If you extend this to the now-debunked notion's common usage as an metaphor for the uniqueness of people, I'd say it's safe to say we're primarily products of our unique environments and anyone brought up under the same conditions as us has a good chance of turning out just like us.
No, I'm not completely serious. (We're not special)
> If you extend this to the now-debunked notion's common usage as an metaphor for the uniqueness of people, I'd say it's safe to say we're primarily products of our unique environments and anyone brought up under the same conditions as us has a good chance of turning out just like us.
This is the old 'nature vs. nurture' debate, and while it's pretty much impossible to decide perfectly due to the practical challenges to creating a proper controlled experiment at scale, it's pretty much accepted by this point that the answer is 'yes, both matter'.
>> I'd say it's safe to say we're primarily products of our unique environments and anyone brought up under the same conditions as us has a good chance of turning out just like us.
> it's pretty much accepted by this point that the answer is 'yes, both matter'.
No, "anyone brought up under the same conditions as us" seems more likely to refer to shared environment than unique environment. It's pretty much accepted by this point that while a lot of interpersonal variation can be attributed to the catchall "unique environment", almost none of it can be attributed to shared environment (or in other words, the effect of an environment on one person has basically no predictive value for the effect of the same environment on a different person).
i'd argue pauli(o) already answered the question of whether all snowflakes are wholly unique
that said, this tech demo is an awesome display of environmental control and deterministic macro processes
i am unsure why people are so fond of fetishising the "we're not special" mantra
it seems an agenda driven denial of reality with dubious consequences relying on the agreement of the definition of words without actually defining them
i suppose the problem lies in the innate ambiguity of the word 'special' and in the case of the article's headline 'alike'
how alike? because in the examples in the videos i can see with only my eyes that these twins have minute differences
so the question arises: are the inconsistencies an issue of mechanical precision?
I feel like snowflakes are memory structures -- the progression of shape starting from the center would reflect humidity/air pressure/temperature over time.
Does that make sense to anyone? Why couldn't you encode memory in this?
ha, unsure why you are getting downvoted clearly some people deny their imagination
any deterministic process can 'encode memory', just look at compression,
so if you have an initial state that you know will produce a final result, like this technology is showing can be done with snowflakes then you can encode the final result as a piece of memory and 'store' that value as the initial state and processing requirements
but you are subject to working backwards, determining the memory from the process
so, could you use this snowflake process to encode arbitrary memory as an initial state and process? it is unknown because this article fails to speak to whether the tech can design the snowflake to an acceptable precision
It would certainly make for an interesting sci-fi story. Imagine if the large snowfall on the east coast were a higher being providing us instructions on how to fix our planet, if only we knew how to reassemble the information. And the planet's glaciers contain massive amounts of information on how to create a wormhole to visit other civilizations, but now they're melting and the information is being lost forever...
> Just get a bunch of monkeys pounding on keyboards instead. They'll produce the same information in due time.
Have you seen the Library of Babel[1]?
It contains every book which has ever been written, and every book which ever could be written, for it contains every combination of 1,312,000 characters that are possible.
It's a bit difficult to find any of that in all the noise, though…
Most "junk" DNA is not actually junk. There are several different parts of DNA.
The most easily understandable parts are the gene coding bits, we know exactly how that works (in isolation), the DNA gets transcribed to RNA which then gets translated into an amino-acid chain that becomes a protein. If you label everything that's not a protein encoding region of DNA as "junk" then you really don't understand DNA at all.
Equally important are the regulation parts of DNA. These are sections of DNA before and after genes which are there to help cells control the expression of different genes.
Additionally, there are big chunks of DNA which exist solely to ensure the DNA has the right chemical properties and is easily stored in a cell.
There's still plenty of "useless" parts of DNA once you account for all that, but much less "junk" than previously believed.
My previous comment was pretty tongue in cheek, but thank you for the explanation, that's really quite interesting. I wonder if it is possible that the 'useless' or 'junk' DNA is mostly stuff that becomes important under different environmental conditions and becomes active based on certain triggers with epigenetics?
I used to agree with you but I think nearly all scientists agree that the long repetitive regions (like LTRs) that compose ~75% of the non-protein-coding genome are actually and truly non-functional garbage that just replicates opportunistically and evolves neutrally.
There was a big argument about this a few years ago but ENCODE finally backed off on their public statements about how much of the genome was "functional".
Although the experiment would be roughly impossible, you could in principle replace all the LTR regions with random sequence and there would be no positive or negative effect.
Note that all of the above may be wrong, but it's really hard to argue that the viral replication stuff in our genome has a functional effect.
I still don't understand why snowflakes are symmetrical. There is symmetry across 3 "planes of reflection." What is the mechanism that transmits information from one side of each plane of reflection to the opposite side?
By analogy, one could say that Courier New zeros "arrange themselves in predetermined spaces and in a specific arrangement." But this gives us any number of patterns across a line of symmetry, including a few non-symmetrical ones.
So how does the communication happen? (I realize the communication is happening from the inside going out, with additional information being provided over time by the environment.)
From a vague memory of something I read about snowflake formation, the mechanism that transmits information from one side of the snowflake to the other is just the fact that snowflakes are very small. Their formation is driven by the atmosphere around them, and the relevant properties of the atmosphere (like temperature) are continuous, so the same on both sides of the snowflake.
Similarly, we don't believe the cosmic background radiation is the same everywhere because there is currently a massive faster-than-light communication network linking every point in the universe with every other point for purposes of temperature coordination; we believe that it's the same everywhere because the universe was very small in the past, like a snowflake.
> Their formation is driven by the atmosphere around them, and the relevant properties of the atmosphere (like temperature) are continuous, so the same on both sides of the snowflake.
So what you're saying is that basically the ability to make twin snowflakes (by manipulating the conditions) proceeds from exactly the same circumstances which already makes their six branches identical?
Based on that hypothesis, you're likely to get twins if you simply grow them in adjacent spaces: together, those spaces are still small and the atmospheric properties are even across them. And that's what he seems to be doing.
I'm going to assume it has to do with the crystalline structure of ice. Crystals like to have a very specific structure, so there's only a few particular ways for it to grow from a given point. For instance, the three-plane symmetry is going to be due to the hexagonal shape of ice crystals [0]. That's also going to inform how branches of branches are formed; note that secondary branches are all parallel to the sides of the entire hexagonal structure of the flake [1].
I thought a lot about this, am equally frustrated by the 'explanations' given in pop science, and have tried to research it without getting great answers, but I have some ideas and points on the matter:
1) Most ice crystals are not symmetric! The pretty ones you see in pictures are the cream of the crop or even artificially grown like these. Even artificially grown ones are often imperfectly symmetric, see the stunted arm in one of the pairs in this article, for example.
2) Many snowflakes are thought to form around dust particles or such. This makes their symmetry more remarkable since their base is not symmetric!
3) A stable structure that forces its pattern out sounds like something that should be invariant under a lot of changing conditions, but the sheer diversity of snowflakes argues that it actually depends heavily upon many parameters. So it's extra remarkable that such structure is both sufficiently stable to form symmetry across the millimeter scale and sufficiently unstable to form many different patterns
4) But the things it's sensitive to appear to be humidity, temperature, etc. that are essentially constant across the length of a snowflake even though they change significantly across the duration of the snowflake's growth.
This SciAm article ( http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-snowflakes-... ) helped me. It's hard to summarize, but it looks like branching starts (in certain conditions) on corners and amplifies existing projections. Corners start hexagonally symmetrical, and to the extent that the formation of "dendrites" proceeds in lockstep around the crystal (due to uniform conditions?), they stay symmetrical. The amplification effect is weaker for the smaller sub-branches, so those are somewhat but not always symmetrical.
It doesn't help that there's a couple missing diagrams, but I think the first one is just a hexagonal prism and I didn't really need the second.
From the article, “I started calling them identical twins because they are like identical people,” he said. “They are too similar to just happen by chance, but not absolutely precisely identical to the last molecule.”
The problem with the term "perfectly identical" is that it's a weasel word that opens the door for endless moving of goalposts. Even if the physicist were to refine the process further and produce snowflakes with identical molecular configurations, you could argue that since they occupy different positions within space they are still different.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 79.3 ms ] threadNo, I'm not completely serious. (We're not special)
This is the old 'nature vs. nurture' debate, and while it's pretty much impossible to decide perfectly due to the practical challenges to creating a proper controlled experiment at scale, it's pretty much accepted by this point that the answer is 'yes, both matter'.
> it's pretty much accepted by this point that the answer is 'yes, both matter'.
No, "anyone brought up under the same conditions as us" seems more likely to refer to shared environment than unique environment. It's pretty much accepted by this point that while a lot of interpersonal variation can be attributed to the catchall "unique environment", almost none of it can be attributed to shared environment (or in other words, the effect of an environment on one person has basically no predictive value for the effect of the same environment on a different person).
that said, this tech demo is an awesome display of environmental control and deterministic macro processes
i am unsure why people are so fond of fetishising the "we're not special" mantra
it seems an agenda driven denial of reality with dubious consequences relying on the agreement of the definition of words without actually defining them
i suppose the problem lies in the innate ambiguity of the word 'special' and in the case of the article's headline 'alike'
how alike? because in the examples in the videos i can see with only my eyes that these twins have minute differences
so the question arises: are the inconsistencies an issue of mechanical precision?
(o) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle
Does that make sense to anyone? Why couldn't you encode memory in this?
any deterministic process can 'encode memory', just look at compression, so if you have an initial state that you know will produce a final result, like this technology is showing can be done with snowflakes then you can encode the final result as a piece of memory and 'store' that value as the initial state and processing requirements
but you are subject to working backwards, determining the memory from the process
so, could you use this snowflake process to encode arbitrary memory as an initial state and process? it is unknown because this article fails to speak to whether the tech can design the snowflake to an acceptable precision
Have you seen the Library of Babel[1]?
It contains every book which has ever been written, and every book which ever could be written, for it contains every combination of 1,312,000 characters that are possible.
It's a bit difficult to find any of that in all the noise, though…
[1] https://libraryofbabel.info/
The most easily understandable parts are the gene coding bits, we know exactly how that works (in isolation), the DNA gets transcribed to RNA which then gets translated into an amino-acid chain that becomes a protein. If you label everything that's not a protein encoding region of DNA as "junk" then you really don't understand DNA at all.
Equally important are the regulation parts of DNA. These are sections of DNA before and after genes which are there to help cells control the expression of different genes.
Additionally, there are big chunks of DNA which exist solely to ensure the DNA has the right chemical properties and is easily stored in a cell.
There's still plenty of "useless" parts of DNA once you account for all that, but much less "junk" than previously believed.
There was a big argument about this a few years ago but ENCODE finally backed off on their public statements about how much of the genome was "functional".
Although the experiment would be roughly impossible, you could in principle replace all the LTR regions with random sequence and there would be no positive or negative effect.
Note that all of the above may be wrong, but it's really hard to argue that the viral replication stuff in our genome has a functional effect.
Pop science explanations never explain this:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-are-snowflakes...
By analogy, one could say that Courier New zeros "arrange themselves in predetermined spaces and in a specific arrangement." But this gives us any number of patterns across a line of symmetry, including a few non-symmetrical ones.
So how does the communication happen? (I realize the communication is happening from the inside going out, with additional information being provided over time by the environment.)Similarly, we don't believe the cosmic background radiation is the same everywhere because there is currently a massive faster-than-light communication network linking every point in the universe with every other point for purposes of temperature coordination; we believe that it's the same everywhere because the universe was very small in the past, like a snowflake.
So what you're saying is that basically the ability to make twin snowflakes (by manipulating the conditions) proceeds from exactly the same circumstances which already makes their six branches identical?
Based on that hypothesis, you're likely to get twins if you simply grow them in adjacent spaces: together, those spaces are still small and the atmospheric properties are even across them. And that's what he seems to be doing.
Though, as you say similar conditions can make each side close approximations of the others.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_crystals#Geometry
[1] http://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/01/22/science/22Snowflak...
1) Most ice crystals are not symmetric! The pretty ones you see in pictures are the cream of the crop or even artificially grown like these. Even artificially grown ones are often imperfectly symmetric, see the stunted arm in one of the pairs in this article, for example.
2) Many snowflakes are thought to form around dust particles or such. This makes their symmetry more remarkable since their base is not symmetric!
3) A stable structure that forces its pattern out sounds like something that should be invariant under a lot of changing conditions, but the sheer diversity of snowflakes argues that it actually depends heavily upon many parameters. So it's extra remarkable that such structure is both sufficiently stable to form symmetry across the millimeter scale and sufficiently unstable to form many different patterns
4) But the things it's sensitive to appear to be humidity, temperature, etc. that are essentially constant across the length of a snowflake even though they change significantly across the duration of the snowflake's growth.
It doesn't help that there's a couple missing diagrams, but I think the first one is just a hexagonal prism and I didn't really need the second.
No two snowflakes are identical.
But two snowflakes can now be "alike" ;)