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cell biology (see the first two rows). And yet, the traditional molecular and cell
biology, although often couched in the concepts of information does not, in the real
sense of the word, involve any information theory at all (as attested by the fact that
no major biochemistry or molecular biology textbooks currently in print, to the best
of my knowledge, define what
information
is!). Thus traditional molecular cell
biology can be regarded mostly as an applied field of chemistry and physics (i.e., a
synchronic science, the science dealing with
synchronic information
; see Sect.
4.5
),
devoid of any truly
information-theoretical
contents (i.e., diachronic science, the
science dealing with
diachronic information
). Linguists distinguish between
syn-
chronic
(i.e., ahistorical) and
diachronic
(i.e., historical) studies of language (Culler
1991). Similarly it may be assumed that traditional molecular biology can be
viewed as the synchronic study of life on the molecular level (which is indistin-
guishable from physics and chemistry) and info-statistical mechanics as both
synchronic and diachronic studies of life. One of the landmark developments in
statistical mechanics is the mathematical derivation by Boltzmann of the formula
for entropy. The comparable event in info-statistical mechanics may be suggested
to be the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA in 1953, that is here
postulated to be the carriers of
molecular information
and
mechanical energy
,
namely, conformons (Benham 1996a, b, Benham and Bi 2004; Ji 1985a, b, 2000)
(see Chap.
8
).
4.10 The Free Energy-Information Orthogonality
as the “Bohr-Delbruck Paradox”
Bohr's “Light and Life” lecture in 1933 influenced Max Delbruck (1906-1981) to
switch his field from physics to biology (McKaughan 2005). By applying the
reductionist, physicochemical approaches to biology as far as possible (in which
effort, he was so successful as to win a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in
1969), Delbr
uck hoped to uncover a biological situation where the reductionist
approach would lead to a paradox akin to the wave-particle paradox in quantum
physics. To the best of my knowledge, Delbr
€
uck was unable to discover any new
paradox or any complementarity in molecular biology beyond the mechanism-
function complementarity that Bohr already discussed in 1933. We may refer to
the kind of paradox that Bohr predicted and Delbr
€
€
uck looked for in molecular
biology as the
Bohr-Delbr
uck paradox.
It asserted here that the information-energy complementarity discussed in
Sect.
2.3.2
and Figs.
4.2
and
4.3
qualifies to be a Bohr-Delbr
€
uck paradox. The
information-energy complementarity (or paradox) can be graphically represented
as in Fig.
4.2
. This figure embodies a paradox from the point of view of physics,
because, in physics, the concept of energy (including entropy as a part of free
energy) rules supreme (i.e.,
€
is both necessary and sufficient
to explain all
