4 ms·

Excuse my language, but I want to stress how preposterous this statement is: this is complete and utter nonsense. Gravity is way more than 10^10 times weaker th

Excuse my language, but I want to stress how preposterous this statement is: this is complete and utter nonsense. Gravity is way more than 10^10 times weaker than electromagnetism at this scale. Unless you mean "gravity is important to make planets, and planets are where we have observed life", in which case you are stretching the meaning of this expression to a meaningless level.

soulofmischief 7y ago
Here you go: https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2015/863075/ https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2015/863075/ I am not being abstract. Beyond molecular chemistry, gravity and electromagnetism are the dominant ambient forces. We are still learning of the relationship between gravity and QM. What is complete and utter nonsense is refuting a hypothesis without understanding it.
- eesmith 7y ago
  Okay, I read it. It's an editorial. It says nothing about how gravity is required "for heavy elements to cluster in one place in sufficient concentrations to form organelles". For the matter, it says nothing about heavy elements.
  - pharrington 7y ago
    https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/cciss_feature.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/cciss_fe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemodynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemodynamics etc. Yes, gravity is, by far, the weakest force. None-the-less, it is a force, and definitely effects all sorts of things at all scales.
    - petschge 7y ago
      While technically present at all scales, gravity is so weak that you can ignore it until you get to pretty large scales. Meters or so. An ant barely feels gravity, a bacterium or a single cell don't even know it is there.
      - pharrington 7y ago
        If you wanna go down that rabbit hole... one must be as precise as possible when estimating.
      - soulofmischief 7y ago
        What does it mean to "feel" gravity? I assure you the ant's biological systems would undergo many changes over generations in the absence of gravity in order to reach homeostasis. A bacterium can't feel anything but did I mention single-celled organisms? No, I mentioned organelles. You are arguing against a straw-man. Furthermore you are completely ignoring the effect of gravitational perturbations on emergent structures. These things don't necessarily "iron out", and if they do, we have not yet ascertained at what level and via what mechanism. You are confusing an object's ability to produce gravity with its propensity for interacting with gravity.
        ceejayoz 7y ago
        > A bacterium can't feel anything but did I mention single-celled organisms? No, I mentioned organelles. Given that mitochondria are almost certainly descended from captured bacteria, that's an odd quibble.
        soulofmischief 7y ago
        You're right; I'm just trying to not stray so far from the intending meaning of my post. However, our organelles are indirectly influenced by gravity as a result of cascading interactions with other macro systems. I'm just sure someone could make the argument that one bacteria out there was shown to function identically without gravity, thus dismantling an argument I was never trying to make. Organelles are different because they interact with a larger cell structure, which interacts with a larger tissue structure, the latter two both having experimentally proven dependencies on gravity for optimal performance in their current structure. Yes, a lot of our cells would work more or less the same in zero grav-- but would they have ever formed that way in the first place? Your guess is as good as mine.
    - eesmith 7y ago
      These two links still have no bearing on the topic. You wrote "Gravity is important for heavy elements to cluster in one place in sufficient concentrations to form organelles." Your link #1 concerns blood flow, which is much larger than organelles and has nothing to do with heavy elements. (In any relevant sense - while red blood cells have iron, they don't affect the fluid dynamics.) Your link #2 barely touches on gravity, and doesn't mention organelles or heavy elements. I agree with krastanov - the statement of yours, which I quoted, is preposterous according to a widely held understanding of how things work. As such, it would require strong evidence to overturn those views. What is the basis by which you decided it was correct and important enough to bring up?
      - soulofmischief 7y ago
        While OP's words are his own and I'm not necessarily in agreement with them, it's worth pointing out that the circulatory system and organs and organelles which comprise them all have circular dependencies; it's not simply hierarchical based on relative size. A change in any part of the system can propagate both upward and downward.
        eesmith 7y ago
        The "OP" I'm quoting is you, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20321707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20321707 . How are you not in agreement with what you wrote? As to your 'circular dependencies', I'll again quote krastanov in the direct ancestor to this thread: > Unless you mean "gravity is important to make planets, and planets are where we have observed life", in which case you are stretching the meaning of this expression to a meaningless level. This 'circular dependencies' argument is as meaningless as saying that biological organelles are essential to the production of nuclear weapons - true, but not important enough that it's needed to understand the overall process. And there are many things like that. We can model weather numerically without modeling each and every molecule because that low-level interaction doesn't really affect fluid dynamics. Mean field theory can be apply to many complex systems. Yes, there can be chaotic behavior, even in Newtownian systems. But that's beside the point, which is they you have made statements which you seem to assert as fact which don't have any evidentiary support. You might as well muse about the effects of feline ESP on the weather.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  The cell is not a natural homogeneous mixture obeying the laws of free energy. It is actually a densely packed collection of mechanisms designed to subvert free energy and selective cause otherwise improbable reactions to occur. It ought not to be a surprise that some of those mechanisms do not work so well outside the standard uniform gravitational field we experience. But that is not to say that there isn't another set of mechanisms that could work without the influence of gravity. You can see this in parallel with human construction: stairs don't work so well without gravity, but ladders work perfectly fine.
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    > It ought not to be a surprise that some of those mechanisms do not work so well outside the standard uniform gravitational field we experience This is called a dependency. So you agree with my initial proposition. > But that is not to say that there isn't another set of mechanisms that could work without the influence of gravity As I addressed in another post, this is orthogonal to the discussion because we are talking about the universe the way it is, not the way it could be; If we remove gravity from the equation, we don't even get past the big bang and forming systems from uneven matter distribution.
    - jcranmer 7y ago
      Your original proposition is "[gravity is] required for [...] chemical reactions in our organelles." I am explicitly disagreeing that gravity is required for such reactions. Your own source doesn't back up that statement--it suggests that the microstructure (in addition to the more obvious structure of the intercellular matrix) of cells is influenced by gravity, which is itself a rather different statement. Influence is a very different thing from requirement. Furthermore, I should point out that our experience that life can survive quite well outside of the normal gravitational field is itself sufficient disproof of your proposition. After all, our mitochondria don't go "Wait! There's no gravity! How am I supposed to Krebs cycle now?"
      - soulofmischief 7y ago
saagarjha 7y ago
> Unless you mean "gravity is important to make planets, and planets are where we have observed life" I did.

soulofmischief 7y ago

Here you go: https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2015/863075/ https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2015/863075/ I am not being abstract. Beyond molecular chemistry, gravity and electromagnetism are the dominant ambient forces. We are still learning of the relationship between gravity and QM. What is complete and utter nonsense is refuting a hypothesis without understanding it.

eesmith 7y ago
Okay, I read it. It's an editorial. It says nothing about how gravity is required "for heavy elements to cluster in one place in sufficient concentrations to form organelles". For the matter, it says nothing about heavy elements.
- pharrington 7y ago
  https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/cciss_feature.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/cciss_fe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemodynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemodynamics etc. Yes, gravity is, by far, the weakest force. None-the-less, it is a force, and definitely effects all sorts of things at all scales.
  - petschge 7y ago
    While technically present at all scales, gravity is so weak that you can ignore it until you get to pretty large scales. Meters or so. An ant barely feels gravity, a bacterium or a single cell don't even know it is there.
    - pharrington 7y ago
      If you wanna go down that rabbit hole... one must be as precise as possible when estimating.
    - soulofmischief 7y ago
      What does it mean to "feel" gravity? I assure you the ant's biological systems would undergo many changes over generations in the absence of gravity in order to reach homeostasis. A bacterium can't feel anything but did I mention single-celled organisms? No, I mentioned organelles. You are arguing against a straw-man. Furthermore you are completely ignoring the effect of gravitational perturbations on emergent structures. These things don't necessarily "iron out", and if they do, we have not yet ascertained at what level and via what mechanism. You are confusing an object's ability to produce gravity with its propensity for interacting with gravity.
      - ceejayoz 7y ago
        > A bacterium can't feel anything but did I mention single-celled organisms? No, I mentioned organelles. Given that mitochondria are almost certainly descended from captured bacteria, that's an odd quibble.
        soulofmischief 7y ago
        You're right; I'm just trying to not stray so far from the intending meaning of my post. However, our organelles are indirectly influenced by gravity as a result of cascading interactions with other macro systems. I'm just sure someone could make the argument that one bacteria out there was shown to function identically without gravity, thus dismantling an argument I was never trying to make. Organelles are different because they interact with a larger cell structure, which interacts with a larger tissue structure, the latter two both having experimentally proven dependencies on gravity for optimal performance in their current structure. Yes, a lot of our cells would work more or less the same in zero grav-- but would they have ever formed that way in the first place? Your guess is as good as mine.
  - eesmith 7y ago
    These two links still have no bearing on the topic. You wrote "Gravity is important for heavy elements to cluster in one place in sufficient concentrations to form organelles." Your link #1 concerns blood flow, which is much larger than organelles and has nothing to do with heavy elements. (In any relevant sense - while red blood cells have iron, they don't affect the fluid dynamics.) Your link #2 barely touches on gravity, and doesn't mention organelles or heavy elements. I agree with krastanov - the statement of yours, which I quoted, is preposterous according to a widely held understanding of how things work. As such, it would require strong evidence to overturn those views. What is the basis by which you decided it was correct and important enough to bring up?
    - soulofmischief 7y ago
      While OP's words are his own and I'm not necessarily in agreement with them, it's worth pointing out that the circulatory system and organs and organelles which comprise them all have circular dependencies; it's not simply hierarchical based on relative size. A change in any part of the system can propagate both upward and downward.
      - eesmith 7y ago
        The "OP" I'm quoting is you, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20321707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20321707 . How are you not in agreement with what you wrote? As to your 'circular dependencies', I'll again quote krastanov in the direct ancestor to this thread: > Unless you mean "gravity is important to make planets, and planets are where we have observed life", in which case you are stretching the meaning of this expression to a meaningless level. This 'circular dependencies' argument is as meaningless as saying that biological organelles are essential to the production of nuclear weapons - true, but not important enough that it's needed to understand the overall process. And there are many things like that. We can model weather numerically without modeling each and every molecule because that low-level interaction doesn't really affect fluid dynamics. Mean field theory can be apply to many complex systems. Yes, there can be chaotic behavior, even in Newtownian systems. But that's beside the point, which is they you have made statements which you seem to assert as fact which don't have any evidentiary support. You might as well muse about the effects of feline ESP on the weather.
jcranmer 7y ago
The cell is not a natural homogeneous mixture obeying the laws of free energy. It is actually a densely packed collection of mechanisms designed to subvert free energy and selective cause otherwise improbable reactions to occur. It ought not to be a surprise that some of those mechanisms do not work so well outside the standard uniform gravitational field we experience. But that is not to say that there isn't another set of mechanisms that could work without the influence of gravity. You can see this in parallel with human construction: stairs don't work so well without gravity, but ladders work perfectly fine.
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  > It ought not to be a surprise that some of those mechanisms do not work so well outside the standard uniform gravitational field we experience This is called a dependency. So you agree with my initial proposition. > But that is not to say that there isn't another set of mechanisms that could work without the influence of gravity As I addressed in another post, this is orthogonal to the discussion because we are talking about the universe the way it is, not the way it could be; If we remove gravity from the equation, we don't even get past the big bang and forming systems from uneven matter distribution.
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    Your original proposition is "[gravity is] required for [...] chemical reactions in our organelles." I am explicitly disagreeing that gravity is required for such reactions. Your own source doesn't back up that statement--it suggests that the microstructure (in addition to the more obvious structure of the intercellular matrix) of cells is influenced by gravity, which is itself a rather different statement. Influence is a very different thing from requirement. Furthermore, I should point out that our experience that life can survive quite well outside of the normal gravitational field is itself sufficient disproof of your proposition. After all, our mitochondria don't go "Wait! There's no gravity! How am I supposed to Krebs cycle now?"
    - soulofmischief 7y ago

saagarjha 7y ago

> Unless you mean "gravity is important to make planets, and planets are where we have observed life" I did.