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COMBINED PHASES. “Formally speaking a cloud is an aerosol, that is a suspension of one phase of matter in another (A colloidal system in which the dispersed phase is composed of either solid or liquid particles, and in which the dispersion medium is some gas, usually air). A characteristic of an aerosol is that it is disperse. It is not one thing, but many things, or many repetitions of the same thing, dispersed in space.” https://lnkd.in/djhU_x4 View in LinkedIn

TURBULENCE AND CLOUD SHAPES. "Turbulence is thought to modify the collision efficiency of droplets in one of three ways: 1. By modifying the flow field around the droplets; 2. By generating spatial inhomogeneities in the droplet concentration field; 3. By modifying (generally increasing) the relative velocities between droplets." http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/fileadmin/staff/stevensbjorn/teaching/skript-5.pdf View in LinkedIn

CONCRETE PATHOGENS. “With the rise of medical microbiology in the late nineteenth century the ontological conception became the dominant theory of disease, and so it has remained, more or less, to the present day. The modern notion of a ‘pathogen’ is clearly derived from it, which accounts for why pathogens have long been considered a discrete category, distinguished from other microbes by their inherent capacity to cause disease in appropriate hosts.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

PLANT VAPOR AND CLOUDS. “Plants emit gases from their leaves and sap, which is one reason why they have distinctive smells. When those gases interact with sunlight, their chemistry changes such that they condense from diffuse gas to liquid droplets less than one micrometer — a thousandth of a millimeter — in size. These droplets then serve as the nucleus of a cloud.” https://lnkd.in/dAd-J4G View in LinkedIn

DISEASES AS THINGS. “The ontological conception is aligned with substance ontology, as it regards diseases as particular things (or properties of things) that are discrete and exist independently of the body they infect, whereas the physiological conception is more congenial to process ontology, as it views diseases as temporally extended disruptions in the carefully regulated meshwork of interconnected processes that constitutes the body.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

The physical cabinet of curiosities; the other is a bird’s nest of clippings and foraging from the marvelous world of ideas. View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this second of two weekends in a remarkable essay on process ontology. Metaphysics rarely strays into biology, or rather, biologists are rarely metaphysical in their thinking. Biologists are generally more comfortable outside of abstract thinking. But this essay, I believe, is deeply important, very timely, and has many practical as well as philosophical consequences. It is worth very careful consideration. View in LinkedIn

WIDELY APPLICABLE. “Metabolic turnover, life cycles, and ecological interdependence—to mention the three phenomena we have discussed here in most detail—all provide compelling empirical motivations for adopting a process ontology in biology.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

SUBSTANCE VERSUS PHENOMENA. “Every science has progressed beyond an initial conception of its phenomena in substance terms to understanding that they are in fact process phenomena. Fire is no longer modeled in terms of the substance phlogiston, but instead in terms of the process of combustion; heat no longer in terms of caloric, but in terms of random kinetic processes; life no longer in terms of vital fluids, but in terms of special kinds of far from thermodynamic equilibrium processes. And so on.“ (Bickhard 2009). https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

THE LEADERSHIP OF PHYSICS. “It is interesting to observe that physics, which has traditionally been regarded as the more advanced science, was pushed towards process ontology about a century ago (as was argued by Whitehead and others), and now biology—if we and the other contributors to this volume are correct—is following suit. Might this perhaps be an indication that the shift from substantialism to processualism is just something that all sciences go through as they develop?” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn