My love and prayers, Ann. Happy Spring Tara! It is good to hear how God is working to bring hope and life to the forefront of your heart! This is breathtakingly beautiful! As one who sat by that bed and also ushered my husband straight to the throne, I can feel every breath and emotion. Thank you for sharing this story weaving in such hope. I hope we can connect more, my friend!
Thank you for sharing,Tara. Your insight and faith are an encouragement every time I open your blog. Prayers for your continuing walk. Love you.
Like this: Like Loading Comments Julie says: Reply March 31, at pm. Alice Chamness says: Reply March 31, at pm. Becky Rudesill says: Reply March 31, at pm. Carol Howard says: Reply March 31, at pm. Ann Elizabeth Robertson says: Reply March 31, at pm.
Pam Williams says: Reply March 31, at pm. Vikki says: Reply April 1, at am. Dorina Lazo Gilmore says: Reply April 1, at am. Beth James says: Reply April 1, at am. Leave a Reply Cancel reply. His Right Hand Held Me.
Loading Comments Email Required Name Required Website. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Take a golf ball and a cannonball and drop them off the Tower of Pisa. The laws of physics allow you to predict their trajectories pretty much as accurately as you could wish for. In contrast, they are goal-directed: survive and reproduce. We can say that they have a purpose—or what philosophers have traditionally called a teleology—that guides their behavior.
By the same token, physics now lets us predict, starting from the state of the universe a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, what it looks like today. But no one imagines that the appearance of the first primitive cells on Earth led predictably to the human race. Laws do not, it seems, dictate the course of evolution. The teleology and historical contingency of biology, said the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, make it unique among the sciences. It depends on chance and randomness, but natural selection gives it the appearance of intention and purpose.
Animals are drawn to water not by some magnetic attraction, but because of their instinct, their intention, to survive. Legs serve the purpose of, among other things, taking us to the water. Mayr claimed that these features make biology exceptional—a law unto itself. But recent developments in nonequilibrium physics, complex systems science and information theory are challenging that view. Once we regard living things as agents performing a computation—collecting and storing information about an unpredictable environment—capacities and considerations such as replication, adaptation, agency, purpose and meaning can be understood as arising not from evolutionary improvisation, but as inevitable corollaries of physical laws.
In other words, there appears to be a kind of physics of things doing stuff, and evolving to do stuff. Meaning and intention—thought to be the defining characteristics of living systems—may then emerge naturally through the laws of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. The first attempt to bring information and intention into the laws of thermodynamics came in the middle of the 19th century, when statistical mechanics was being invented by the Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell.
Maxwell showed how introducing these two ingredients seemed to make it possible to do things that thermodynamics proclaimed impossible. Maxwell had already shown how the predictable and reliable mathematical relationships between the properties of a gas—pressure, volume and temperature—could be derived from the random and unknowable motions of countless molecules jiggling frantically with thermal energy.
In other words, thermodynamics—the new science of heat flow, which united large-scale properties of matter like pressure and temperature—was the outcome of statistical mechanics on the microscopic scale of molecules and atoms.
According to thermodynamics, the capacity to extract useful work from the energy resources of the universe is always diminishing. Pockets of energy are declining, concentrations of heat are being smoothed away. In every physical process, some energy is inevitably dissipated as useless heat, lost among the random motions of molecules.
This randomness is equated with the thermodynamic quantity called entropy—a measurement of disorder—which is always increasing. That is the second law of thermodynamics.
Eventually all the universe will be reduced to a uniform, boring jumble: a state of equilibrium, wherein entropy is maximized and nothing meaningful will ever happen again. Are we really doomed to that dreary fate? His aim was to start with a disordered box of randomly jiggling molecules, then separate the fast molecules from the slow ones, reducing entropy in the process. The demon separates the box into two compartments, with a sliding door in the wall between them.
Every time he sees a particularly energetic molecule approaching the door from the right-hand compartment, he opens it to let it through. Eventually, he has a compartment of cold gas on the right and hot gas on the left: a heat reservoir that can be tapped to do work. This is only possible for two reasons. First, the demon has more information than we do: It can see all of the molecules individually, rather than just statistical averages.
And second, it has intention: a plan to separate the hot from the cold. By exploiting its knowledge with intent, it can defy the laws of thermodynamics. At least, so it seemed. And the reason shows that there is a deep connection between thermodynamics and the processing of information—or in other words, computation.
Despite leaving an obvious leafless and seemingly lifeless structure, it is only by shedding its leaves that the tree can survive the windy and sun-deprived winter, when sudden gusts could blow down a tree laden with a large surface area of leaves.
In other words, dismissing its leaves before winter, the tree prepares to reduce wind resistance and to save energy to reblossom in the spring. The death of the part — the leaf — as sad as it may seem, is for the sake of the life of the whole tree.
If leaves do not leave is that where their name comes from?! Similarly, the apoptosis of a cell is a necessary sacrifice to preserve the life of the whole body. Taking our bones as an example , the balance between the newborn and dying cells is the key to the natural turnover for our healthy skeleton. In fact, about 10 percent of our bone mass is renewed every year with cells dying and new ones taking their place. When the balance of this process is disrupted, disease results. Too many dying cells leads to the loss of bone mass, such as in a condition known as osteoporosis, which means porous bones.
Too many new cells leads to bone tumors. Having their programmed death gone awry, cells multiply indefinitely and uncontrollably — a condition known as cancer — which sets the whole body to an eventual death.
On different scales — the leaf for a tree, the cell for the body, the individual for the society — what we perceive as death is actually an act of carrying on life.
0コメント