1.4 Mutability
7
a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his
dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay.
These words would not stand out if written now, two-and-a-half centuries later, but
Shakespeare’s language sounds dated, and Chaucer already needs translation.
Language is most stable when frozen in sacred texts, like Latin and Hebrew.
Medieval Latin was still apt to deteriorate but Hebrew was rooted in the Bible where
every word came directly from God and also had, besides a straightforward reading,
a hidden esoteric meaning, coded by numerical values associated with the letters,
searched for by kabbalists, up to modern computer-aided studies crowned by an Ig
Nobel Prize. The revival of spoken Hebrew by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in the early 20th
century had the effect of an earthquake transforming a landscape, as it opened the
language to further changes in Israeli vernacular.
Temperature in its literal meaning has kept falling, on the average, since the
Big Bang, just as linguistic temperature was falling, on the average, from hunter–
gatherer tribes to modern countries with compulsory school attendance. No structures could survive until nuclear forces became durable enough to keep helium
atoms intact against the temperature of one billion degrees kelvin (K), 100 seconds
after the Big Bang. Waiting 380 000 years more, the temperature was down to a cool
3000 K, and the plasma soup cleared up, with protons and electrons combining to
form neutral hydrogen, whence light broke out. Now, as the cosmic clock shows
13.7 billion years and counting, the average temperature is 2.175 degrees above
absolute zero, hardly comfortable for life, but the average is irrelevant, as weather
depends on location, up to millions of degrees in star interiors. In the interstellar
void, the hell of ice and fire where equilibrium is never attained, the temperature is
ill defined, ranging from almost absolute zero to the superstellar energy of cosmic
rays.
The temperature in neighborhoods hospitable to life, on planets protected by an
atmosphere, is in the range of chemical bonds. Their strength is properly measured
in units of thermal energy, E 0 = kT , where k is the Boltzmann constant and T is
the absolute temperature. This measure unequivocally characterizes the capability
of a bond to sustain background thermal noise. If E is the energy of a bond, the
probability of its break-up is proportional to e −E/E 0 . The exponential dependence is
very steep. If the energy of a bond is ten times the thermal energy, the probability of
its spontaneous break-up at room temperature is less than 0.005%. Typical energies
of covalent bonds formed by an electron pair shared by two atoms in a molecule
are still more than ten times higher, adding five or six zeroes more after the decimal
point. Molecules can be bound by weaker bonds: hydrogen bonds with an energy
of about 10kT are carried by a hydrogen atom tied to two polar atoms, e.g., oxygen
and nitrogen belonging to neighboring molecules; still weaker bonds with energy in
single kT units are formed by the interaction of permanent or induced dipoles.
Erwin Schr¨ odinger (1944), in his book pioneering physicists’ involvement in the
problems of biology, justified at length why the information carrier should be a
molecule. He followed the work of the geneticists Max Delbr¨ uck, later a Nobel Prize
winner, and Nikolai Timof´ eeff-Ressovsky. For the latter, and also the latter’s teacher
Nikolai Koltsov, this should have been evident, but it was less clear to the physicist
7
a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his
dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay.
These words would not stand out if written now, two-and-a-half centuries later, but
Shakespeare’s language sounds dated, and Chaucer already needs translation.
Language is most stable when frozen in sacred texts, like Latin and Hebrew.
Medieval Latin was still apt to deteriorate but Hebrew was rooted in the Bible where
every word came directly from God and also had, besides a straightforward reading,
a hidden esoteric meaning, coded by numerical values associated with the letters,
searched for by kabbalists, up to modern computer-aided studies crowned by an Ig
Nobel Prize. The revival of spoken Hebrew by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in the early 20th
century had the effect of an earthquake transforming a landscape, as it opened the
language to further changes in Israeli vernacular.
Temperature in its literal meaning has kept falling, on the average, since the
Big Bang, just as linguistic temperature was falling, on the average, from hunter–
gatherer tribes to modern countries with compulsory school attendance. No structures could survive until nuclear forces became durable enough to keep helium
atoms intact against the temperature of one billion degrees kelvin (K), 100 seconds
after the Big Bang. Waiting 380 000 years more, the temperature was down to a cool
3000 K, and the plasma soup cleared up, with protons and electrons combining to
form neutral hydrogen, whence light broke out. Now, as the cosmic clock shows
13.7 billion years and counting, the average temperature is 2.175 degrees above
absolute zero, hardly comfortable for life, but the average is irrelevant, as weather
depends on location, up to millions of degrees in star interiors. In the interstellar
void, the hell of ice and fire where equilibrium is never attained, the temperature is
ill defined, ranging from almost absolute zero to the superstellar energy of cosmic
rays.
The temperature in neighborhoods hospitable to life, on planets protected by an
atmosphere, is in the range of chemical bonds. Their strength is properly measured
in units of thermal energy, E 0 = kT , where k is the Boltzmann constant and T is
the absolute temperature. This measure unequivocally characterizes the capability
of a bond to sustain background thermal noise. If E is the energy of a bond, the
probability of its break-up is proportional to e −E/E 0 . The exponential dependence is
very steep. If the energy of a bond is ten times the thermal energy, the probability of
its spontaneous break-up at room temperature is less than 0.005%. Typical energies
of covalent bonds formed by an electron pair shared by two atoms in a molecule
are still more than ten times higher, adding five or six zeroes more after the decimal
point. Molecules can be bound by weaker bonds: hydrogen bonds with an energy
of about 10kT are carried by a hydrogen atom tied to two polar atoms, e.g., oxygen
and nitrogen belonging to neighboring molecules; still weaker bonds with energy in
single kT units are formed by the interaction of permanent or induced dipoles.
Erwin Schr¨ odinger (1944), in his book pioneering physicists’ involvement in the
problems of biology, justified at length why the information carrier should be a
molecule. He followed the work of the geneticists Max Delbr¨ uck, later a Nobel Prize
winner, and Nikolai Timof´ eeff-Ressovsky. For the latter, and also the latter’s teacher
Nikolai Koltsov, this should have been evident, but it was less clear to the physicist