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Molecules & Mirrors —Vanessa Seifert on the Philosophy of Chemistry
4 Plays4 minutes ago
Why do molecules have a "handedness" when the physics that determines their structure does not?*
This is a question emblematic of the philosophy of chemistry; at times, it has been used to argue that chemistry cannot be reduced to physics. However, Vanessa Seifert has a different — yet equally intriguing — answer. This symmetry breaking is closely linked to that contentious area of quantum mechanics: the measurement problem.
Vanessa is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow based at the University of Athens and a visiting fellow at the University of Bristol. In addition to molecules, we discuss the project of reductionism, laws, and alchemy.
I found this to be a wonderful example of the fruitfulness of turning the philosophical gaze to sciences beyond physics.
*(Note, it can't be explained by the chirality of the weak nuclear force)
Links
vanessa-seifert.com has links to Vanessa's publications and popular writing — her articles on philosophy in Chemistry World are a great introduction to a broad range of topics
multiverses.xyz Multiverses home
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Transcript
Introduction: Philosophy of Science vs. Philosophy of Physics
00:00:00
Speaker
If you listen to podcasts like this one, Multiverses, or even if you read classic books by people like Kuhn or Popper, you might be forgiven for thinking that philosophy of science and philosophy of physics are synonymous, that they're co-extensive, because so many of the debates are to do with space or time or quantum mechanics, and so many of the examples in those books are drawn from physics.
00:00:26
Speaker
But of course, there is more to science than physics, and there should be more to the philosophy of science than the philosophy of physics. As a particular case of this, think about emergence.
00:00:39
Speaker
How is it that we get from, on the one hand, the austere equations, the very simple formulae of physics, to, on the other hand, the richness of the natural world, the animal kingdoms, of of ah the crazy behaviour of economies.
00:00:58
Speaker
How is it that there is nothing else between those two? Or is there? This is the problem of emergence and reductionism. And of course, physics can't solve this on its own. We need to plot the course that takes us from those physics equations to the equations and and laws we find in other sciences.
Vanessa Seifert's Journey and Chirality Challenge
00:01:19
Speaker
My guest this week is Vanessa Seifert, a wonderful person to take us on the beginnings of that journey because she is a philosopher of chemistry. And surely it is chemistry where the rubber starts to hit the road, where emergence starts to come about. It's the first rung on the ladder of of sciences that that starts with physics at the bottom.
00:01:42
Speaker
She's a postdoctoral fellow affiliated with the University of Athens. She studied under the famous philosopher James Ladyman at the University of Bristol. And we're going focus on a few things, perhaps mainly on the problem of chirality, which is how there is a particular orientation to chemical molecules.
00:02:03
Speaker
Now, some philosophers of chemistry have argued that this interesting. is an example where reductionism doesn't work, where some genuinely new behaviour is just there in nature, in chemistry, that's not there in physics. And they say this because the Schrödinger equation for chemical molecules is symmetric. You will get a superposition of two molecular structures, and yet that's not what we see. We see a single molecular structure with a handedness.
00:02:34
Speaker
Now, Vanessa Sifat and her collaborator, Alexandra Franklin, argued that this, no, this is not something new. This is, in fact, an old, old problem. It's none other than the measurement problem that we've talked about on this po podcast before. The problem of of how you get superpositions that are written into the equations of quantum mechanics, and yet you don't see things like cats in um a dual state of being alive and dead.
00:03:01
Speaker
So I think this is just a brilliant example, an introduction to the philosophy of chemistry and to the philosophy of science beyond physics in general. And I'm really thankful for Vanessa for her time.
00:03:14
Speaker
So here we go. Hope you enjoy.
00:03:26
Speaker
Hi, Vanessa Seifert. Welcome to Multiverses. Thank you for being here. Hi, James. Thank you for having me.
Chemistry's Relationship with Physics: A Historical and Modern Perspective
00:03:33
Speaker
um so I'm really excited because you're the first philosopher of chemistry that I've spoken to ever. So that's a big deal for me. ah And it's been really fascinating learning about the topic.
00:03:44
Speaker
I was curious, how did you how did you come into it? It's quite a new field. did you Were you always interested in chemistry, always interested philosophy, and this was just a natural ah meld of the two?
00:03:57
Speaker
um So it happened a little bit. um So my training was initially in a chemical engineering. That was my undergraduate studies in Greece.
00:04:08
Speaker
And um I wasn't really happy with the prospect of ah working as a chemical engineer. ah So I wanted to do a switch ah to philosophy of science. And... um you know, it was natural to, and once I did, you know, my master's degree, and I saw how much I liked it, and that I wanted to pursue a PhD.
00:04:28
Speaker
um It was, you know, the natural way of going into philosophy of science because of my background training. So my PhD proposal was about ah the relation of chemistry with physics.
00:04:41
Speaker
And I justified it on the basis of my training, basically, because I didn't have a lot of training in philosophy. I only had studied one year philosophy of science. So i had to kind of incorporate my background um studies as well. So it's a very romantic story of how I got into philosophy of chemistry. It it happened just because I i was trained you know in that field more.
00:05:05
Speaker
ah you know It was one of the sciences I was most ah ah more acquainted with ah compared with other sciences. um So that's how it happened. But it was very fortunate. That makes sense.
00:05:17
Speaker
yeah i mean I think there's there's a general trend of philosophers of science starting with science or yeah having a very deep grounding in in science now as the questions that are getting asked are very specific, which I think is a good segue into um I'd love to talk about your your recent paper on chirality and the measurement problem. So it's pretty complicated. Yeah, with Alexander Frangling.
00:05:43
Speaker
and So yeah, perhaps maybe Maybe lead into this by telling us um there is a problem with chirality in in chemistry or a, I don't know, as something a little bit of a mystery. Tell us what that is.
00:05:57
Speaker
So i'm I'm going to start a little bit differently, actually. ah So in the philosophy of chemistry, and when you start reading into the literature, and you find that you know one of the most important problems that they raise, philosophers of chemists of chemistry, has to do with the you know chemistry's relation with quantum physics. And um you know the literature and the field is very young, I should say. ah If you don't mind, I'd like to set a little bit the context. so it may Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So um and the field is quite
Autonomy and Reductionism in Chemistry
00:06:29
Speaker
young. It started in the ninety s ah the Its journal, its a big official journal, Foundations of Chemistry, was ah created, I think, in 95, 96, somewhere during that decade, right? And the society as well was created then. And, um you know, they started off...
00:06:48
Speaker
um ah by discussing chemistry's relation to physics and explicitly rejecting a chemistry' ah chemistry's reduction to physics. um Because in philosophy of science, up until that point, it was fairly uncontroversial that chemistry is an easy example where reduction works.
00:07:11
Speaker
right So if you go into the general literature about reductionism and even go into and Ernest Nagel's book about intertheoretic reduction, chemistry is mentioned you know in passing as one of the easy cases where you see reduction to reductionism to work.
00:07:30
Speaker
so philosopher maybe Maybe we should just say, so if anyone like reduction, yeah how would you define it? What's a kind of... So um reductionism initially was the idea that you know the the higher level theory, or at least one theory can be derived by another one. In this case, chemistry or a theory in chemistry can be derivable by a theory in quantum in physics in quantum physics in such a way, and that's at least the strong version that renders the higher level theory, the chemical theory,
00:08:05
Speaker
in that case, a little bit redundant in some sense, right? yeah Or secondary at least. So what is fundamental is everything that we know from ah the physical theories. All the other higher level theories that we have are just you know um easy ways to describe different patches of the world. And that's it.
00:08:24
Speaker
But every everything true about the world is described by the you know the true theory is the underlying physical one. And so reductionism is the idea that you can show, I'm moving a little, okay, there. Reductionism is the idea that the more fundamental theory is ah has a higher priority than the lower level one and kind of derive, you can derive the chemical or the higher level theory from it.
00:08:53
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. So it's it's sort of where chemistry is like applied physics in in the views of a reductionist perhaps. or very i mean, and there's different forms of reduction. but yeah Yes. there are and that Nowadays, this is a ah very simplistic... and explanation of reductionism because reductionism has tried to accommodate ah the value that the special sciences have. It also acknowledges that it's not so easy to ah deduce, you know, the equations that you get, you know, the the equations or the descriptions that you get by the higher level theories to deduce them by the lower level ones. So the idea that I initially give you gave you is the
00:09:36
Speaker
the naive dream, the reductionist dream that was um at the beginning formulated. But now, of course, you you don't need to be a reductionist. And um you don't have When you are a reductionist, you don't have to be so um dismissive, I suppose, of the special sciences. Rather the opposite. There are much more nuanced accounts of reductionism that take into account um the role of the special sciences. But in any case, that was not the case back in the 90s.
00:10:07
Speaker
There was still this idea that you know chemistry is, in a sense, applied physics. And and so ah the community tried to resist that. and To some extent, it resisted it as well in order to reaffirm also the the field itself, the philosophy of chemistry. So it's quite interesting. If you read the introductions or some of the papers that came out but back in the day, you would see some philosophers explicitly said that we need to defend the autonomy of chemistry from physics in order to also reinforce the autonomy of the philosophy of chemistry and why it's worthwhile doing philosophy of chemistry. So I didn't really like that when I started studying during my PhD, the topic.
Quantum Mechanics and the Chirality Debate
00:10:50
Speaker
and
00:10:51
Speaker
But in any case, and i started working on this during my PhD in Bristol. And i discovered that one of the case studies that they invoked as evidence for the non-reducibility of chemistry is molecular structure and chirality.
00:11:11
Speaker
right So the idea is that there are some molecules, they're called isomers, that and have, there are sets of molecules rather, that are called isomers. They have the same number and types of atoms, but the atoms are are connected to each other in different ways.
00:11:29
Speaker
So isomers are sets of molecules that only differ in terms of you know how the atoms between them are connected. And even the the connections can be very minimal. So there are different kinds of isomerism, chemistry, chemists call them like that, where, for example, the chiral molecules, it's a subgroup of isomers, are sets of molecules that differ that differ only in terms of where one of the molecules, rather, the classic thing is you have a molecule, imagine it like a hand, and the other molecule differs it's the other hand, right? They are not they cannot super, the the structure cannot super be super superimposed.
00:12:07
Speaker
one on the other, right? So they mirror images of one another. They are mirror images, but they are not identical. These are called chiromolecules. And so the argument ah made a by philosophers of chemistry is that with respect to these chiromolecules, quantum mechanics cannot tell the difference when they describe them. The description that they offer for the these two molecules is identical.
00:12:37
Speaker
Right? So so and ah why is that? So is it just that quantum mechanics is just saying... I don't want to give it away yet. Okay, don't give it away. Okay, okay. okay so But that's that's their argument.
00:12:49
Speaker
so that's it and So they noticed that you know they cannot give you that. And then that's where e ah all the anti-reductionist positions started to and emerge in the literature because some said, okay, this is evidence that we don't have epistemic reductionism because the description from quantum mechanics cannot give us a description of the chemical you know system.
00:13:15
Speaker
which fair enough, some this kind of reading of reductionism doesn't seem to work, indeed. And then you have also stronger readings that this is ah evidence of some form of metaphysical non-reductionism. What, for example, Robin Hendry, a very famous um philosopher of chemistry at the University of Durham, calls strong emergence.
00:13:38
Speaker
So he he claims that this is evidence of of molecular structure and emerging at a different level of ontology, at the chemical level. which is distinct from what is happening at the lower quantum mechanical level.
00:13:52
Speaker
So that's a very big claim. So that's saying there is just genuinely, there is stuff in the world at this level, which you can't you can't explain in any way um you know from from the lower quantum mechanical level. It just it just happens. um And there is no account of quantum mechanics which is which is able to explain that. ah Yes, okay. You make it... Am I putting too strongly or...? yeah you make it a little bit Yes, you make it a bit too too strong. But um I think the the the gist is correct. that that There is something that quantum mechanics cannot it cannot track everything. So the and that's also the idea of, um you know, yeah in general, ah emergence ah brings forward this idea that, you know, ah physics is not complete.
00:14:42
Speaker
or at least causally complete. It denies that principle that we have, that everything that happens is the result of physical ah you know causal relations and nothing else. And emerge and and at least you know many readings of emergence say that this is not actually the case. There are stuff happening, causal stuff, that are non-physical. They happen at a higher level.
00:15:03
Speaker
So yes, in that sense, physics is not complete according to emergence. And molecular structure is invoked as an example of that.
00:15:14
Speaker
and and maybe and And just to sort of explain that claim a bit more, maybe we should say, why is it that a first reading of of quantum physics would suggest that you you don't get um chirality out? I mean, is it just most simply put that there's there's no kind of...
00:15:33
Speaker
asymmetry built into quantum physics. Would that be one? So Robin Hendry explains the situation very nicely, I think. So he says, um what happens is you have the Schrodinger equations.
00:15:50
Speaker
for a chiromolecule, right? And suppose you don't use any prior assumptions about that molecule and you start writing that equation for for the system. You take into account only the number and types of subatomic particles, right? And you try to you try to calculate how they interact. Each one interacts with all... ah how each subatomic particle interacts with all the other subatomic particles that make up the molecule.
00:16:17
Speaker
Now, he says, and the and and that's accurate, that you know in practice, scientists cannot solve that equation because it's too complicated. So they start making approximations, right? They start disregarding some of the interactions that take place. ah But most importantly, what they do is they apply the so-called Born-Oppenheimer approximation.
00:16:40
Speaker
which is like taking like taking the nuclei to be frozen in space relative to how the electrons move. And that makes them disregard some of the interactions between ah some of the particles. And that makes the equation much ah simpler to solve.
00:16:58
Speaker
Now, once you've made that approximation, you can't differentiate between the chiral molecules. right? Because you've put, ah you've already imposed some form of structure to the molecule already by freezing out the nuclei because you freeze them out somewhere. I explained very crudely. I hope that I'm i'm doing justice justice to it, but I think you get the point, ah right? mr So yeah you impose structure and then, so the problem here is, and
00:17:30
Speaker
Either you say, okay, I've done that because computationally it's very complicated to solve the equation just by first principles. But if I could, then I would have been able to differentiate between the different chiromolecules. But you don't really know that.
00:17:49
Speaker
Robin says, you don't know that because actually what you do is you already impose part of the structure that you're looking at. And that's why, you know, that this is evidence that maybe structure emerges from the physical level.
00:18:04
Speaker
So it's how you read the situation, basically. um Now, the paper that we wrote with Alex is a different way of interpreting what's going on there. So what we say is that, you know... and I should also say, by imposing the BO, you break the symmetry.
00:18:23
Speaker
That's what symmetry is. and And the claim is that before breaking the symmetry, ah the emergentist or the anti-reductionist claim is, well, actually, it's not computational difficulty because if I hadn't broken the symmetry by applying the BO, I would have a superposition of structures and I wouldn't be able to differentiate them.
00:18:45
Speaker
And then what we came to say with Alex is this, okay, then this is an instance of the measurement problem then. Yeah. Yeah. Let's just pause there because I think that it's really key that the you know ah the application of the Born-Oppenheiner approximation, so you treat the the nucleus as kind of like a planet or something that's in a fairly well-defined place.
00:19:12
Speaker
um That's not just... If you see that as just a way of you know approximating and and making it making the computation more tractable, then you might say, okay, well, there's nothing there's nothing strange here. um we're're We're quite...
00:19:30
Speaker
you know
00:19:32
Speaker
we're cutting some corners, but we're not and ignoring anything important about the the kind of fundamental physics. But then the counter argument that claim is, no, look, in the yeah we can we can see for other reasons that the the the sort of the ground state, so the most basic state, the lowest energy state, which is you know what what you I don't know, the simplest state that physicists like to consider things being in um for a molecule will be symmetric. So it won't have any handedness.
00:20:14
Speaker
um And when you apply the Born-On-Penheim approximation, that handedness goes away. But it seems like you've lost something, you know, the at one level you're saying, okay, well, my physics tells me there's there's no handedness here, that it's mirror symmetric.
00:20:34
Speaker
um And then as soon as you start cranking through the equations, you have to do this thing which gets rid of that. And that makes you think, well, actually, maybe just you know this assumption that I've ah brought in is is is is not just an assumption that makes things more tractable, but um you know maybe to Henry's point is actually you know there's something new that's emerged here.
00:20:53
Speaker
There is a handedness that just happens to emerge at the same point that we we need to make these um you know For instrumental reasons, we need to to to make some assumptions. um So I think, yeah, that's quite you know that that seems quite mysterious. um To an extent, yes.
00:21:11
Speaker
But you you know we have to be also mindful of of the details and of what actually quantum mechanics describes. So um and the equation, in theory, is attempting to describe a single molecule.
00:21:27
Speaker
right And in in chemistry though, all the properties including including chirality and handedness are properties and they observe when molecules are in non-isolation. So I've written about this separately in other papers.
00:21:43
Speaker
ah which is a crucial difference because there is evidence that if you were to look at molecules by themselves, which is a very hard thing to do, and actually now they're trying to develop what they call single molecule chemistry.
00:21:56
Speaker
So the chemists are trying to detect the or observe properties of just one single molecule. But even that... You know, the act of measurement renders the molecule in non-isolation in a way yeah that detaches itself from the target system that quantum mechanics is set to describe.
00:22:14
Speaker
So already there, there is a gap of whether what quantum mechanics describes is the same as chemistry describes or even observes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And whether the properties we're expecting by chemistry should be detectable or identifiable by quantum mechanics is not evident. Maybe it shouldn't be. Because we know that and you know ah certain molecules, when they are and in isolation, there have been done some experiments, they exhibit quantum behaviors.
00:22:44
Speaker
The exhibit says that there's there's also evidence of quantum tunneling and stuff like that. So there might, this actually might be correct. Quantum mechanics might be correct, that there is no chirality when you look at single molecules in isolation.
00:23:03
Speaker
So it's not necessary that you have to impose, you know, You have to impose the expectations that you have because of one description. You have to impose those expectations on the other description. Because technically speaking, they might be describing different systems that have different properties. So one is just designed and works for the the system of a single molecule. And the other, you know as soon as you step into the the multiple molecule realm, it's a different kind of physics that supplies.
00:23:37
Speaker
You know, you are at the classical realm now. That's why we talk about it in terms of the model of the measurement problem with Alex. Because ah for us, this is a a case study that kind of shows um it's just another case study where you see the classical quantum divide.
00:23:56
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. and So, yeah, maybe run us very quickly through. i think many people will be familiar with the measurement problem. Don't make me explain. I'm not very good at stuff. Well, can just say it's when you have something in, I mean, the classic one is, you know, Schrodinger's cat. It's in two states. Here we sort of have Schrodinger's molecule or something. It's like two handednesses. Yes, dead and alive at the same time.
00:24:23
Speaker
Yeah. And in this case, it's like you have a single hand and it's both a right hand and a left hand at the same time. And we never see that. We're quite familiar with people having both kinds of hands, but not having one hand and it being both. Or neither. It's difficult how you read what superpositions mean.
00:24:43
Speaker
Exactly. It's such a mess. That's why I'm very reluctant to to talk about these things because i still cannot get my head around them. It's so difficult to... Well, I think you're right. I don't think we have the language for it, right? In, in you know,
00:25:01
Speaker
in di direct notation or something, you can just write down like ah you know two things and you have a plus between them. But what does that plus mean? It doesn't mean that you have a hand and another hand. yeah And it's not clear that you have a hand that's in two distinct states.
00:25:19
Speaker
It's in a single state, but that state is somehow just very, very hard for us to understand. um
00:25:28
Speaker
So yes, that is basically... ah the the weird situation of the measurement problem, I suppose. And this is also how it applies for the chiral molecules in particular, that, you know, the the um the ground state of such molecules, a ground state is supposed to be the most stable state of the molecule, the one with the lowest energy, the one that you expect it to to be, right? Is the one where there is no structure or there's a superposition of structures, whatever that means.
00:25:58
Speaker
Either it has one... I don't know. I don't know how to say that. It's in a superposition of structures. That's it. I don't, I don't know how to further explain that. That's fine. That's fine.
00:26:11
Speaker
I'm sorry about that.
00:26:15
Speaker
No, I think, I think that's good. Um, Can you wait? Can you hear me okay? I think my connection... hear you. Okay, good. Yeah, sorry. my your Your image is frozen, but I'm still hearing you fine. um Okay, so we have we have these we have these um molecules which in you know at a level of description are in you know right-handed.
00:26:40
Speaker
We don't know quite how to say it, but they seem to be right-handed and left-handed at the same at the same time. And this seems like an instance of measurement problem. Or neither. Yes. ah Because we never experienced that sort of thing at the macroscopic scale. we never And this is like manifest in a mere inability to to speak about this correctly or to know how to talk about it, because we just don't see that sort of thing. um So we've just not developed the the tools for conceptualizing it really outside of quantum mechanics.
00:27:15
Speaker
um So, yeah, how you know how how did different i guess how how did how the different approaches to the measurement problem come to bear on this topic um in particular?
00:27:32
Speaker
So, um, the, the measurement problem, um, is closely connected to, so, different interpretations to quantum mechanics offer different solutions or interpretations to the measurement problem, what the measurement problem is and how we can explain it. Right. And, um,
00:27:53
Speaker
the In the paper with Alex, we um we sketched, you know, three main interpretations of quantum mechanics, ah the Everettian interpretation, the spontaneous collapse theories, and then the Bohmian theory. And each one gives you a different version of what happens.
00:28:08
Speaker
but what it gives It kind of gives you a different narrative of the measurement problem, why it happens and why you end up actually with one chiromolecule and not the other, ah basically. So...
00:28:22
Speaker
What it does essentially is, you know, we take the situation that we know from philosophy of chemistry that, you know, the ground state corresponds to a superposition of chiromolecules and then the different solutions to the measurement problem by giving you an interpretation of what it means to be in a superposition. And then, you know, for that, as super for for the wave function to collapse and for you to observe one of the two chiromolecules, it automatically gives you also a solution of of the chemical problem.
00:28:50
Speaker
That's basically it. Okay. at many so Maybe if we say, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I think you sort of um you you you almost um phrased it in terms of say the Copenhagen interpretation, said okay there's a collapse here. And um you know that's one way of thinking about it. And so would it be right, for example, with the the many worlds interpretation, we would say, well, actually,
00:29:15
Speaker
there's you know there's no collapse. You have both of these chiral molecules. exactly But as soon as they sort of start to interact with your um measuring equipment and everything, um all that measuring equipment goes into a superposition as well.
00:29:31
Speaker
A superposition of seeing a left-handed and a right-handed molecule and I go into superposition position of ah being in a world where there is ah you know a left-handed molecule being seen by my apparatus and a world where there is um a right-handed molecule being seen. And these two worlds are a kind of...
00:29:55
Speaker
They're unaware of each other. They're unable to interact with each other in any way um because they've reached a scale where the you know the wave functions are just two too noisy, too different. um Whereas at the the quantum level, there's still some chance that there's interesting stuff that can happen at this where the superposition can sort of be um played with, manipulated.
00:30:17
Speaker
um Exactly. So that's funny the watch's one one way. yeah that's that's why Do you have a preferred way? Do you have a kind of ah dog in this fight of quantum mechanical interpretations? No, no okay very good not at all. That's wise.
00:30:33
Speaker
i know No, not at all. I'm going to let physicists and philosophers of physics to to to work it out. And, then you know, they there I have no dog in the fight, no.
00:30:45
Speaker
but But what you've done here is is really interesting because this problem of or you know this this issue of chirality was seen as an instance oh chemistry is or sort of evidence for the independence of chemistry from from physics and for it um being hard to ah to get to chemistry from
Unity or Independence: Chemistry's Role in Science
00:31:12
Speaker
physics. And you've almost reversed that and said, actually, here it's a very clear instance of something that people are thinking about within physics, mainly philosophers of physics, but it yeah is a and it should I think it is a problem within physics itself.
00:31:25
Speaker
um And so actually, you know there's greater unity here. um you know This is an argument for the unity of these these two things. Definitely. So definite ah so yes, i um I should say ah but both Alex and I are not... um um Well, maybe I should only talk for myself, but I think Alex would agree as well. we and We wanted to resist this antireproducctor this strong anti-reductionism that you know took ah took the lead with the with respect to molecular structure. And ah you know I don't believe that the paper shows some strong form of reductionism, but it does definitely show that there is strong unity between the two fields in sciences. um
00:32:13
Speaker
Though I think it is still possible to maintain some form of emergence, not with respect to the fields, but with respect to wahab how large things or observable things relate to very small things that make them up.
00:32:33
Speaker
You know, yeah you can yeah you you can be an emergent because, and this is something that philosophers of physics physics talk as well, that some forms of at least weak emergence that has to do um with the relation between different scales of ontology.
00:32:50
Speaker
It's not about how chemical biological stuff relates to physical stuff, but how even large physical stuff relates to smaller physical stuff.
00:33:01
Speaker
Yeah. Which i think, and and and at least with respect to some interpretations, it seems that some some form of some different form of emergence could work. under some interpretations of quantum mechanics, if I'm not wrong.
00:33:15
Speaker
But this is not this goes a bit beyond my own my expertise, to be honest. But that's the impression that I have. I mean, I think it'd be good to talk about, yeah,
00:33:28
Speaker
just the status, your your other work on the possibility of um reducing or productionism between chemistry and and and physics. i I mean, one thing that just struck me when talking about the, you know, trying to solve the Schrodinger creation for a molecule is just how difficult it is, even at that scale, right? We're we're talking about individual atoms here and we,
00:33:58
Speaker
we can't even figure out precisely. like We have no precise solution. um that That's incredible. like Even at the scale, we're already starting to bring in approximations. um so um you know it Dirac's famous claim that, okay, now we have quantum physics, we're going to we got a chemistry becomes applied yeah physics. I paraphrased him there. um
00:34:32
Speaker
Yeah, it it doesn't... Certainly in practice, it's it's it's not um it's not possible. um But I mean, i there's a sense in which those...
00:34:45
Speaker
calculations may be so difficult that even in principle, they're not possible, at least not within the sort of universe that we live in. mean, we we get into a sort of strange territory here. See, but that's where speculation starts now.
00:35:00
Speaker
This is where all the speculation starts, whether this is an in principle or a practical problem.
00:35:07
Speaker
And, ah you know, say that and we cannot really tell for sure, I suppose. um On the other hand, we have indirect evidence um that um you know most of the stuff that happened in the world are the are the result of physical goings-on on the lower level.
00:35:26
Speaker
We have indirect evidence of that. And for chemistry, even more so. If you go through the history of chemistry, um you know um physics has illuminated um but but by shedding light into atomic structure and what happens ah at the atomic level. It has helped chemists explain ah in um and understand in a much more nuanced way how chemical reactions happen the way they do. um the chemical properties of matter. So there's so much um epi epistemic success by and being informed by physics that it would seem weird that the two sign that you know there is such a strong detachment a from physics.
00:36:15
Speaker
I suppose. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. But on the on the other hand, is yeah, there's there's no detachment, but... it's clear that there's many kind of concepts in in chemistry.
00:36:29
Speaker
Perhaps we can talk about um maybe bonds or or reactions, whatever you whatever your whatever you prefer, um where there's kind of a level of... These these concepts are ah ah really useful.
00:36:44
Speaker
ah There's no clear way of ah defining them in terms of certainly fundamental quantum physics, it becomes very, very difficult to do that. And it's not even clear if there's like a kind of one-to-one mapping between these concepts and things at the quantum level.
00:37:00
Speaker
um Nevertheless, there's an argument to be made that these are real things. And so this is kind of another, I suppose, route or path to arguing that know chemistry deserves its status as kind of an independent science. like there's There's genuine concepts and stuff here which are, um while not in contradiction to quantum physics, ah they're kind of they that they're somewhat independent or they're they're not completely
00:37:35
Speaker
there's no There's no simple mapping between between them and the things that we have from quantum physics. I have two points on this. So first, I think with respect to the chemical bond, I think that there is ah um there there are it is they you can identify what the chemical bond is in quantum terms. um I've written a paper about this in a philosophy of science about the chemical bond being a patterns of subatomic interactions that you can get even by just quantum models. You don't need to have, you know, the non-approximative, the ab initio kind of calculations of the Schrodinger equation. And Heitler and London's work back in the beginning of the 20th century, um you know, even if it was for a very small, for for hydrogen molecules, they that they managed to describe quantum mechanically the covalent bond. um
00:38:29
Speaker
But apart from that, you know, but What I want to resist a little bit is ah you said that um you know we cannot reduce one to another, so there is a ah ah reason to believe that chemistry is independent.
00:38:44
Speaker
but No one is trying to steal chemistry's independence by um defending some form of reductionism. I think that's one of the...
00:38:56
Speaker
This is a mistake we're doing in this discussion a lot, from the very beginning, actually, of discussing chemistry's reductionism. We've connected it so strongly with the idea that, you know, if chemistry is reduced, then it will disappear.
00:39:10
Speaker
It will be ah put into shackles and being, ah you know, it would have to obey physics in everything, which which is a very strange thing to...
00:39:24
Speaker
it's It's like creating a monster that we're afraid of, but this is this is this is not real. This is not how things happen. And chemistry by no means is going to disappear as a discipline, even if reductionism were to happen. Even if we were able to solve the Schrodinger equation and describe everything quantum mechanically, all chemical phenomena, chemistry would still continue. I'm pretty sure it would still continue and as it does now.
00:39:52
Speaker
Because it doesn't hinge on that, right? It's it's not because physicists are unable to describe chemical phenomena that we have chemistry. We have chemistry because it has developed a language that is very, very successful in in doing the job. you know and the And the job is not only explaining chemical phenomena. A big part of chemistry is making stuff.
00:40:15
Speaker
Mm-hmm. So it also has a... Chemistry is a discipline has ah a a bit of a different character than... You know, we we have in mind theoretical physics only, but chemistry is not only about theory and understanding chemical phenomena, it's about ah producing things and making drugs and designing food and tackling climate change and um making materials that would absorb CO2, you know? um
00:40:47
Speaker
None of this is going to disappear.
00:40:51
Speaker
if reductionism were to work.
00:40:55
Speaker
But where would it leave philosophers of chemistry? Does it make it sort of more or less interesting? No, I don't think
00:41:07
Speaker
No, because this is not the only topic that is interesting philosophically with respect to chemistry. um Surely this is an interesting topic. I'm not denying that, but ah chemistry such a rich um a discipline in terms of, you know, even the language that it uses, the symbols that it has created with a periodic table. It's so worth examining from the perspective of philosophy of language, for example, or what the symbols mean and how they've been developed. And yeah the periodic table alone, has a huge literature behind it, how it was created, the importance the importance of values when picking different classes between different classifications of the periodic table, um
00:41:57
Speaker
models in chemistry, ah whether chemical reactions ah correspond to causal relations. I'm just referring to stuff I'm working on now, like different things. But the field is very rich.
00:42:12
Speaker
yeah And you can raise many different questions with respect to chemistry. So I don't think we we should have any worry about you know reductionism, ah destroying philosophical thoughts around chemistry.
Philosophical Implications of Chemistry's Proximity to Physics
00:42:26
Speaker
Yeah. yeah I think in many ways, chemistry is a really interesting area where precisely because it's not at the, for want of a better phrase, foundational level of reality, right? it it's it but it's also not at the level of biology or economics or society or whatever, um that you can get some handle on these questions of, you know, what is a, I don't know, what is a natural kind? Yeah, exactly. What what' sort of a law, you know, if, you know, what sort of causation, if any, is involved in in in chemical reactions? Are they are they themselves, um you know,
00:43:11
Speaker
we we can sort of test some of the philosophy under, you know a different set of conditions to to physics, maybe slightly less idealized, um a bit richer um without getting lost in the fog of, you know, really, really abstract or, well, maybe not i abstract, mate much, much higher level things. Yeah.
00:43:33
Speaker
Or it it can also inform, you know, um discussion of those more higher level, uh, case studies by looking at this one and seeing how you can refine your idea of reductionism for this case, then you can see whether it can apply to other cases as well.
00:43:55
Speaker
um It's like a test field for me, chemistry, exactly, because it's the closest one to physics, but it's not as complicated or burdened with these other worries that we have with biology.
00:44:06
Speaker
um it's ah It's a good testing ground. for different philosophical accounts to see whether they work. um But also, I want to say something else. I forgot to say it before, if you don't mind.
00:44:19
Speaker
um Even if we settle, say we settle that you know chemistry is reduced to physics, That itself would and create or prompt new philosophical questions about chemistry.
00:44:35
Speaker
So it wouldn't end the discussion per se. It would create new questions about, for example, the reality of chemical stuff in the context of reductionism. which I think is very interesting. And there is a lot of talk and now about how you can accommodate the reality of special science entities, if you admit the special science entities are strongly reduced to their physical constituents.
00:45:01
Speaker
So just put the discussion a bit forward, I suppose. Yeah, no, ah please yeah talk about that. So I mean, is this the question of, know, sometimes People knowing that know or interested in philosophy say, well, you know, what is real?
00:45:16
Speaker
Is it just atoms and molecules or, you know, quantum fields? um And, you know, you want to say, well, no, like all this other stuff, like all the things that we can see around us, that they're also real. Yeah. um And, you know, at at the mid-level, even things that we can't see or maybe quite abstract concepts like, you I don't know, particular you know, gold, gold, not just a particular instance of gold, but gold is a, an element or an actual kind. That's, that's a real thing as well. um and And, and then we get, yeah. So I think you're right. This is really interesting ground. Maybe talk us through some of the work that you've done here.
00:45:57
Speaker
So, um, I've only worked, well, I worked on that a little bit with respect to the chemical bond. um There is um this idea of, um um you know, that ah special science or higher level things can correspond to patterns. ah to real patterns. It's real it's based on Daniel Dennett's work on real patterns, actually. And and then later on, it was also this idea of real patterns was adopted and used by Leidman and Ross in their Everything Must Go book to develop ah rainforest realism and also a version of, I suppose, non-reductive physicalism.
00:46:46
Speaker
So I was trying to apply these accounts to the chemical bond, whether the chemical bond can be thought of as a real patterns of subatomic interaction. So in that sense, you maintain a ah form of reductionism or of unity.
00:47:01
Speaker
Maybe reductionism now is a little bit of a misleading term, um at least of very strong unity and connection to the lower level stuff. But on the other hand, you know, still maintain that the bond is is a real thing.
00:47:16
Speaker
Just like the table or a ball is a real thing, separate from the physical particles that make them up. and and And maybe lead us through the argument, like what makes it, you know, what is the real patterns and um structural realism argument? for Yes. So that's a difficult one. and um So um to be...
00:47:40
Speaker
is to be a real pattern. I think that's a quote by Daniel Dennett, just by being a pattern automatically you are real. Right. But and structural realism also adds this ah and nomological criteria that, you know, you have, once you have causal powers to be is to cause in a sense.
00:48:02
Speaker
And so once you, the thing is able to do stuff, this also reinforces its existence. I'm just taking a very small nugget now from structural realism. I'm not making justice to it at all, I have to say here. So for people who don't know structural realism, they should go and read it because now I'm just taking a small part of it to explain how I think at least, you know, chemical bonds. So...
00:48:26
Speaker
In this particular instance, the chemical bond is is a pattern of subatomic interactions because we know that because of the quantum mechanical description of chemical bonds. And then Dennett is very useful because he gives us an ah epistemic criterion of how to detect patterns. So he uses this classic example of bitmaps.
00:48:46
Speaker
do you Do you know that? So he has this table in the paper um where there there are different bit bitmap... but Well, there there are different boxes, right? There are dots rather. No, I should explain it better. So imagine um a series of black and white dots.
00:49:04
Speaker
And he says there are at least... There's one way you can describe the black and white dots, the so-called bit bitmap description, where you identify the position of each and every black and white dot.
00:49:16
Speaker
Right? Then a different way to describe that system is by grouping together the dots. Say, you know, we've got 10 dots here and 10 dots there. Or if they form, you know, if you look at them from afar, if they form some sort of box, different black yeah boxes, you say there are five black boxes made up of a hundred black dots, say.
00:49:39
Speaker
Right? yeah So yeah then it says, as long as you can give, a more efficient description than the bitmap, which requires identifying every a black dot, then that means you have a pattern there.
00:49:55
Speaker
And once you have a pattern, automatically that pattern is real. Yeah. Right? So that's the idea with chemical bonds as well. You have the Schrodinger equation, which just by first principles identifies the interaction of each and every subatomic particle of the molecule, right?
00:50:14
Speaker
That's the bitmap. That's your bitmap. Yeah. Yeah. Then you have the quantum models that after the B.O. approximation and doing also further approximations, perhaps identify some box and describe the system in terms of boxes.
00:50:28
Speaker
Right. And then you have the chemical description, which identify describes the system in terms of bonds.
00:50:38
Speaker
So these are more efficient descriptions and the concepts that they invoke, in this case, the chemical bonds correspond to patterns. And that's why they a exist. That's how the argument goes. and
00:50:53
Speaker
I think one of the one of the kind of objections that that typically gets brought up against um Dennett's, at least Dennett's real patterns as well, there's loads of different ways that you could come up with more efficient description, the bitmap description. But we don't want to say that there's loads of different ways that reality is. We sort of think of it being a singular thing. um ah i guess i mean I think maybe structural realism goes some way to responding to that by saying, well, actually, you've got to fit it.
00:51:26
Speaker
yeah so Go ahead, please. it's the and What structural realism says is that um Actually, you can filter away some of those descriptions because science science invokes those ones that are ah you know counterfactually and and and empirically more successful.
00:51:44
Speaker
so those descriptions that are used in science and have real ah you know empirical bearing are the ones that should be it' taken into account. It's not like you have an endless plurality of possible descriptions, all of which identify different patterns.
00:52:00
Speaker
Mm-hmm. and Very good. So at least, and that's, but you know, the this is a um this is a delicate balance that you should keep because on the one, that there is some um truth to that, that you cannot dismiss, that there are more than one descriptions that are more efficient than the bitmap.
00:52:20
Speaker
And you cannot dismiss all of them. You can clean them up and say, you know, only those that are invoked or tested by science. They have survived scientifically in a sense, we should admit. But still, you have some plurality and you should be okay with that. Because even if you look in the case of the chemical bond, this would all this explains also nicely the different types of bonds that chemists invoke.
00:52:43
Speaker
And not all of them match perfectly every case. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes, you know, they miss out some of the things that they would call bonds, but sometimes they wouldn't call them bonds, you know?
00:52:56
Speaker
yeah And um so in practice, even in scientific practice, you see that you have different, more efficient descriptions that are being invoked. And that's okay. Yeah.
00:53:07
Speaker
And you might also have descriptions working out at different levels as ah as well. um That, again, a sort of...
00:53:18
Speaker
Yeah, maybe maybe covering the same grounds. I'm trying to think of ah an example. but um Different levels of abstraction, maybe, James, not at different levels of reality.
00:53:29
Speaker
This is also something that maybe sometimes confuses the discussion because ah scientists also invoke classes that are and that abstract away of other classes, scientific classes. But these are not different levels of reality.
00:53:45
Speaker
right It's not that we talk about larger things. We just disregard some of the aspects of that thing and talk about it in terms of but slightly more fuzzy or ah abstract category.
00:53:59
Speaker
So i might say you you have a sort of bunch of atoms. ah Oh, it's a bird. And then you have ah a bunch of birds. It's a flock of birds. And you've got these kind of different levels at which you can describe things. um and And they're all you know we're we're abstracting away or we're we're summarizing um at various steps.
00:54:23
Speaker
or you could I would put it as you know you have a bunch of atoms and you you identify the color in terms of the wavelengths or whatever, but then you identify it in terms of the color red of all of the atoms, but then you can identify it in terms of crimson. Okay.
00:54:41
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. So it's red and crimson. They do not identify a different level. Right, right. So they're working at the same level, they're just different precision maybe. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:54:55
Speaker
So that often happens in chemistry, that you have different, um ah youre especially with elements, if you think about that, you you talk about, cannot think, you talk about gold But you'd also talk about it as member of the kind metals or a member
Conclusion: Classification and Implications in Chemistry
00:55:17
Speaker
of the kind. I don't remember which group does it belong to it? It's it's the, oh my God. Anyway, yeah you get you mean. Don't me.
00:55:24
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah.
00:55:29
Speaker
There's alkaloid metals, but it's not one of those. Sorry, I don't know what it is. Hopefully, a chemist doesn't hear me now because they would be banging their head. Maybe we can edit this. Wait, let me check. It's going to bug. It's a group 11.
00:55:42
Speaker
um and gold is gonna buy yeah
00:55:50
Speaker
it's it's in a group eleven element. so It's not a very memorable name for the group. It's a noble metal. That's what I tried to remember. noble metal. yeah Okay, so you've got noble metals. I just remember the noble gases, but yeah, it doesn't react with anything. so Yeah, it doesn't react with it. Yes, that's right. Okay, that's a noble thing. So group it's a part of group 11. It's also part of noble metals. It's also a metal, and it's also a member of gold, you know? Yeah, and then and all those things are sort of real in a sense. right it is It is a group of level thing. It is gold. it is like It's got this atomic number. yeah um
00:56:27
Speaker
But there's not any there's not any contradiction there. um There's just different just different levels of precision. I suppose. Or you want to bring out different aspects, different properties of that.
00:56:46
Speaker
of matter. I mean, what is this? um do Do you have?
00:56:53
Speaker
What is your position? as a Do you have a sort of very defined position for yourself as ah as a realist? um Or you sort of? um
00:57:05
Speaker
Look, I consider myself a realist. i also consider myself um as someone who's against strong anti reductionism.
00:57:16
Speaker
So I'm not, I'm not into pluralism of the strong form. I'm not into emergence. and You know, in its strong form again. Yeah.
00:57:28
Speaker
It's easier to say what I'm not rather than what I am, what I believe. But um I'm still in the process of figuring out how I can accommodate my realist beliefs with my reductionist beliefs.
00:57:42
Speaker
um I think it can be done, but there are so many fine details in the literature that you have to respond to, which I haven't gotten gotten around yet, I suppose, getting a position about everything, you know, because you have to figure out how you're going to tackle the overdetermination problem.
00:58:04
Speaker
What is going to be your position about the causal completeness principle? and What are you going to say about, um I don't know, possible? Well, these are some of the, these are, what other problems could there be?
00:58:23
Speaker
What form of unity, epi epistemic unity you would require? What kind of epistemic requirements you need to set up to to support the form of unity you want to defend. These are you know things you need to specify, I suppose.
00:58:40
Speaker
Yeah. But yeah. Very good. um Yeah, maybe. ah i said if you want to sort of finally talk about what you're working on next or what you're really excited about or any any kind of big questions that we haven't covered and and and you think are important for anyone who's, don't know, interested in philosophy of chemistry.
00:59:04
Speaker
So um currently I'm working on a chemical reactions. This is the the theme of the of the project and I'm working at the at the University of Athens. So thinking about chemical reactions as as as causal relations, um which is interesting. um I've been thinking a little bit about and how you can maintain ah um a strong idea of causal relations you know in a productive way, non-Humian way, and in a way that also matches with a naturalistic kind of attitude towards your metaphysics.
00:59:49
Speaker
ever so yeah So what's the the the the kind of issue here is a chemical reaction you Okay, so, okay. It might seem simple because you might i say, well, what what's the... I take some hydrogen, I take some oxygen, i get some... There's water, I get some energy out and I get some water out.
01:00:10
Speaker
ah So... Yeah, so, yourself together as a course yeah okay, let let me just put the context because I've been, I'm just throwing around the terms, I suppose. So you have a chemical reaction, say hydrogen and oxygen, usually chemists say hydrogen and oxygen produce H2O. So if you think about it philosophically, even the word produce kind of kind of and hints towards a causal relation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. that That's essentially what the, the, the,
01:00:39
Speaker
the aim of the project is, is to study seriously whether there is a causal relation behind such statements or whether we just throw away these terms, you know, but shouldn't take them very seriously. And, um,
01:00:52
Speaker
You know, there's further evidence that maybe these correspond to causal relations because reaction mechanisms have been invoked as examples of mechanistic explanations in philosophy of chemistry. And so perhaps, you know, maybe indeed chemical reactions are ah relations between causes and effects. But then, and that's where the project starts, you have to think, ah you know, if you think of it as a causal relation, what are the relata?
01:01:21
Speaker
what are What are the genuine causes? Because this is not evident when you look at the details of a chemical reaction. what you you have hydrogen and oxygen, but it has to also be in a particular temperature. it has to there has to be Sometimes there has to be a catalyst, right? um Other factors have to figure in. And then this brings you, it's interesting because it connects to classical problems around causation.
01:01:47
Speaker
So how you differentiate ah genuine causes from background conditions. That's why I really, so that is what is very fun in general with philosophy of chemistry. You have so many underexplored and examples from chemistry that you can use in order to address classic problems in philosophy.
01:02:09
Speaker
Yeah. And you can inform them in ways that you haven't thought of before. So this is one part of the project, figuring out the problem of background conditions in light of chemical reactions. And then the second part... The background condition would be, example... The presence of oxygen. If you light a fire, match. Yeah.
01:02:28
Speaker
right and you have the two reactants that are involved in lightning much but you also need oxygen oxygen yeah and the yeah is oxygen part of uh of of the cause or not or is it just the reactants in this case yeah and people would say
01:02:47
Speaker
yeah know You might say, okay, well, this guy, it's his fault. He lit the match. And then someone else would come along and say, no, it was it was all the oxygen in the room. And well, actually, sometimes it could be, sometimes that background condition is the relevant thing. If you're like in some spaceship or something, and you're just testing, you know there shouldn't be any oxygen in a room.
01:03:05
Speaker
Then actually it was the cause, but to yeah. So this then takes you to think about what you mean by cause and causation. And it takes you to the literature about what is the causal relation. Because if you think about it counterfactually,
01:03:19
Speaker
If there weren't any oxygen, then there wouldn't be any ah light. Then the background condition does become part of the cause under this reading of the causal relation. But if you think of it productively, and this is not a good example because oxygen is part of of the chemical reaction, but in any case, if you think about about it productively, ah it is only the things, the reactants that transform chemically.
01:03:45
Speaker
that should be considered under the productive reading of causation as being part of the codes, right? And so the background conditions wouldn't be, that what happens, the the thermodynamic conditions, temperature wouldn't figure out as part of the cause.
01:03:59
Speaker
ah So again, this is interesting because you would take, you would, this is but what I'm doing in the project. They take up each account of of causation and see what what kind of image it gives you of causal relations. And it gives you a little bit of a different image every time.
01:04:17
Speaker
and And do you think there is there one, it seems maybe the productive image or the productive conception of causation is a little bit works a little bit better. Do you think there is one? Yeah.
01:04:28
Speaker
yeah Surprisingly, yes. For me, surprisingly, because it seems that there is more empirical... If you look into how chemists describe chemical reactions, they use certain notions that are closer to the productive spirit of causation. So even chemical affinity, the idea, it is defined as you know the propensity of elements to react with some elements, but not others. Right.
01:04:57
Speaker
propensity. You immediately go to a more metaphysically heavier you know account of causation. Yeah, the kind of dispositional. Dispositional, exactly. Dispositional, propensity, a power-based account of causation, right? and Which is surprising because you would think that you know science or a human understanding of causation, a lighter view of causation in a sense, is more in line with what um with science, I suppose.
01:05:27
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Which and the human view is just stuff happens and it always happens yes like this and we don't really know. Exactly. but Exactly. So this is one thing I'm working on.
01:05:40
Speaker
um I've been also ah reading a lot of history of chemistry lately, which is very exciting. I'm very much into alchemy. Have you read about alchemy?
01:05:53
Speaker
like don' i I mean, I've never tried at least not with any success. I i highly recommend it. It's a very exciting part of chemistry, I would say, um because there are a lot. Alchemists discovered so many things that are chemical kept that have value for chemistry. And it's very interesting to see how important a part they played in the development of chemistry and then how they faded away or were even disregarded by chemists later on because of the kind of mystery yeah seriousness that was involved in their practice.
01:06:32
Speaker
So, yeah, these are the stuff. Yeah, and i I think it's interesting. It's probably...
01:06:40
Speaker
ah Maybe you can tell me, but it it only seems like more recently that alchemy's been seen as kind of... like What I want to say is people like Newton who are doing alchemy, I'm not sure that they would have seen it as a unscientific.
01:06:57
Speaker
you know For them, like of course, the religious and the scientific aspects were completely indistinguishable and alchemy was... you know mystical, but that's just legitimate because everything was. Yeah.
01:07:12
Speaker
But even if you think this ah ah the aim they had to find you know the elixir of life, philosopher's stone, how to translude everything into gold, it was a sensible thing to to question.
01:07:26
Speaker
Because if you think about it, they they saw stuff um transforming from one thing into another. They had evidence of chemical reactions. why wouldn't it why Why is it insensible to think that you could transform stuff into gold?
01:07:43
Speaker
It wasn't. yeah it It was a legitimate question based on what they knew, which they didn't know a lot at the beginning. Yeah. So, um you know, we we we put too much blame into the fact that, you know, they were looking into the philosopher's stone and this elixir thing and and they put too much weight into it. And they also gave, you know, they tried to give a a theory that would be um a worldview.
01:08:08
Speaker
It would be something that explained the movement for our planets, how um diseases come about, ah the nature of man and whatever. But this is not only what, it's not only alchemists who did that.
01:08:22
Speaker
Aristotle gave a worldview. ah the The Catholic Church gave a worldview that tried to accommodate every aspect of life. No. um And you know prior to the scientific revolution, it was normal to build a theory that would attempt to accommodate and explain everything. very good anyway I took you to places you didn't expect, I'm sure. No, I wasn't expecting that. no I think that's a great place.
01:08:49
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. I think that's a great place to to to finish. Thank you, Vanessa. This has been really very interesting. I think a great introduction to the philosophy of chemistry. and yeah those philosophers i'm sorry if I I'm sorry if I took you away ah from, you know, talking about the measurement problem. if you If you want to talk it again a little bit, I don't mind. No, I'm very happy. i um i need to be challenged and get away from territory of physics, but this is great.
01:09:15
Speaker
Well, it was lovely. I really enjoyed it.
01:09:34
Speaker
you