Behind much of today’s biotechnology is the (Newtonian?) notion that living organisms are machine-like. And living organisms can look like machines in some respects. But they aren’t. Barbara Adam points out that the cells of our bodies are incessantly self-renewing – our limbs aren’t like gears that stay the same over time. Nor do the regularities of living organism meet the mechanical ideal of invariant repetition. Living organisms constantly balance decay and renewal, so that their stability is “fundamentally dynamic.”... Read more

Summarizing findings in physics and biology that should inform social science, Barbara Adam writes, “All organisms, from single cells to human beings and even ecosystems, display rhythmic behaviour. Rhythmicity is a universal phenomenon. Scientists conceptualise atoms as probability waves, molecules as vibrating structures, and organisms as symphonies. Living beings, they suggest, are permeated by rhythmic cycles which range from the very fast chemical and neuron oscillations, via the slower ones of heartbeat, respiration, menstruation, and reproduction to the very long... Read more

KG Denbigh wrote in 1981 that physics treats time as a simple continuum: “It knows of no means of picking out a unique moment, the now or the present. The t-coordinate is an undifferentiated continuum, and, if this coordinate is ‘taken for real’ as has been the tendency among many scientists and philosophers, the familiar distinction between past, present and future, so important in human affairs, comes to be regarded as a mere peculiarity of consciousness. It is as if... Read more