+ A
caveat. The epilogue to The Delphic
Boat. Harvard University Press, 2003: Scientists should have no name...
Dealing
with information, this site is information-rich; to get a
flavour of its content
Do not hesitate, draw a page at random to
explore some of its english content
An article in english, drawn at random
Origin of life and common sense: how
did some believe that arsenic could replace phosphorus?
"Here this text comes to an end. In
our time, now that the written word has lost the almost sacred
status it had for so long, I wonder about its significance. Should
I have written it? Or indeed, what place is there for scientific
writing? This is a minor work; what benefit can it bring? Choose
a major work, such as the 1905 article in which Einstein explicitly
sets out the foundations of the theory of relativity, and compare
it, with its enormously destructive consequences – do you remember
Nagasaki? – with Mozart’s Don Giovanni, with Mickiewicz’s
love poetry, or Michelangelo’s Pietà. Ask yourself
which you would destroy, if fate allowed you to save only three
of these works. Science is, and remains, anonymous. Anyone might
rediscover Einstein’s findings, one fine day. Science is anonymous,
and this is probably why it is both feared and disdained. What
ambition, what mad hope drove me to dedicate my days and nights
to thinking through what is set down in black and white in this
bundle of pages? Astonishment, no doubt. Astonishment at finding
myself one of the billions of human beings taking part in the
last doubling of the population of humanity, at a time when we
can all look around us at this planet we have devastated. At
having witnessed the destruction of all my hopes and all my beliefs,
and yet finding myself still standing on this transient earth.
At knowing that a day will come, not for me but for others, when
a new form of creation will replace what we have destroyed, only
to disappear in its turn into the night of Oblivion. I wanted
to leave some signs of this new hope of an impossible future,
to help those mysterious Others who will one day give it birth,
to help them find their way, or rather to know that the way exists,
without me. "
The classical physical representation
of Reality rests on four currencies: space, time, matter and
energy. For some time a fifth category, information, begins to
be systematically considered as an essential component of this
representation. It appears that the discrepancies between classical
physics and quantum physics cannot be resolved by assuming the
existence of hidden variables, as all the experiments derived
from the thought experiments invented by Einstein and others
have all refuted their existence. The contradiction is resolved
if one introduces information
as an essential component of the phenomena of interest. At least from a heuristic
point of view, information can be considered
as an authentic currency of Reality. Collecting information
requires concrete instantiations of Maxwell's demons, combined
to creative destruction, a concept that has been revived under
a subtle form by Nassim Taleb as antifragility.
Information is central to biology, in a
very loose manner in general, essentially via the concept of
genetic program and information transfers between the program embodied
into nucleic acids and its expression, generally as
proteins (which may combine their action to different levels
of integration, up to complex behaviours in multicellular organisms
for example). In this context of a revolutionary shift of emphasis
in the physical sciences, and in the recent developments of biology,
we investigate at this site the role of a concept that has often
been considered as quite fuzzy, and which is at the centre of
many heated controversies, Natural Selection. If information
is a category of Reality, then accumulation of information over
time is a central question to biology. Analysis of the genome
of living organisms suggests that specific degradation functions
make room by using energy to prevent degradation of
what is functional. This process of making room is what we used
to name natural
selection. It implies that one is able to avoid mixing up reproduction
(making a similar copy) and replication (making an identical
copy), a separation that has been central to permit the origin
of life.
As information theories are only fairly recent, it is essential
to create new ways to represent this category, and the way it
permits exploration and creation of novel components of Reality.
We hope that this will be an incentive for young mathematicians
to display their inventivity. In parallel, this effort needs
to be coupled to experimental approaches in biology, to test
the many ways in which living organisms trap information: our
quest will be to identify Maxwell's demon's genes...
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