Frasi di Pierre Lecomte du Noüy

Pierre Lecomte du Noüy è stato un fisico francese.

✵ 20. Dicembre 1883 – 22. Settembre 1947
Pierre Lecomte du Noüy: 2   frasi 0   Mi piace

Pierre Lecomte du Noüy: Frasi in inglese

“One of the funniest examples of these kinds of statistics comes from Evolution: Possible or Impossible by James F. Coppedge [who] cites an article by Ulric Jelinek … which claims that the odds are 1 in 10^243 against "two thousand atoms" (the size of one particular protein molecule) ending up in precisely that particular order "by accident." Where did Jelenik get that figure? From Pierre Lecompte du Nouy… who in turn got it from Charles-Eugene Guye, a physicist who died in 1942. Guye had merely calculated the odds of these atoms lining up by accident if "a volume" of atoms the size of the Earth were "shaken at the speed of light." In other words, ignoring all the laws of chemistry, which create preferences for the formation and behavior of molecules, and ignoring that there are millions if not billions of different possible proteins--and of course the result has no bearing on the origin of life, which may have begun from an even simpler protein. This calculation is thus useless for all these reasons, and is typical in that it comes to Coppedge third-hand (and thus to us fourth-hand), and is hugely outdated (it was calculated before 1942, even before the discovery of DNA), and thus fails to account for over half a century of scientific progress.”

Richard Carrier, "Bad Science, Worse Philosophy", Addendum B, http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/addendaB.html#et_al at The Secular Web (Internet Infidels: 2000)
About

Autori simili

Georges Charpak photo
Georges Charpak 2
fisico polacco
Louis-Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie photo
Louis-Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie 8
matematico e fisico francese
Max Planck photo
Max Planck 11
fisico tedesco
Werner Karl Heisenberg photo
Werner Karl Heisenberg 4
fisico tedesco
Peter Higgs photo
Peter Higgs 1
fisico britannico
Marie Curie photo
Marie Curie 8
chimica e fisica polacca naturalizzata russa e in seguito f…
Steven Weinberg photo
Steven Weinberg 6
fisico statunitense
Carlo Rubbia photo
Carlo Rubbia 18
fisico italiano
Niels Bohr photo
Niels Bohr 8
fisico e matematico danese
Paul Dirac photo
Paul Dirac 3
fisico e matematico britannico