Announcement List for the Virginia Atheists & Agnostics

[jin lee <>]

Hey guys,

Regrettably, I will not be able to present today and I am hoping that this presentation can take place at another time. I'm really sorry about the mix up. If you guys were looking forward to discussing today the kind of ideas that were mentioned in Victoria's previous email, I highly recommend the following talk that will be taking place at 7 pm tonight. I have pasted its details below. 

Best regards,

Jin

Hoxton Lecture

Thursday, March 22, 2018

7:00 PM

Chemistry , Room 402

Note special date.

Note special time.

Note special room.

William Bialek [Host: Marija Vucelja] 

Princeton University

"The Physics of Life"

ABSTRACT:

In the four hundred years since Galileo, the physics community has constructed a remarkably successful mathematical description of the world around us.  From deep inside the atomic nucleus to the structure of the universe on the largest scales, from the flow air over the wing of an airplane to the flow of electrons in a computer chip, we can predict in detail what we see, and what will happen when we look in places we have never looked before.  What are the limits to this predictive power?  In particular, can we imagine a theoretical physicist’s approach to the complex and diverse phenomena of the living world?  Is there something fundamentally unpredictable about life, or are we missing some deep theoretical principles that could bring the living world under the predictive umbrella of physics?  Exploring this question gives us an opportunity to reflect on what we expect from our scientific theories, and on many beautiful phenomena.  I hope to leave you with a deeper appreciation for the precision of life’s basic mechanisms, and with optimism about the prospects for better theories.

On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 6:50 PM victoria kovalchuk <> wrote:

Hello everyone!

This week we will be having our very own Jin Lee present on the topic of Emergence in Science. It's a really cool combination of science and philosophy, so I hope the many STEM and philosophy majors in our club (and everyone else!) comes to this cool discussion! The meeting will be tomorrow, March 22nd, at 7pm, and the meeting will be in New Cabell 415. Jin's blurb is below!

I am also excited to announce that we will be having a UVA professor Sonam Kachru from the Department of Religious Studies who will be giving a talk relating to Buddhism. The meeting will be on April 5th, so pencil it into your calendar and watch our for more info.

Also, no Faith and Science discussion this week, but it will be happening next week! 

Have a great day!

Victoria Kovalchuk

Here is Jin's blurb:

There exists a controversy regarding the reduction of scientific theories, with implications towards the consistency of science itself. Can the development of a network of neurons be reductively explained by the genes that produce them? Can one's thoughts, feelings and actions be reductively explained by the neural network? The answer, when we look at macroscopic vs microscopic scales, tends to be "no, it's more complicated".

One then asks, "are complex systems inherently not explainable by their simple parts? what is it that makes this incompatibility of scale ontologically different from our ability to construct the natural numbers from 5 axioms, or to explain the asymmetry of the water molecule's charge distribution from quantum mechanics?"

Reductionism and emergence are two concepts at the center of a controversy in the philosophy of science. Both can be seen as two sides of the same coin, for those that strongly support one concept tend to argue against the other. I will be presenting on the definition of these two concepts and examples of such controversies in modern scientific research. I hope to see if people can spot this pervasive problem in their own fields of study and illuminate where they stand on this issue. Such a discussion, I believe, has implications towards our certainty in the consistency of scientific theories between macroscopic and microscopic scales.

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