Silicon: life beyond carbon

I visited Drumheller (Alberta, Canada) last month to see the fossil of dinosaurs at Royal Tyrell Museum. I am attaching some of the pictures. Most of the fossils were bones of different parts (of the dinosaurs), different species and different times. The bones that I saw were hard to believe that they are actually "bones". Mainly because we are used to see bones, which are white or yellowish or brownish at some extent. During that visit, I could not distinguish between an EGG and a ROCK kept side by side and I identified incorrectly (unbelievable ehh...?).
Believe me they (the bones) look like rocks.....hard solid rocks. My post starts now.

All of us know, life was not like this 200 millions years ago. What about the earth and life on earth before that? How was it? I do not know and no one is SURE about the answer. Basic elements that constitutes life are mainly Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen. (Of course many elements like nitrogen, calcium, phosphorous etc etc.. also are vital part of life on earth.. I think all of you will agree that the way these elements make bonds now, were different long back ago. Let us think of an alternative to this system of carbon-hydrogen based life.

I remember a line in Sriramcharitmanas by Tulsidaas, a well known and one of the most popular Hindu script, which reads... छिति जल पावक गगन समीरा, पंच रचित अति अधम शरीरा। it means our body is made up of SOIL, WATER, FIRE, SKY AND AIR. In simple words, it is said in Hindu mythology that our body is made up of soil. This is also interpreted as follows. after death our body is disposed and it goes into these above-said five components. Sometimes I wander whether it gives us some more information other than this. Is it possible to have a life with soil? There is no answer to this but there are hints from the mother nature to decode. Silicon and silicates are main constituent of soil and is in abundance in the nature on earth. Can we imagine a life system with silicon and its derivatives as the basic unit instead of carbon and its derivatives as we see it in present.

Keeping all these questions in mind I started searching what our scientific knowledge says about this. While searching, I saw a literature by Prof. E. REYNOLDS published in NATURE in year 1893. That paper is about looking at silicon analogues of carbon compound. Periodic table is of help for this kind of comparison. I am writing some of the matter from that paper because I think it is important. "..Carbon, whether combined with hydrogen, oxygen or nitrogen or with all three, is the great element of organic nature, while silicon, in union with oxygen and various metals, not only forms about one-third of the solid crust of the earth, but is unquestionably the most important element of inorganic nature....." he further writes.. "....The chief functions of carbon are those which are performed at comparatively low temperatures;hence carbon is essentially the element of the present epoch. on the other hand, the activities of silicon are most marked at very high temperatures;hence it is the element whose chief work in nature was performed in the distant past, when the temperature of this earth was far beyond that at which the carbon compounds of organic life could exist......."

Silicon's ability to make stable bonds with elements like nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen indicates the possibility of a silicon based life possibly in other atmosphere other than oxygen (as it is now). Other possible atmosphere could be SULFUR. I suggest sulfur because it shows properties similar to oxygen due to their presence in the same group (group 16). Also sulfur is related to silicon in period third in the same way as oxygen is related to carbon in the second period. Apart from this silicon is capable of making long chains, multiple bonds and good bond strength with oxygen. Moreover, silicon also has an edge over carbon because of its solubility in aluminum. as it is said "silicon dissolves freely in aluminum". In a way Aluminum resembles nitrogen in directly forming bond with silicon at higher temperatures (here the comparison is between Si-Al and C-N). Si-Al dissolution and ability to stay together with ease and stability can be understood in terms of there coexistence in the crust of earth which has been named with them as SIAL (refer to the other part of crust called "Sima", consisting of silicates and magnesium).

Before saying final words for this post, I would like to make two points about the importance of silicon (and its derivatives) in our life. First, a complex derivative of silicon made up of Silicon, oxygen, hydrogen and carbon is used in many medical application including cosmetic implants. This material is called "polymerized siloxene" or more commonly known as "silicone". This material shows know side effects in our body if implanted in our body. Secondly, recent research shows the importance of SILICON in our nutrition for strong and healthy bones (Journal of Nutrition and health aging, Vol 11, page 99 (2007)).

Finally, Its time to think on the possibility of a life with silicon, aluminum and oxygen as basic building blocks instead of carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen. Life in terms of this silicon and group can be thought to be present in past on earth or may be the world outside our reach.  Science gave the answer about our evolution, courtesy Charles Darwin. But it reminds me of a statement by George Bernard Shaw.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

Karl Popper and the Black Swan

I was reading the novel 'The Black Swan' by Nassim Nicholas Taleb during the winter of '08-'09. Since the internet has become just a click away, as a habit I read reviews and make general google research on the book and the author that I am reading. It was during one of these research readings that I came across Karl Popper - who is generally regarded as one of greatest philosophers of science. Being a student of science for most of my life it was surprising, and ignorant of me, to not have heard of the man and his contributions. Nevertheless, I tried to make amends and read a sufficient amount of material on the man. To write a post on a personality, let alone a philosopher is a herculean task and beyond the scope of the post. More importantly I cannot safely say I have read enough of his work to really build an article on the subject. Instead what I will do is introduce Karl Popper, if you are not already introduced to him, with slices of material I read with regard to Black Swan, Nicholas Taleb and Karl Popper.

Writing for the New York Times, Taleb starts his article/book with this paragraph.

Before the discovery of Australia, people in the old world were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence. The sighting of the first black swan might have been an interesting surprise for a few ornithologists (and others extremely concerned with the coloring of birds), but that is not where the significance of the story lies. It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird. 

He goes on to elaborate on the subject and give a three characteristic of a Black Swan event and more. Also, the following set of paragraphs would allow you to see the link between Taleb and Popper.

The problem of demarcation:

Every genuine scientific theory then, in Karl Popper's view, is prohibitive, in the sense that it forbids, by implication, particular events or occurrences. As such it can be tested and falsified, but never logically verified. Thus Popper stresses that it should not be inferred from the fact that a theory has withstood the most rigorous testing, for however long a period of time, that it has been verified; rather we should recognize that such a theory has received a high measure of corroboration. and may be provisionally retained as the best available theory until it is finally falsified (if indeed it is ever falsified), and/or is superseded by a better theory.

Popper has always drawn a clear distinction between the logic of falsifiability and its applied methodology. The logic of his theory is utterly simple: if a single ferrous metal is unaffected by a magnetic field it cannot be the case that all ferrous metals are affected by magnetic fields. Logically speaking, a scientific law is conclusively falsifiable although it is not conclusively verifiable. Methodologically, however, the situation is much more complex: no observation is free from the possibility of error—consequently we may question whether our experimental result was what it appeared to be.

Thus, while advocating falsifiability as the criterion of demarcation for science, Popper explicitly allows for the fact that in practice a single conflicting or counter-instance is never sufficient methodologically to falsify a theory, and that scientific theories are often retained even though much of the available evidence conflicts with them, or is anomalous with respect to them. Scientific theories may, and do, arise genetically in many different ways, and the manner in which a particular scientist comes to formulate a particular theory may be of biographical interest, but it is of no consequence as far as the philosophy of science is concerned. Popper stresses in particular that there is no unique way, no single method such as induction, which functions as the route to scientific theory, a view which Einstein personally endorsed with his affirmation that ‘There is no logical path leading to [the highly universal laws of science]. They can only be reached by intuition, based upon something like an intellectual love of the objects of experience’. Science, in Popper's view, starts with problems rather than with observations—it is, indeed, precisely in the context of grappling with a problem that the scientist makes observations in the first instance: his observations are selectively designed to test the extent to which a given theory functions as a satisfactory solution to a given problem.

My personal favorite is this paragraph.

In the view of many social scientists, the more probable a theory is, the better it is, and if we have to choose between two theories which are equally strong in terms of their explanatory power, and differ only in that one is probable and the other is improbable, then we should choose the former. Popper rejects this. Science, or to be precise, the working scientist, is interested, in Popper's view, in theories with a high informative content, because such theories possess a high predictive power and are consequently highly testable. But if this is true, Popper argues, then, paradoxical as it may sound, the more improbable a theory is the better it is scientifically, because the probability and informative content of a theory vary inversely—the higher the informative content of a theory the lower will be its probability, for the more information a statement contains, the greater will be the number of ways in which it may turn out to be false. Thus the statements which are of special interest to the scientist are those with a high informative content and (consequentially) a low probability, which nevertheless come close to the truth. Informative content, which is in inverse proportion to probability, is in direct proportion to testability. Consequently the severity of the test to which a theory can be subjected, and by means of which it is falsified or corroborated, is all-important. 

Even after reading some of the articles on Popper, I am yet to completely understand and make my personal comment on his work. Nevertheless, I think he makes sense to me almost always and that encourages me to read more of him. Need to get hold of some of his written works. Suggestion in that regard would be most helpful.

To conclude here is what William W. Bartley has to say about Popper:

Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over has wasted or is wasting their intellectual careers. The gulf between Popper's way of doing philosophy and that of the bulk of professional philosophers is as great as that between astronomy and astrology.