Reality and Its Order by Werner Heisenberg

Author:Werner Heisenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030256968
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

(b) The Structure of the Biological Domain

Chemical laws could not be formulated exactly, nor could the question of the nature of chemical forces be answered as long as the focus was restricted to actual chemistry, that is to say, to the qualitative transformation of measurable quantities of substances. Only with the advance into the chemistry of smallest quantities of matter (atoms and molecules), into the boundary area where chemical and mechanical processes can no longer be sharply distinguished, was it possible to discover and exactly formulate the natural laws that encompass chemistry and mechanics simultaneously.

Similarly, as long as we restrict ourselves to the study of life forms that are visible to us, we are not likely to succeed in formulating biological laws exactly or answering the question of the nature of the forces that decisively shape life. Only as we move on to the area of the minutest of organisms, the boundary area where living begins [C42] cannot be sharply distinguished from large molecules, may it become possible to track down the natural laws that encompass biology, physics and chemistry at one and the same time. This boundary area has become open to research only in the last decades; the road to the discovery of natural laws is likely to be yet a long one. The question must for the time being remain open of how the logical freedom created by Bohr’s thesis may be exploited by a positive assertion about the biological dimension. Nonetheless, we shall address at least some possibilities concerning the substance of this prospect.

In order to make some judgment about the biological dimension it is important from the start to state that the origin of life or, more precisely, of living organisms on the slowly cooling surface of the earth was a unique process, one that we cannot reproduce experimentally. That is why the application of the concept of “law” to life-processes is problematic, since a natural law is by its very nature a statement about processes that can be repeated as often as one wishes. To be sure, it is possible to think about the earth’s cooling as something that happened any number of times, but if we wanted to say what happens in such a cooling process we would leave behind the area of experimentally ascertainable statements. At best a comparison, made at some future time, of the formation of organic entities in different stellar systems could replace the repetition of that process. However, for the time being we do not know whether such organic formations exist on other bodies in the universe. In any case, biology for now refers to organic life on our earth. Laws can be therefore be spoken about in as many places as there are repeatable biological experiments. But these experiments always presuppose the existence of life as it has developed. The origin of living organisms from inorganic matter remains a unique historical process.

One could now, for example, take Darwin’s principle of selection as the key to understand the processes of life, as many researches have done.

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