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Amihud Gilead

Publications and source records attributed to Amihud Gilead.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

The Twilight of Determinism: At Least in Biophysical Novelties

In the 1990s, Richard Lewontin referred to what appeared to be the twilight of determinism in biology. He pointed out that DNA determines only a little part of life phenomena, which are very complex. In fact, organisms determine the environment and vice versa in a nonlinear way. Very recently, biophysicists, Shimon Marom and Erez Braun, have demonstrated that controlled biophysical systems have shown a relative autonomy and flexibility in response which could not be predicted. Within the boundaries of some restraints, most of them genetic, this freedom from determinism is well maintained. Marom and Braun have challenged not only biophysical determinism but also reverse-engineering, naive reductionism, mechanism, and systems biology.

physics.hist-ph

Two Kinds of Discovery: An Ontological Account

What can we discover? As the discussion in this paper is limited to ontological considerations, it does not deal with the discovery of new concepts. It raises the following question: What are the entities or existents that we can discover? There are two kinds of such entities: (1) actual entities, and (2) possible entities, which are pure possibilities. The paper explains why the first kind of discovery depends primarily on the second kind. The paper illustrates the discoveries of individual pure possibilities by presenting examples such as the Higgs particle, Dirac's positron, and Pauli-Fermi's neutrino.

physics.hist-ph