Boltzmannian Immortality

Immortality.

“Is death necessary?“, asked biologist G. R. Taylor and stated that in 1968 in the USA alone more than a thousand teams of scientists were working on the issue of growing old and the problem of death. Some people are frozen at their death. They want to be revived as soon as a cure for their disease or the aging process has been found. Most of humanity seems to have the desire to live forever. M...

Rethinking Boltzmannian Equilibrium

Boltzmannian statistical mechanics partitions the phase space into macroregions, and the largest of these is identified with equilibrium. What justifies this identification? Common answers focus on Boltzmann’s combinatorial argument, the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, and maximum entropy considerations. We argue that they fail and present a new answer. We characterise equilibrium as the macros...

Probability in Boltzmannian Statistical Mechanics

Chance in Boltzmannian Statistical Mechanics

In two recent papers Barry Loewer (2001, 2004) has suggested to interpret probabilities in statistical mechanics as chances in David Lewis's (1994) sense. I first give a precise formulation of this proposal, then raise two fundamental objections, and finally conclude that these can be overcome only at the price of interpreting these probabilities epistemically. 1. Introduction. Consider a gas t...

Enabling Replicative Immortality

Molecular aspects of cancer continue to be uncovered by researchers around the world. Theses aspects will need to be exploited in the next generation of cancer treatments. Specific tumor suppressor genes such as p53 can serve as novel therapeutic targets as well. Although the scientific understanding of the actual steps in tumorigenesis is rather muddled, the differences between cancer and norm...