Re: Heisenberg and his Principle (and how it relates to paleontology)

["Steve Brusatte" <dinoland@lycos.com>]

On Tue, 4 Dec 2001 00:27:41   
 David Marjanovic wrote:
>> Now, when conducting isotope ratios and chemical composition tests of
>dinosaur bones or any fossil, the extremely small size of the quantities
>being measured may be significant, and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
>may play a role.  Of course, this only relates to a very small branch of
>paleontology.
>
>Such stuff is still far too big for statistically significant contributions
>from HUP, I'd say. It might, say, increase the noise in a mass spectrometer,
>but this is a total guess.

Probably very true.  So, I can't fathom to think of any paleontological 
application that would be significant enough to warrant contributions from HUP. 
 Unless we wanted to measure the size of a proton in the nucleus of a calcium 
atom in the bone of a dinosaur...  I can't imagine why anyone would want to do 
that, though.  

>Roger Penrose's (I think; can find a ref) suggestion that in the microtubuli
>of (nerve) cells a superposition of quantum states (a direct consequence of
>HUP) can establish itself and cause random, free will etc. is very, very
>interesting -- but later I read somewhere that even microtubuli are too big
>for that.

Yeah, I've read about that, too.  Very interesting stuff, but there is nothing 
near enough evidence to suppport such a hypothesis...yet.  

Steve

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