Michael Polanyi made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He was a chemistry professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, and then in 1933 he moved to England, becoming first a chemistry professor, and then a social sciences professor at the University of Manchester in 1944 Polanyi was elected to the Royal Society. One of his children and two of his pupils won the Nobel Prize. His older brother Karl was a founder of the
Galileo Galilei Society in Hungary.
Ernst Mach had the greatest influence on the formation of the Galilean worldview in the natural sciences, which was built on the absolutization of the concept of
experience. ("We cannot even think about the phenomena that cannot be proven by experience," wrote Polanyi).
In 1967, Michael Polanyi published the landmark article "Life Transcending Physics and Chemistry." In it he wrote...
"When I say that life transcends physics and chemistry,
I mean that biology cannot explain life in our age
by the current workings of physical and chemical laws."
Chemical and Engineering News (ACS), Vol 45, Issue 35 (1967)
In 1969 Polanyi went into more detail with his article in
Science, " Life's Irreducible Structure: Live Mechanisms and Information in DNA are boundary conditions with a sequence of boundaries above them." In it, he wrote...
If all men were exterminated, this would not affect the laws of inanimate nature. But the production of machines would stop, and not until men arose again could machines be formed once rnore. Some animals can produce tools, but only men can construct machines; machines are human artifacts, made of inanimate material. The Oxford Dictionary describes a "machine as an apparatus for applying mechanical power, consisting of a number of interrelated parts, each having a definite function." It might be, for example, a machine for sewing or printing. Let us assume that the power driving the machine is built in, and disregard the fact that it has to be renewed from time to time. We can say, then, that the manufacture of a machine consists in cutting suitably shaped parts and fitting them together so that their joint mechanical action should serve a possible human purpose. The structure of machines and the working of their structure are thus shaped by man, even while their material and the forces that operate them obey the laws of inanimate nature. In constructing a machine and supplying it with power, we harness the laws of nature at work in its material and in its driving force and make them serve our purpose.
Science (1968) vol 160(3834), 1308-1312.
To summarize,
1) Physics and chemistry are
reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry, but
Life is not.
2)
Life transcends physics and chemistry. Living things are the transcendental, which religions usually described as a state of being beyond (or before) the physical world.
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