What truth is the article talking about? The article is basically slop that goes from place to place without a thing to say.
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
-21 points (20.0% liked)
science
23179 readers
760 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
One of physicists’ great talents—starting with the laws of simple parts (such as atoms) and working up to a complex whole—cannot fully account for cells, animals, or people.
I think that's the core of it. But the author is a "tide goes in, tide goes out, you can't explain that" kind of moron. Of course you can explain a cell's operation through physics->chemistry->biology. We can't explain the spark of life yet, but we can certainly explain life processes.
The fundamental laws that govern matter and energy cannot predict another fundamental property of life: It is the only system in the universe that uses information for its own purposes. Plants grow toward light, microbes swim toward rich food sources, animals hide from predators, humans send giant metal contraptions into outer space.
This is, of course, nonsense. A light source isn't information, life doesn't need information, and plants grow toward light through simple chemical reactions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototropism
Maybe an AI written article? Or science from a christian bias? Its nonsense claiming a cell membrane defies our understanding of physics. It is 100% physical laws thus chemistry
Could it be that this is the truth physics can no longer ignore? Find out in our season finale! Coming up next, this man claims to be pregnant with Montezuma's gold, but will Montezuma have his... revenge?
Well, does he?!?!?
Give me a young star, and I can use the reductionist laws of physics to predict that star’s future: It will live a million years rather than a billion years; it will die as a black hole rather than as a white dwarf. But the components of a living organism yield something new and unexpected, a phenomenon called “emergence.” Give me a simple cell from the early days of Earth’s history, and I could never predict that some 4 billion years later it would evolve into a giant rabbit that can punch you in the face. Kangaroos—like humans—are an unpredictable, emergent consequence of life’s evolution.
But couldn't "reductionism" simply chalk this inability up to the practical lack of physical information and our purely technical inability to play out (simulate) something as massive as, at the very least, all that takes place on an entire planet?
In fact, even the example with the predictability of a star's life isn't all that certain in practice – do we really know exactly how the star's life will play out, or just generally? Will the Sun become a red giant in roughly ten million years, or in exactly 10.285.914 years? It's still a complicated chaotic system and we certainly can't account for all the details and microflunctuations. The same inability applies to physics describing evolution, with the main difference being how far-reaching the difficult-to-predict micro-flunctuations can be (a change in a gene can change everything about life on Earth millenia down the line; a solar flare, while involving an incomprehensibly larger amount of energy, changes next to nothing about how the star's life will play out, as far as we're concerned).
I take these differences more as a spontaneous consequence of how you frame your topic of study, depending on your practical possibilities (different methodologies arising based on how suitable/doable they are for different objects), rather than as a strict border between hard determinist physics and non-physical magic.
Is this usual for theatlantic or is it any good?
Atlantic has good stuff sometimes, but this isn't it.