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The powers of 10 and the human body

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Recently, we noted cicadas’ apparent predilection for the prime numbers of 13 and 17.*

Do we have a predilection for powers of ten?

* Too bad mosquitoes don’t share it. If we had all that time to prepare …

Incidentally, one argument against the Darwinian explanation for the cicada’s long prime-number hibernation (as a means of avoiding predators) is that so few life forms ever do that. You’d expect a strategy adopted for explicitly that purpose to be more common if it worked, because predators are almost universal.

Comments
Here is an interesting piece of trivia to go with the ‘powers of ten’ video that HybridMedical has:
The Scale of The Universe – Part 2 – interactive graph (recently updated in 2012 with cool features) http://htwins.net/scale2/scale2.swf?bordercolor=white
The preceding interactive (powers of 10) graph points out that the smallest scale visible to the human eye (as well as the size of a human egg) is at 10^-4 meters, which ‘just so happens’ to be directly in the exponential center of all possible sizes of our physical reality. i.e. 10^-4 is, exponentially, right in the middle of 10^-35 meters, which is the smallest possible unit of length, which is Planck length, and 10^27 meters, which is the largest possible unit of ‘observable’ length since space-time was created in the Big Bang, which is the diameter of the universe. This is very interesting for, as far as I can tell, the limits to human vision (as well as the size of the human egg) could have, theoretically, been at very different positions than directly in the exponential middle. As well, this exponential ‘coincidence’ is also interesting since conscious observation keeps turning out to be a integral, non-negotiable, part of measurement within quantum mechanics:
Quantum physics says goodbye to reality – Apr 20, 2007 Excerpt: They found that, just as in the realizations of Bell’s thought experiment, Leggett’s inequality is violated – thus stressing the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we’re not observing it. “Our study shows that ‘just’ giving up the concept of locality would not be enough to obtain a more complete description of quantum mechanics,” Aspelmeyer told Physics Web. “You would also have to give up certain intuitive features of realism.” http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/27640
Moreover, the magnitude to which Leggett’s inequality was violated was staggering to learn about:
A team of physicists in Vienna has devised experiments that may answer one of the enduring riddles of science: Do we create the world just by looking at it? – 2008 Excerpt: This test was more stringent. In mid-2007 Fedrizzi found that the new realism model was violated by 80 orders of magnitude; the group was even more assured that quantum mechanics was correct. http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_reality_tests/P3/
Now, I really don’t truly fully completely understand what it means for the materialistic scenario of “naïve realism” (the view that 3-D material reality exists independently and prior to our conscious observation of it) to be violated by 80 orders of magnitude as to rigorously establishing the validity of Theism as correct, but seeing that there are ‘only’ 10^80 orders of magnitude subatomic particles in the universe, then that strongly suggests, at least to me, that they completely blew the materialistic view of reality, (the view of reality existing completely independently of consciousness), clean out of the water. Just how troubling this should be for the committed Atheist who believes everything, even consciousness, emerges from a material basis is highlighted here:
Lecture 11: Decoherence and Hidden Variables – Scott Aaronson Excerpt: “Look, we all have fun ridiculing the creationists who think the world sprang into existence on October 23, 4004 BC at 9AM (presumably Babylonian time), with the fossils already in the ground, light from distant stars heading toward us, etc. But if we accept the usual picture of quantum mechanics, then in a certain sense the situation is far worse: the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago!” http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec11.html
Further notes:
“It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.” Eugene Wigner (1902 -1995) from his collection of essays “Symmetries and Reflections – Scientific Essays”; Eugene Wigner laid the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963. “It will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the scientific conclusion that the content of the consciousness is the ultimate universal reality” - Eugene Wigner – (Remarks on the Mind-Body Question, Eugene Wigner, in Wheeler and Zurek, p.169) 1961 – received Nobel Prize in 1963 for ‘Quantum Symmetries’
Here is Wigner commenting on the key experiment that led Wigner to his Nobel Prize winning work on quantum symmetries,,,
Eugene Wigner Excerpt: When I returned to Berlin, the excellent crystallographer Weissenberg asked me to study: why is it that in a crystal the atoms like to sit in a symmetry plane or symmetry axis. After a short time of thinking I understood:,,,, To express this basic experience in a more direct way: the world does not have a privileged center, there is no absolute rest, preferred direction, unique origin of calendar time, even left and right seem to be rather symmetric. The interference of electrons, photons, neutrons has indicated that the state of a particle can be described by a vector possessing a certain number of components. As the observer is replaced by another observer (working elsewhere, looking at a different direction, using another clock, perhaps being left-handed), the state of the very same particle is described by another vector, obtained from the previous vector by multiplying it with a matrix. This matrix transfers from one observer to another. http://www.reak.bme.hu/Wigner_Course/WignerBio/wb1.htm
The argument for God from consciousness can now be framed like this:
1. Consciousness either preceded all of material reality or is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality. 2. If consciousness is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality then consciousness will be found to have no special position within material reality. Whereas conversely, if consciousness precedes material reality then consciousness will be found to have a special position within material reality. 3. Consciousness is found to have a special, even central, position within material reality. 4. Therefore, consciousness is found to precede material reality. Four intersecting lines of experimental evidence from quantum mechanics that shows that consciousness precedes material reality (Wigner’s Quantum Symmetries, Wheeler’s Delayed Choice, Leggett’s Inequalities, Quantum Zeno effect): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G_Fi50ljF5w_XyJHfmSIZsOcPFhgoAZ3PRc_ktY8cFo/edit
bornagain77
June 1, 2013
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