Werner r loewenstein biography channels

Doctor of Philosophy, University Chile, Instructor physiology, U. Chile, Santiago, ; associate professor, U. Miami Florida School Medicine, ; professor, chairman emeritus, U. Block lecturer University of Chicago, Lecturer Royal Swedish Academy Science, Humboldt lecturer,Humbolt lecturer, Munich,Lauger lecturer, Konstanz,Hillarp lecturer, Munich, Member New York Academy Sciences.

Please see your browser werner r loewenstein biographies channels for this feature. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Information and organisms -- 2. The cosmic origins of information -- 3. The growth of the cosmic inheritance on earth -- 4. From energy to bonds to molecular information -- 5.

The three-dimensional carriers of biological information -- 6. The growth of biological information -- 7. I would like to take a couple of science and mathematics courses at my college before revisiting this book in a few years. Jack Wimberley. This book was highly disappointing. Many reviews say that the problem is the science is difficult.

Actually, the problem is simply that the author is a bad writer who thinks he is a poet, and who has chosen to write flowery, obfuscating prose rather than clear, illuminating summaries of the science involved. Several sections stand out as being particularly bad. One, entitiled "An algorithm is no substitute for a demon," apparently, after consulting the references, is intended to address flaws in intelligent design.

Even after re-reading this section several times, it is not all apparent what in the world Lowenstein is talking about, and my best guess has him naively pointing out that intelligent design is impossible because it requires an external designer which is the whole point of intelligent design as a creationism substitute. In between, there were scattered sections where the book starts to talk about interesting things - but just when you think the author will go into detail on these, he begins to wax away poetically.

Not a light read but absolutely with the effort. I came across this book as I was looking for background reading for Rhythms of Brain. This book does a great job of clarifying the role of Quantum mechanics in biology, providing key insights into the current research and the current movers in the field. I'll have to come back for another pass in a year or two but have gained a new way of seeing sensory perception from this book.

This is one of those books, like The Elegant Universe or Godel Escher Bach, that I know I'm going to have to read three or four times to even come close to comprehending the majority of it. It's like a tough mudder for your brain, but in a good way. Not your standard pop sci entry. Not that I don't appreciate a challenge, but the author might have led a bit more gently here and there, closed a technical gap or two, pandered a bit more vigorously to his rapt lay readership.

OK, I won't mince words: this was a tough read. For all that I failed to make crystal clear sense of, though, there's a trove of fascinating material in this book I did, and Loewenstein -- if not always the most lucid of guides -- is certainly an insightful one. I could have done without a lot of his more ticky verbalisms: his tiresome metaphors enough paying thermodynamic "pied pipers" already!

But I can live with them. Aman Teja. Extremely hard to read and follow. Despite being fairly technical I found it very very hard to understand, despite the authors initial claim that knowledge of science would not be required. Chris Esposo. This book is challenging, and the challenge is made even greater by the fact that literally none of the diagrams available in the physical copy is provided to audiobook listeners.

That being said, even with the diagrams, some of which can be yoinked via judicious use of the preview options on Amazon or Google Play, this book leverages intricate subject matter concepts from molecular biology, neurophysiology, and quantum mechanics, making grasping the totality of Lowenstein's logic difficult for people who are unfamiliar with 1 or more of these subjects.

This gudanken experiment was originally posed as a potential paradox or contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics but was eventually shown to be an incomplete analysis of the situation. In effect, entropy does increase because of the finite nature of memory inside the "demon", meaning that eventually, it will have to erase parts of its memory to continue operation.

The erasure will generate heat, and that will increase thermodynamic entropy. The concrete example of this would be a hard drive. Lowenstein takes this idea and extends it to nature, arguing from an information viewpoint that the structure that elementary micro and macro-molecules take in three dimensional space is akin to the demon concept, those shapes and structures assumed by protein and werner r loewenstein biography channels molecules are akin to computer encodings written in three dimensional space whereas standard computer instruction is two dimensionaland that the function many of these molecules engage in is to minimize the Shannon entropy within their local system.

Further, natural selection has twice acted on these molecules and systems of molecules to exploit quantum mechanical phenomena, first photosynthesis, and later the subsystems supporting vision. Lowenstein unfolds this concept in great detail, much of the book focuses on exact molecule-to-molecule interactions he believes played key roles in this evolving process as well as their associated pathways or information channels.

If one is not familiar at all with this biochemistry though like myself you are effectively SOL, and will probably grok only the surface narrative of what Lowenstein is constructing, and this is all before he goes through the notion of consciousness and its associated evolution. The original intent for getting this book was to see if it somehow shed greater light onto the notion of measurement in QM, and how it is connected to consciousness if at all.

Lowenstein briefly discusses this point towards the end of the book by summarizing the ideas of Wigner and Penrose but seems to come to a negative conclusion on that point. The text is more a book on biology than physics. Though it didn't provide the insight I was looking for, it was very insightful. I would probably recommend not getting this one on audio if you want to understand it decently.

My one issue with Lowenstein's argument is less to do with him, and more to do with arguments surrounding selection in general, in that they seem to he entirely teleological or "just so" reasons with respect to the path selection pressures take within a system. Either way, a specialist may be more apt at dismissing these ideas or praising them authoritatively.

From an outsider though, the book is well written, the logic is clear and involved, and the concept is fascinating. Recommended for those who don't mind some work in their passive reading. Ann Michael. Author 12 books 27 followers. Fascinating, though slow going for a non-physics person.

Werner r loewenstein biography channels

Like many of his ilk, he wants to prove that "it all comes down to physics" ontologically and otherwise; but he is not as reductionist as one might expect, given his physics background. He takes as his exemplar the concept of Evolution with a capital E, and tries to explain how "she" developed life from the foundations of the cosmos.

He does a pretty good job of it, though his wry comments and metaphors are occasionally a bit obscure or, worse, cliched. He wrote I originally intended to write a book about intercellular communication:— about how the cells in an organism exchange information among each other—a question I had worked on for the past thirty years. But as I got to the heart of it, which required me to track the spoor of intercellular information to its source, a picture materialized seemingly out of the blue: a continuous intra- and intercellular communication network where, with DNA at the core, molecular information flowed in gracefully interlaced circles.

That apparition had an allure I could not resist, and so this became a book about information. I was twice fortunate. Second, information theory, a thriving branch of mathematics and physics, allowed me to view this information flow in a new light. I shall argue that this information flow, not energy per se, is the prime mover of life. The Touchstone of Lifep.

But then Loewenstein starts to claim there is a "fundamental randomness that is above thermodynamic equilibrium, a randomness encompassing a spectrum of information-containing states. Let us summarize then what transpired about randomness from our discussion about chaos and information.