Dear list,
I've met Fritz Schaefer a couple of times and find him to be intelligent
and friendly, a great chemist and Christian. He is very well respected in
the chemistry community and one of my collegues at Furman thinks that he
would've gotten a Nobel prize except that he's too outspokenly Christian
(for example, he mentioned his Christianity a few times during a scientific
talk at Furman last Spring). He gave a talk like the one Glenn described
at the Michigan Vertias forum in '97 which I enjoyed. However, as Glenn
pointed out, it's a "Campus Crusade"-type talk, not a hard-core apologetics
talk. I doubt Schaefer considers himself one of the greatest Christian
apologists. I suspect he didn't know what he was getting into when he
signed up to give a talk at Waco or else someone mistakenly scheduled him
after Weinberg.
Now, on to water. As a chemist, I see water as ideally suited as the
solvent for life. Its dipole moment allows it to solvate ions crucial to
life (eg. the Na+/K+ ions used to fire our neurons). It's polarity and the
resulting hydrophobic/hydrophilic interactions with other molecules produce
the complicated folding structures of our biomolecules. And it's ability
to hydrogen bond impacts our chemistry in many ways. The simplest example
is that ice is less dense than water, so lakes don't freeze up in winter.
Although life exists in many extreme conditions--which shows how robust the
Creation is and brings glory to the Creator--it's very difficult to imagine
intelligent life existing at the extreme conditions Glenn quotes from Paul
Davies. It takes a lot of energy to run our brains, and I doubt the
kinetics at low T will handle it. On the other hand, at high T the
complicated biomolecular structures in our brains might fly apart.
How to quantify water's "ideal suitibility for life" is left as a homework
assignment for the reader ;-)
Keenan
Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 09:56:49 -0600
From: dfsiemensjr@juno.com
Subject: Re: Water's dipole
On Thu, 27 Apr 2000 08:58:36 -0600 Allan Harvey
<aharvey@boulder.nist.gov> writes:
> At 05:57 AM 4/26/00 +0000, glenn morton wrote:
>
> >The only real piece of data Schaeffer presented that might point to
> a
> >creator was the need for the water molecule to have precisely 1.84
> Debye
> >units for the dipole moment. He didn't explain it--just said it.
> Here he
> >had some real evidence and left it lying on the rug like an
> unexplained
> >stain.
>
> I heard back from Fritz Schaefer on what he meant by this. He was
> just
> referring to the fact that life as we know it depends on water being
> a
> liquid in the range of conditions at which our biochemistry takes
> place. Change the dipole moment and maybe water freezes or boils at
> our
> body temperature. My feeling is that that isn't a constraint where
> it
> needs to be precisely 1.85, but might constrain you to +-0.2 or some
> range
> like that. So it doesn't strike me as a very strong argument.
>
> That does bring up a related question I have wondered about. I get
> the
> impression that the biochemistry of animal life is tuned to a fairly
> narrow
> range of temperatures -- make things hotter by 20 K or so (don't
> hold me to
> that number) and enzymes and proteins break down, make things colder
> by 20
> K and reactions don't go fast enough. To what extent is that
> temperature
> range a fundamental constraint, or is it conceivable that our
> biochemistry
> could work (just with slightly different enzymes, etc.) at
> substantially
> different temperatures? If we still could have evolved if liquid
> water was
> 50 K hotter or 50 K colder, then I think the anthropic argument on
> water's
> dipole moment pretty much vanishes.
>
>
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------
Given the state of water at 0C, simple life would have to be close to
non-motile 20K below what is presented as standard temperature. However,
I understand that algae survive and grow, though slowly, in the snow and
ice of the Antarctic. At the other end, some bacteria in hot springs and
at ocean vents are reported to grow best at temperatures well above
70C--I recall 80-90C, with some surviving above 100C, with the water
liquid only because of the pressure at depth.
On the other hand, the solvent power of water seems relevant to life.
But. as a philosopher, I don't know if this is in any way relevant to
considerations in the anthropic principle(s) argument(s).
Dave
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