What is so special with carbon?

What is so special with carbon?


http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=2846514233477399562&postID=8749937674288937092&page=1&token=1301934723723

Ulla said...
The interesting question from my point of view is 'why is life based on carbon'? What is so special with carbon?

I had some general thoughts last night with Ulla's question in a comment to Riofrio on what was so special about carbon as a base for life. This is a deep question and I can understand why many might think it an emergent and mystical subjective thing. I will post here soon today some thoughts on this related to the symmetry of our topology series and try to make some objective conclusions. I am not sure we can pin down exactly what we mean by life- we may say by that definition that the silicon based earth is conscious and alive as some sort of degree without restrictions- life as a sort of raw motion and warmth- but that is still philosophy.

I feel Ulla's question rather deep so look a little deeper as to what is her concerns. I will reply with casual speculations on the more braiding theory of things- but as in this set of comments today I imagine the appeal to quantum (field?) terms as Kea observed has to be supplemented into wider areas- Although, here at the frontier and reading Ulla's recent blog I am a little closer to those who try to make it all based on something like mind or consciousness as a viable alternative but metaphysical possibility- like galatomic's theory from the old philosophychatforum days. Again, what we try to describe as a quantum leap which is rare, may not necessarily be a leap by reason of quantum space as the grounding.

I also see Ulla's comment to my last post as suggesting that in general the structures of life as DNA may not have a rigid form (as observed) but ultimately a chance configuration from only a random and quantum basis- a more standard model. But is life as we know it and mind as it is co-inevitable in this sense merely the debate on what minor bacteria inhabit the surface of things in their little interactive toroidal representations? Perhaps, as in the post Whiskers we see that space is full of carbon tubes and Iron whiskers- in a sense to make steel we have to engineer in our theories the equivalent of the Bessemer process!

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I posted this comment today after reading what I feel are Lubos's awakening interpretations and understanding of the see frontier effects from our recent experimental data:

Lubos, I see you too are thinking about the asymmetry and the hidden changes of sign and handedness (todays post on MEG for example).

I do not see how either of you will win the bet on the LHC finding supersymmetry, squarks or what, when perfectly good alternatives to the standard theory based on topology does discuss particles in a similiar manner and considers possibly stringy multidimensions. Such superspaces may not be supersymmetry in the sense some of you are now exploring.

But thanks for the info and interest. I think we do indeed have to go beyond the usual ideas like just phase spaces or the "old language of various quantum theories- not to say these are wrong."

The PeSla

This posted as a comment on Jester's page concerning the same general experimental results:

http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=2846514233477399562&postID=8749937674288937092&page=1&token=1301934723723

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Carbon's Special Role in a Universe of Light and Dark Fluid

It is appealing but a little soon to relate these ideas to the light and opaque matter. The superman symmetries may not clearly turn the coal into diamonds and the soot into a powerful principle of a more local non-locality of fiber like bundles of closed and open mouthed wormholes. We only can speculate on the nature on the other side of ultimate mirrors.

For those whom might encounter my surviving poetry, the mythology of Quabics was a term I used to understand the parts and the wholes of things, matter in particular when we count the quarks arithmetically (and as an independent idea the anti-quarks that came in a dream). I feel this the contribution of later Christian metaphysics, the idea of the Trinity or better yet the Quaternity of Jung- but such things should be understood in a sort of evolutionary order- as well carbon itself as some unit of matter seen over the immense time where it comes in and out of living things. I owe this view to a very old lady in chemistry class- different world views and the debates of the time in geometry made for low grades- save, this lady who spurned milk, gave me an A on the carbon paper.

In a way what I write will come from a rather outdated and trivial view as an introduction to the deeper meaning such things imply- but did we not overrate the grounding of say Boyai's geometry developed from simple obvious and trivial logic- as that species of humans related to Hungarians are jokingly said to be evidence of aliens among us for all their inventions like this or Rubik's cubes?


The Trinity or Quaternity issues is still with us, perhaps in the debate as to what is the 3+1 or 2+2 or 4 symbolism in the formulation of the quantum and other physics.

I think of things like two metal plates attract by the Casmir force (and as Rowlands points out there can be seen organic equivalents in force descriptions). But if we have places where the geometry of spheres match that of the planes we might ask what it means as far as the world outside it, what happens within the "crust" between spheres? Does it push things apart, contain them, or collapse them together?

Let me remark that Pauling suggested that we can have 20 carbons together in the form of a dodecahedron- nature with a little uncertainty as a fudge factor for the pentagonal angle is 108 and the octahedral is 109.54, but even a straw models can be made as such a polyhedron.

But a key idea here is that when we arrange carbon as in the Buckyballs what we get is not ideally that based on fivefold symmetry as much as a close stacking as the molecule grows more on the essential lengths of lesser dimensions such as of space or two planes. Only projected out are these true three dimensional geodetic domes.

So, briefly, and mirror particles held on the back burner, let us count the number of things in a carbon atom as if to find a finer but simple idea of what is there to understand vaguely the mass.

3^2 x 2 or 2^3 x 3 has been observed in these blogs to have some sort of relevance to possibilities or impossibilities of topological structures. Of 6 protons we multiply by three quarks to get a count of 18. Alternatively we multiply by four, quaternity, and we get a count of 24 such things.

Interestingly, 18 x 24 = 1/2 x 6^3 which is 4 x 27.

24 x 4 = 96 and 96^2 = 8 x 1152(the 24 4D cell group number)

Whiskers: Iron is 26 (and thought to be a limit of element production now by novas and certainly is a result of such novas that break down into alpha particles and neutrinos that allow the rapid explosion- save other mechanisms of local jetting may still do the trick for the heavier elements) and Carbon! Metaphorically, we see this sort of arithmetical numerology calling up all the intelligible numbers we encounter today in the twistor like braiding and graphing theories. Certainly the Carbon cycle in the sun is an evolving step to explain some if its source of energy relating on the way to final states of iron. Iron 26 plus carbon 6 equals 32, three times that is 96 and for times that is 128 which is used by Rowlands for certain exact fractions for some particle masses.

Of course there are interdimensions involved in these abstract and discrete geometric structures... We derive some fractional charge values. We imagine graphs that turn a tetrahedron into one of a higher octagon analog to imagine 16 tetrahedra it can be broken down into, or say a fourspace orthogon into 8 three space orthogons which in turn become the 24 three space tetrahedra.

Carbon as 12 x 3 is 36 or times 4 is 96. and C60 or the Buckyball x 4 is the 240 of eight dimensional sphere packing and other things...

We see then that a quaternity of quarks my be expressed outwardly as four "bonds" and as recently observed by experiment the C60 can behave like a Methane molecule as things can be bonded by four to it. (and in a sense there are 8 bonds which seem to enter the count abstractly as what are exploded timelike dimensions of a count.

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The question then is is there some (geometrical) restrictions in a field of many possible arrangements of atoms that carbon is not just accidentally useful to allow the complexity for the arising of life? Although we may make a crude analogy to its similar forms in the periodic table and these certainly have effects on organisms, the general background of the over all structure of an atom would make this very unlikely.

This is not to say that life as such could not take on other forms- but these might be radically different, especially if matters of restricted quasi-nonlocality and quantum like in the entanglements- yet subject to the same intelligible rules of this sort of carbon symmetric underlying topology in 4 space (3 or 4 generation) matter with its ultimate limit of 120 elements this side of the mirror (or 92 if your view of 4 space is Fuller like.) But why would nature in any imagined universe say choose other elements for the foundation of life itself if not side processes of life adapting to the elements at hand?

Interestingly, the properties of superconductivity come up and aromatic ideas when we arrange carbon in graphene or on Buckyballs and so on. A lot of these new experimental results, from this simple perspective on atoms, could have been predicted within the real of matter and life as we know it by such topological concepts.

Two stay thoughts related to these calculator pay concepts: That some sort of iotaplex singularity may be symmetrical somewhere to the initial and final points and direction to the infinity of ordinals reverses that things collapse to combine or expand to repel.

And that if we so add triangles to a flat map of a tetrahedron we get a truncation of it and to that we find center points as if a geodetic structure most simply expressed, and yet it may exist physically as such- and of course be a space filler.

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Since some can evolve such theories in their psyches- I fancy that we could come to some planet where life evolves to a more M theory that has its species of life based on strings alone as a variation in the general scheme of evolving things- but to my knowledege none of the stringers have applied this directly to theories of organism.

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It may be of background relavence to let you know yesterday and today I have had a rather low grade toothache...

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Ulla has an interesting summary of some of these NP (new physics) concerns on her blog at: http://zone-reflex.blogspot.com/2011/03/whats-matrix-relative-locality.html

In many ways it does seem rather like a mess. It occurs to me that even our ideas of dark or opaque matter or fluids (especially when we wrestle with ideas a the extreme of scale or posit certain types of particles, or even show where in the scheme of things the vacuum alone might cause some of these phenomena that : Ultimately we have to look a a deeper grounding than even our ideas of dark matter.

For one thing in slightly higher space, and values we may consider unitary as foundational or normalized as to scale, or some recursive hierarchy of such scales as geometrical thus true analogies we are just chasing the underlying notions of our metaphysics that seem to some extent universal and at least as long as we live that something in our perceptions and reality seems concrete enough to persist. In the greater scale of things the differences in the grounding scale of say Planck values do not amount to much of a difference at all- just the axiom that there is always a residual difference that may or may not ever vanish no matter how small. We can of course focus things like Rowlands in that the weak force is (metaphysically) everything or we can like Smolin chase fixed ideas for a fictional replication multiverse. Or we can extend all this that a certain mental aspect is involved only on a deeper and much more complex level than the first of such quantum conceptions.

It is clear to me that what may seem not symmetric to our familiar space can in fact be so. And in theories that assume a bounded brane or even sheets of such on a smaller low dimensional scale only that "since we can take the associahedron and it makes no difference in that case to what extent we extend the long axis" that this is a useful theorem that may underlay some ideas about ranges of effects flat or curved we now can imagine as a relative and limited non-locality. Indeed, such a resolution come up in the description of vectors in the new cyclic universe alternatives.

Not of symmetric shadows are space fillers in the sense of surfaces on which we can show the flow if independent of exchanges of say electrons in the sense of Coxeter's eutasic stars (a global and Euclidean grounding of directions and vectors) as shadows of the higher spaces will be symmetric in say three space. We imagine that the hexagons of this "space filler or truncated octahedra" as to be slightly indented in the three space. So where these things apply to organic structures we have the possibilities of the fudge factor between dimensions coextensive perhaps with the quantum range of uncertainties involved, at least reductionist perceived arithmetically and geometrically intelligibly. In what absolute sense of space would our notions understand there are no gaps in the tessellations? Would that be any different than say the notions of tiles of seven sides in hyperbolic space?

Perhaps, these sorts of consideration would suggest that some near misses of the semi-regular polyhedra have uses in the organic realms for some angles have a degree of freedom in the natural dimensional realization of the vectors of this fudge factor as if in effect these were akin to some non-Euclidean geometry of near flat angles and some general geometry of intelligibly relating to pi. What would be the life of lecturing on the frontiers of physics is not necessarily as profound as the lecturing on the foundations of physics or how it relates to the foundations of mathematics even in terms of simple compass and straight edge or prime numbers. Can we ultimately imagine a prime number system different and relative in locality from our range of perception- that perhaps but a model that is at core metaphysics- one that recedes from our technological and theoretical mastery as seems the idea of what is red or grue as a color superimposed a little less than angels but more than the beasts as our intellect upon the quantum waves and phase and dust...

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The other day I came across this interesting page- flux particle theory- as theories of everything goes it is elemental in its own right and should be reading for any among us who on some level or other aspires to claim a theory of everything. Interesting his symbol is a dodecahedron with outward vectors (but then in a sense did not Plato have a sort of subatomic theory for his time that used component triangles of the polyhedra that explained in 4 elements chemical properties?):

http://www.gootar.com/gravityboy/index.html

"Unless a theory has a simple underlying picture that the layman can understand. the theory is probably worthless." Interesting quotation.

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I stayed for more coffee and found this link from Ulla:

Ulla
http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.3596


Ahhh, I see someone came close to what I have been saying since 74. Including references to the I ching! (take that philosophychatforum elites! that dismiss such things as not science). Of course you will recognize a lot of this in my recent posts as my graphs- If they are using the term hypercomplex as I know it then it certainly has to do with the normal nine dimensional natural dimensions of such octonion roots- so they have more work to do to unify and apply some of these ideas. This is to say that there is still more to the gene code than we state in this paper with the arbitrary H matrices- but they do come from the four value base as I did long ago, 4n and all that, and 24 as well as the so called 20. See my KLMN graph of the 256 cell 16 dimensional case. But what are you to make of this article yourself? My quasic matrix makes clearer sense to visualize by the way. To see things 8 fold in that matrix did take a bit of getting used to but the base 8 has to be done. Things really get interesting when you reverse a lot of the evolving and let us recall that in such higher space there are fundamentally different paths or view one may take as to sorting these things out as if braids or knots or what have you. In a sense we observe a global effect here even if just implied. I suppose eventually the idea of information theory had to meet these concepts in our more receptive climate of multi-dimensional physics. It certainly goes further than Rowland's hints and treatments.

This should be very inspiring for us as it is after all about us and in general the heart of chemistry is this rather rarefied conception of DNA, from a quantum view or not.

I may come back to this to check some of the special way they claim for some details. Thank you for the link even if it is 37 years too late. I wish I had made it into Madison for genetics a couple of years after then- as usual the social world is not something we should assume makes sense :-)

The PeSla

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Ulla, just found this link after the above post so came back- for you: (Oh, this was in the area of what your carbon inspired question was discussing anyway and the greater freedom of these symmetry concepts. And thanks for your last blog posting btw.)

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110403141322.htm

as I said- "Things really get interesting when you reverse a lot of the evolving and let us recall that in such higher space there are fundamentally different paths or view one may take as to sorting these things out as if braids or knots or what have you." Of course this suggests too the viability of a more particle or point centered count- hopefully will shed more light on the protein con formalities also.

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If in a sense carbon is that intimate to life- then what are we really but something in the cost of living someone decides must have a carbon tax?

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When it rains it pours. http://blog.vixra.org/2011/04/04/hidden-variables-and-the-24-rays-of-peres/ the article in his blog today I could not download the PDF but the counting numbers if not the relation to what sort of theory underlies this are certainly relevant to the new physics views awakening like violets under discussion.

Of course these ideas should be put in a more general topological context than just the idea of the 24 cell as important as that seems to be.

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