Thursday, August 08, 2013

Looking Into A Very Small Mirror

I thought this article on Wired was really cool.

We can now see molecular bonds as they form.
Using atomic force microscopy, we can now see individual atomic bonds within molecular structures. This is beyond awesome. It's like looking into the smallest mirror imaginable. You can imagine how you'd see the molecules the make up your body doing whatever it is they do all day.

Of course, if you're a pure materialist and don't go in for all of that metaphysical "soul" stuff, this means that your chances of ever finding your free will in the physical world grows ever smaller. As of now, it looks to be about a few ten-millionths of a millimeter in diameter.

Good luck finding it there.

1 comment:

tim eisele said...

Yes, those are very cool pictures. Particularly because what they show agrees so closely with the structural diagrams, even though the diagrams are pieced together from all sorts of subtleties of the behavior of chemicals, and not from actually seeing them.

As for your comment about souls, I get the impression you believe that no physical measurement will be able to detect a soul. Is that correct?