved puzzles in chemistry

I was lead to this passage, it was the one book that was by itself today, it had no other books by it and looked lonely so I picked it up and tried to figure out if I had finished it and indeed I had but the dog eared page I checked had this to say:

 

Unsolved puzzles in chemistry,

 

(stolen without permission from pg 293 of THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE by Michael Talbot: a good read if you know how to truly geek out for a week)

 

Chemist Ilya Prigogine recently noted that Bohm’s (Nobel Lauriat, Atomic Physicist)  idea of the implicate-explicate order (the notion that what is true within makes it true without, a very holy thought if you ask me) may help explain certain anomalous phenomena in chemistry. Science has long believed that one of the most absolute rules in the universe is (entropy) that things always tend toward a greater state of disorder.  If you drop a stereo off the Empire State Building, when it crashes into the side walk it doen’t be come more ordered and turn in to a VCR. It becomes more disordered and turns into a pile of splintered parts. (the law of splat, hehehe)

Prigogine has discovered that this is not true for all things in the universe. He points out that, when mixed together, some chemicals develop into a more ordered arrangement, not a more disordered one. He Calls these spontaneously appearing ordered systems “dissipative structures” and won a Nobel Prize for unraveling their mysteries. But how can a new and more complex system just suddenly pop into existence? Put another way, where do dissipative structures come from? Prigogine and others have suggested that, far from materializing out of nowhere, they are an indication of a deeper level of order in the universe, evidence of the implicate aspects of reality becoming explicate.

IF this is true, it could have profound implications and, among other things, lead to a deeper understanding of how new levels of complexity – such as attitudes and new patterns of behavior — pop into existence in the human consciousness and even how that most intriguing complexity of all, life itself, appeared on the earth several billion years ago.

***

Believed,

 

Bele-eved

 

Beautiful Eve,

 

The Belly of Eve, the home of the first bite of Knowledge. – Belief

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March 2, 2004

wow. you always give me so much food for thought. i could take a big bite of just about anything you write and chew on it for hours and hours.