Chemistry Is Weird

Despite the fact that most of us were exposed to the subject in high school, I’d wager that 99.99% of us don’t give a passing moments thought to the reality in our world, the reality which makes you, you – chemistry. Yet, even if you did chemistry in high school, you probably never gave a passing moments thought to how weird chemistry really is. Weirdness aside, chemistry works. We all rely on that, except when it comes to the chemistry that rules the roost of that brain thingy of yours.

Chemistry is really weird if you stop and think about it. The basics from the ground up, those fundamental constituents, protons, neutrons and electrons, have the properties of charge, mass and spin and presumably exist in a solid state at STP (standard temperature and pressure) or otherwise. In other words, they have none of the properties, apart from mass, associated with any of the properties associated with the chemical elements (like being other than a solid, liquid or gas at STP (standard temperature and pressure); having colour;

Given those elementary particles, if you start to pile them up, well charge plus charge equals a greater or lesser overall charge; mass plus mass equals more mass; spin plus spin – well I’m not sure spin is a property that can be added or subtracted.

If it could be so arranged, but we’ll make it so since this is a thought experiment, a baseball-sized collection of electrons or neutrons or protons at STP would obviously have mass, and a lot of electric charge in the case of protons and electrons. But what would the colour be? What would it taste like? What would it smell like? What would it feel like? These are unanswered and probably unanswerable questions.

But assemble these fundamentals in various combinations and all of a sudden you do get all of the elements with their associated colours and tastes and so on. That’s a bit weird for starters.

How many atoms of gold (for example but any other element would do) have to come together or be assembled before you have the properties of gold? It surely has to be more than one atom worth surely. 

But even weirder is when you start to combine the various elements with associated properties into molecules that have properties totally unlike the parent elements. You have hydrogen and oxygen as dry gases at STP that make water which is wet and liquid at STP. Silicon is a solid at STP and Carbon is a solid at STP, and Oxygen is a gas at STP, but Carbon Dioxide is a gas at STP whereas Silicon Dioxide (sand) is a solid at STP, yet Carbon and Silicon are like mother and daughter in terms of similarity. Then you have Chlorine, a poisonous yellow gas at STP, and Sodium, which is a solid shiny metal at STP, and volatile enough such that if you swallow any you will really do yourself a very serious mischief. However, Sodium Chloride is just pure table salt and a compound your body requires to survive and thrive!

Carbon isn’t a poison, Oxygen you can breathe, but you’d die in a pure Carbon Dioxide environment, or even in a pure Carbon Monoxide environment.

All of chemistry is deterministic and predictable, both inorganic and organic, with the apparent exception of brain chemistry, which I’ll get to shortly. 

You’d think chemistry would be straightforward, but chemistry can act in rather weird, even unpredictable ways. I mean, if you have an atom of Sodium and an atom of Chlorine, you get a straight-forward molecule of table salt (salty). If you have two atoms of Hydrogen and one atom of Oxygen you get, in a straightforward fashion, a molecule of water at STP (wet). Combine Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen in a certain way and you get sugar (sweet). Another arrangement can give you chlorophyll (green).

Now how is this weird? Well, the basic constituents, protons, electrons and neutrons aren’t salty, wet, sweet or green. Sodium and Chlorine atoms aren’t salty; table salt is salty. Oxygen and Hydrogen atoms aren’t wet at STP; water is wet at STP. Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen atoms aren’t sweet; sugar is sweet. The constituent atoms comprising the chlorophyll molecule (Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen and Magnesium) aren’t green; chlorophyll is green. 

So how do the properties of saltiness, wetness, sweetness, greenness, arise from those constituents that don’t have those properties? It’s not quite as strange as getting something from nothing or something happening for no reason at all, but nevertheless IMHO something’s screwy somewhere. And enigmas like these all lead back to that most fundamental of all issues – what is reality?

Or take another case – Carbon. You’d think Carbon is Carbon is Carbon, but no. Carbon can be charcoal or coal; Carbon can be graphite; Carbon can be a diamond. The various properties of these substances, all just Carbon, drastically differ. Chemistry is indeed weird.

Let’s re-ask the question: How do properties (like charge, spin, mass or presumably being either a solid liquid or gas depending on how you vary temperature and pressure) that all matter (like the fundamental particles, the building blocks of atoms/elements, in turn the building blocks of molecules/compounds) has, morph into properties that only some kinds of matter have, like sweetness, transparentness, hardness, colour, malleability, etc. or properties drastically different from their constituents – like two gases making a liquid.

I’ll just note here that while the fundamental particles, the atoms/elements and molecules/compounds have specific properties, composites like humans do not. The human body for example is collectively a solid, a liquid and a gas. Actually I don’t even tend to think of the human body as an organism but rather a colony composed of billions of micro-organisms, both the cells that make you up as well as all those other microbes that your body plays host to. But that’s an aside.

Speaking of the human body, the body (including the brain and therefore the mind) is one huge chemical processing factory. What goes in is not the same as what comes out!

When it comes to the most of your bodily bits and pieces, your body chemistry is pretty damn deterministic. You breathe in Oxygen and out will come Carbon Dioxide. If you eat X today, your digestive juices process it in the same way as when you ate X the week before. You expect your liver chemistry to detoxify those beers you had with the boys last night. If you take medication, whether it is prescription or self prescribed, you count on the fact that X + Y = Z yesterday, today and tomorrow. If your doctor prescribes various blood and/or urine tests, there’s an extremely high degree of expectation that the results of those tests will exhibit enough absolute certainty for the doctor to then follow-up on, and you will have confidence in that follow-up.

The brain is just a soup vat of chemicals, organic chemicals and bio-chemicals, but chemicals all the same. Therefore anything and everything rooted within the confines of the brain is rooted in chemistry. 

But it is absolutely amazing what chemistry can accomplish when it is part and parcel of your brain chemistry. Things don’t seem quite as deterministic then. Your brain chemistry holds sway over your sensory inputs, memory, desires, emotions, creativity, etc. and we know that those sorts of attributes in humans can be pretty unpredictable.

Still, perhaps one afternoon you smell (sensory input) your next door neighbour’s southern fried chicken cooking which then triggers off a whole potful of internal responses, all triggered in turn by your brain chemistry. The chain reaction might start off by all of a sudden feeling hungry (desire) then remembering (memory) that frozen chicken you have in the freezer and how it has been quite a while since you had a good finger-lickin’ chicken dinner but you’ll need to pop into the corner store to pick up some of those 57 herbs and spices. But then you get an inspiration (creative thought) to stuff the chicken as you would a turkey and forgo the Colonel’s secret recipe, even though you get all teary-eyed (emotions) when you recall how your significant other proposed to you at your local KFC outlet following the senior prom: all that from what’s basically just chemicals doing their chemical thing.  

If you recall something (as per the above example), presumably matter and energy are interacting since there’s no such thing as a free lunch. You don’t get something, in this case memory recall, for nothing – at no cost to you. But how can chemistry result in memory? Chemicals are products. Chemical reactions (those matter-energy interactions) produce new chemical products. Does that make memory a product (and ditto all those other nebulous mental ‘products’ like emotion, desire, morality, and creativity)? Computer memory recall isn’t chemistry of course – there aren’t any chemical reactions going on in your PC – but rather physics (energy expenditure moving electrons around, etc.) Anyway, laptops (to date anyway) don’t have those other nebulous human (and animal) traits like emotion, desire, morality, and creativity that are presumably chemistry driven. But there is more to the anomalies of brain chemistry that just equating a memory or creativity with a chemical, if in fact the two can be equated at all.

Actually I can’t accept the proposition that a molecule (however complex) can equal a memory or be a new creative idea. There must be trillions and trillions of unique memories and creative thoughts (that probably become memories) stored within the brains of the collective of human and animal societies, yet that number would vastly outnumber the possible combos of types of molecules available. It would appear that there has to be more to memory and creativity than just chemistry – it would appear so, but is it so? 

How is it that you can ‘train’ your brain chemistry to wake you up at a certain time – no alarm clock – and it doesn’t matter what time you went to sleep and how many hours of sleep you actually had? How is it that your brain chemistry likes one piece of music but not another piece, or how you can turnoff liking a particular piece of music that used to be your favourite, or type of food, or type of animal – the list is endless. How can your brain chemistry remember X one day, but not the next day? Presumably that creative thought you had today could have been thought of yesterday but wasn’t – same brain, same chemistry (apparently), different results. How does your chemistry-driven feelings for your better half change over time? How come your brain chemistry can result in sexual arousal from viewing one image but not from another image? And it’s not just human brain chemistry either. Given seemingly identical circumstances, my cats will not of necessity perform identical actions. I’m sure there is a logical chemically driven deterministic explanation, except that it’s all so complex and interwoven that it gives more the appearance of indeterminacy and free will. If 99.99% of chemistry is deterministic, I’m sure brain chemistry will prove to be also.



All Our Yesterdays; All Our Tomorrows

We are all familiar with the concepts of ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’. We probably use the terms all the time in daily conversation and correspondence. But exactly where do we find ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’? What exactly is ‘yesterday’ or for that matter ‘tomorrow’? When exactly is ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’? We use the terms loosely, but pinning them down is elusive.

Actually, to start the ball rolling, the concepts of ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ are totally artificial since your today is already someone else’s tomorrow, or someone else’s yesterday, depending on the relative time zones you and that someone else inhabit. Rather, there is a universal ‘now’ (even if it’s noon in one place and midnight 180 global degrees opposite), and at that point defined as ‘now’ there’s what’s past ‘now’ (history) and what’s still ahead of ‘now’ (the future). However, since we are all familiar and comfortable with the terms ‘yesterday’ (history), ‘today’ (now) and ‘tomorrow’ (future), let’s stick with that though they are unnatural time units since they are artificial distinctions or inventions by humans. Other unnatural, artificial, meaningless, manmade time divisions include the second, minute, hour, week, month, decade, century, and related. But there are some natural time divisions: the ever varying day-night cycle and the broad yearly cycle of the seasons are reflected in the natural world, from annual tree rings to the awake-asleep patterns of wildlife. The Lunar cycle is another natural time unit that influences life on Earth but one that has no corresponding manmade equivalent.

Anyway, even though an artificial concept, where does ‘yesterday’ reside? Where are all our yesterdays? Where does ‘tomorrow’ reside? Where are all our tomorrows?

Let’s consider ‘yesterday’ first, but perhaps one needs to start off by distinguishing between a personal ‘yesterday’ and a generic or universal ‘yesterday’, a ‘yesterday’ that contained all things that happened ‘yesterday’ throughout the entire universe.

When it comes to ‘yesterday’, and the day before ‘yesterday’ and the day before that, etc. you could say ‘all our yesterdays’ resides in what someone tells us happened, or what’s recorded in a book or newspaper, or what’s on tape as in a radio show or TV news bulletin. Yet, if you hear that person, read that article, see that TV program that details all things ‘yesterday’, you are hearing, reading, seeing that ‘yesterday’, today, so you are experiencing ‘yesterday’ today. That’s not what we really mean by ‘yesterday’. 

What happened ‘yesterday’, even if you find out something about ‘yesterday’ today, ultimately resides in your mind and in your memory. That’s what makes ‘yesterday’ really real to you. But ‘yesterday’ is even more real if you directly experienced ‘yesterday’s’ happenings ‘yesterday’. Your ‘yesterday’ is your past; your past is contained in your memory.

But where does ‘yesterday’ reside after the oldest person alive who can remember or recall a ‘yesterday’ beyond the recall of any other living person, dies? Then records that detail all our ‘yesterdays’, say an historical museum exhibit, are only experienced afresh today. There’s no way you can deal with a ‘yesterday’ in ancient Egypt in the same way that an ancient Egyptian who lived through that ‘yesterday’ dealt with it.

A universal ‘yesterday’ suggests that not everything that belongs to ‘yesterday’ is known to other people or is written down or otherwise observed or recorded. In fact most of what happened ‘yesterday’ is in total oblivion to all and sundry. 

What if there was absolutely nothing to preserve for posterity an event that happened ‘yesterday’, say a raindrop impacting the middle of the ocean and there’s not even a fish around to see it splash. Or perhaps a meteor impacted the far side of the Moon or several hydrogen atoms fused to create a helium atom in the core of our Sun releasing a photon which has to ‘fight’ it’s way to the surface and escape, but that takes thousands of years, or if inside a faraway star in a faraway galaxy that photon wouldn’t be visible to us (or our descendents) on Planet Earth for maybe millions of years, if ever (since 99.999% of such photons will bypass Earth). Unless there is a cosmic consciousness, that photon will go unobserved and unrecorded, in which case, did the event happen? Does the photon exist? In fact, ‘yesterday’, 99.999% (add at least 100 more 9’s) of events that transpired in the greater Universe went unrecorded and unobserved. So the historical record of ‘yesterday’ is grossly incomplete, unless again you wish to argue that unobserved, even by the humblest of microbes, means it didn’t happen. It’s a variation on the old ‘if a tree falls in the forest and there’s nothing or no one there to observe it, did it make a sound’?

In any event, perhaps this photon event is an example of ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ merging – a ‘yesterday-tomorrow’ connection. A photon created ‘yesterday’ (sometime in the past) but not observed until ‘tomorrow’ (sometime in the future) is still just a single timeline event. In fact, ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ are always linked because what happened ‘yesterday’ has a direct causality bearing on what will happen ‘tomorrow’. So in one sense ‘yesterday’ resides in ‘tomorrow’, and ‘tomorrow’ will in turn reside in tomorrow’s ‘tomorrow’. On a human level, a dance between the sheets ‘yesterday’ can result in quite another event nine months worth of tomorrows later!

Where does ‘tomorrow’ (the future) reside? Well, as hinted at above, the future resides in what happened ‘yesterday’. That’s the generic or universal future. What of your personal future? Where does that reside? There’s only one place your personal future resides – inside your mind.

You can imagine the Sun rising ‘tomorrow’, but until it actually does happen that event is all in your mind, but of course when it does happen it’s no longer ‘tomorrow’ is it? ‘Tomorrow’ never actually comes around, just morphs into today. But sooner or later all your personal mental ‘tomorrows’ come to an end, at least that’s the accepted wisdom.

Your future ceases when you’re declared brain dead, or does it? Not entirely, for each and every elementary particle (electrons, etc.) that makes up what was you in your past still has a future – another case of the ‘yesterday and tomorrow’ connection – as those bits and pieces have had as many ‘yesterdays’ as there were ‘yesterdays’ and will have as many ‘tomorrows’ as the Universe allows for. Some of those bits and pieces were no doubt once part of a ‘yesterday’ pre-you life (or even non-life) form and will no doubt become a part of a post-you ‘tomorrow’s’ life form (or non-life form), so you were part of someone or something else’s immortality and you in turn will be immortal as bits of you will become incorporated into other pieces of matter and energy, ‘tomorrow’. 

In summary, your personal ‘yesterday’ is just a memory, housed and locked away in your mind. Your personal ‘tomorrows’ are just patterns of thought and probabilities, possibilities, even near certainties, but only near certainties as nothing is ever set absolutely in concrete (death and taxes excepted). What may, or may not have happened unobserved in your non-personally experienced ‘yesterday’ resides in your imagination. What may or may not happen unobserved outside of your personal world ‘tomorrow’ is also within your imagination. So where does your ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ reside – in your mind and nowhere else.

Reality: Really Real, Pseudo-Real, or Unreal? Part Four

Reality – It’s all relative; it’s reversible; it’s symmetric; it’s personal; it kicks back when you kick it; it’s conceptual; it’s theoretical; it’s actual; it’s abstract; it’s bio-friendly; it’s unforgiving; it’s emotional; and ultimately the reality of life, the Universe and everything resides in your mind.

Reality from Two More Points of View – Squared:

Position yourself way above the Sun’s North Pole and film the motion of the solar system, or just the inner solar system ‘below’ you. You’d film the Earth revolving about the Sun in a counter clockwise direction, and rotating in an easterly direction.

If you now role that film in reverse, you’d see the Earth revolving in a clockwise direction and rotating in a westerly direction. An inhabitant of that time reversed Earth would see the Sun rise in the west and set in the east! However, that’s no violation of physical law. It’s relatively easy to picture a solar system is which the revolution of planetary bodies is the opposite of ours; planets that rotate in the opposite direction. 

Such opposites with respect to motion are what you’d see in a mirror reflection – if you had a mirror big enough. So, if you reverse time [T], you produce a mirror image of the motion (left handedness motion becomes right handedness motion and vice versa), which in physics is called parity [P]. If you look in a mirror, your right hand now looks like a left hand and vice versa – that’s parity. That applies equally on the micro scale; with the added feature that to preserve the overall symmetry, the charge [C] needs to be reversed too. So, a positive [CPT] is symmetrical with a negative [CPT]. Since the macro is made up of the micro, in our time reversed; parity (motion) reversed, Earth; said Earth would have all the charges in all the particles that made it up reversed. In short, said Earth would be an antimatter Earth!

On the micro level, a positron (positive charge), rotating clockwise (spin up) while moving forward in time at one second per second is symmetrical with an electron (negative charge), rotating counter clockwise (spin down), and moving backwards in time, at a rate of one second per second! Again, there’s no violation of physical law. The laws of physics do not make any distinction between time frames moving from past to present to future relative to time frames going from future to present to past. It’s the same reality from two different perspectives. Which version you prefer is solely up to you – either interpretation is a valid one. Most people of course prefer the classical time frames forward version – the Earth revolves counter clockwise and rotates easterly and is composed of matter and goes from past to present to future. But, you can be, if you wish to be, justifiably stubborn and reverse the CPT and accept that reality.

Again, if you reverse the time frame, you need to also reverse the image of whatever is in motion to its mirror image instead. Now that image may be hard to swallow and isn’t really a ‘reflection’ of your day to day macro world. If you look in your home mirror, and see a reflection of a grandfather clock with hands rotating and pendulum swinging, it will look odd – the hands going the wrong way around (counter clockwise) and the pendulum going right-left-right instead of left-right-left. But, physicists can handle it (at least via their abstract equations – just like the mathematics can deal with the ten or eleven dimensions required of string theory.    

So, in general, negative [CPT] and positive [CPT] are the two symmetrical sides of the same physical law reality coin.

But there are two other ways of looking at and interpreting this. There’s 1) a real mix of (a hell of a lot of) matter and (a very little amount of) antimatter all going forward in time together in step, or 2) you can postulate the concept of additional pseudo-antimatter by postulating that every now and then elementary particles of matter reverse direction in time (hence reverse charge and parity as well) thus mimicking what we call antimatter. That mimicked antimatter elementary particle can reverse time direction again and revert back to what we call normal matter. That applies equally to real antimatter reversing time’s arrow and becoming pseudo-matter. While the former (1) is the commonly accepted, commonsense point of view, it’s actually the latter (2) that has greater explanatory power in solving some of those mysteries of physics, such as entanglement, and double slit experiment weirdness and why are all electrons or positrons identical (because maybe there’s only one of each zigzagging backwards and forwards in time).

Reality Really Is A Personal Thing:

The most unique thing about you is “The You” inside you – your mind. There’s nothing unique about your sex, blood type, pigmentation, hair style, body shape, age, etc. Your genetic makeup isn’t unique if you have an identical twin. Many of your body’s organs can be transplanted into other bodies. But your mind is unique. Even if you had an identical twin, your minds would be different.

Your brain, which houses the mind, is the organ that has to absorb the sensory input we constantly receive from the outside world. While we have some limited control over the sensory barrage or onslaught reality inflicts on us, we so have some – control that is. You can often choose what you want to taste or listen to or see. You can close your eyes or stick your fingers in your ears if you want.  Another form of control is that you can choose your surroundings, maybe eventually immerse yourself in a totally artificial reality, as in the Star Trek’s holodeck programs.  So, in one sense, reality really is all in the mind as all sensory input flows into it. And since your mind is unique, your reality, or your version of reality, must be unique too.

Quite apart fro having some control over external sensory input, the inner workings of your body also can affect the mind and therefore your notion of reality. Migraine headaches can cause you to ‘see’ flashes of light where no optical input is preset. A build-up of this chemical, or lack of that substance, can cause quite considerable alterations in your perception of what’s happening – reality. Near Death Experiences (the NDE) is a case in point. Control over those inner workings is possible, in some cases, to a greater or lesser degree. However, you’re body often tends to do its own thing and mind over matter is a useless exercise!

All of which leads to the point that you can also alter your own perception of reality, not directly via sensory stimuli, but chemically. There are lots of drugs, prescription, legal and over-the-counter (alcohol, etc.), not quite so legal (LSD, magic mushrooms, marijuana, various herbs, etc.) which affect brain (mind) chemistry and how you perceive the outside world.  The question then arises, if you can alter your brain’s (mind’s) chemistry, and that alters your perception of reality, how do you know that your unaltered (normal) brain chemistry is giving you an accurate reflection of what’s out there? If you’re honest, you don’t! But you can assume that you are getting a reasonable facsimile of reality, otherwise basic survival would be highly problematic. I mean if you thing that’s a purring pussy cat approaching you when it’s actually a roaring man-eating tiger, you’re in deep shit. Or, equally in the fertilizer, that’s not really table salt you’re sprinkling on your veggies, its cyanide!

There’s also the area of electrical stimulation of the brain that can produce realities which aren’t real but which, to you, are very real indeed!

There’s an opposite side to the altering-your-mind’s-sensory-input. Instead of adding or replacing inputs, eliminate them – deprive yourself of as much sensory input as possible. I’m thinking of isolation tanks where you float in water at body temperature, there’s no light, no sound, no smell. Of course your heart still thumps and you can still think (therefore you are and therefore you still have a grip on reality, even if the sum total of that reality is just you, and only you. Regardless, it’s a far removal from your day-to-day perception of what’s real!

Lastly, while mind melds (or telepathy) are probably an ever unlikely possibility, I can se the day when there is a direct interface between a computer, an artificial intelligence perhaps, and the human mind. Perhaps that computer link might be an interface between one human mind and another. That way you could directly experience another person’s reality!

The key point: Actual reality has relatively little to do with your brain chemistry (apart from providing the matter/energy needed to run the apparatus).  Your perception of reality has everything to do with brain chemistry. That’s true even if reality is augmented by technology, from telescopes to microscopes; mass spectrometers to particle accelerators; eye glasses to hearing aids.

To be continued…