Lee Cronin
speaker
545 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Jun 2024
Lee Cronin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The rate of change of assembly, DADT, will go vum sigmoidal as it eats all the food, and the number of E. coli cells will replicate because they take all the food, they copy themselves, the assembly index of all the molecules goes up, up, up, and up until the food is exhausted in the box. So now the E. coli's stopped... I mean, dye is probably a strong word.
They stop respiring because all the food is gone. But suddenly the amount of assembly in the box has gone up gigantically because of that one E. coli factory has just eaten through, milled lots of other E. coli factories, run out of food and stopped. And so that looking at that. So in the initial box, although the amount of assembly was really small,
It was able to replicate and use all the food and go up. And that's what we're trying to do in the lab, actually, is kind of make those kind of experiments and see if we can spot the emergence of molecular networks that are producing complexity as we feed in raw materials and we feed a challenge, an environment. You know, we try and kill the molecules.
And really, that's the main kind of idea for the entire paper.
In very simply, actually, if we, let's say we'll go to Mars with a mass spectrometer with a sufficiently high resolution. So what you have to be able to do, so good thing about mass spec is that you can select the molecule from the mass. And then if it's high enough resolution, you can be more and more sure that you're just seeing identical copies.
You can count them and then you fragment them and you count the number of fragments and look at the molecular weight. And the higher the molecular weight, And the higher the number of the fragments, the higher the assembly index. So if you go to Mars and you take a mass spec or high enough resolution, and you can find molecules, and I'll give you a guide on Earth.
If you could find molecules, say, greater than 350 molecular weight with more than 15 fragments, you have found artifacts that can only be produced, at least on Earth, by life. Now, you would say, oh, well, maybe the geological process. I would argue very vehemently that that is not the case. But we can say, look, if you don't like the cutoff on Earth, go up higher, 30, 100, right?
Because there's going to be a point where you'll find a molecule with so many different parts, the chances of you getting a molecule that has 100 different parts is... And finding a million identical copies, you know, that's just impossible. That could never happen in an infinite set of universes.
Yeah, that was so interesting. And I... Always understood the copy number was really important, but I never explained it properly for ages. And I kept having this, it goes back to this, if I give you a, I don't know, a really complicated molecule, and I say it's complicated, you could say, hey, that's really complicated, but is it just really random?
And so I realized that ultimate randomness and ultimate complexity are indistinguishable. Until you can see a structure in the randomness. So you can see copies.
Yeah. The factory.
it's it's all to do with the the telescope or the microscope you're using and so at the maximum resolution so in the nice thing about the nice thing about chemists is they have this concept of the molecule and they're all familiar with a molecule and molecules you can hold you know on your hand and lots of them identical copies a molecule is actually a super important thing in chemistry to say look you can have a mole of a molecule so an avogadro's number of molecules
And they're identical. What does that mean? That means that the molecular composition, the bonding and so on, the configuration is indistinguishable. You can hold them together. You can overlay them. So the way I do it is if I say, here's a bag of 10 identical molecules. Let's prove they're identical. You pick one out of the bag and you basically observe it using some technique.
And then you take it away and then you take another one out. If you observe it using technique, you see no differences. They're identical. It's really interesting to get right because if you take, say, two molecules, molecules can be in different vibrational and rotational states. They're moving all the time. So with this respect, identical molecules have identical bonding.
In this case, we don't even talk about chirality because we don't have a chirality detector. So two identical molecules in one conception assembly theory basically considers both hands as being the same. But of course, they're not. They're different. As soon as you have a chiral distinguisher detect the left and the right hand, they become different.
And so it's to do with the detection system that you have and the resolution.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sure, I mean, of course we're different close up, but if you zoom out a little bit, we'll morphologically look the same. You know, height and characteristics, hair length, stuff like that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I agree. I mean, this is the power of assembly theory in that regard. So the way to look at it, if you have a box of objects, if they're all indistinguishable, then using your technique, what you then do is you then look at the assembly index. Now, if the assembly index of them is really low, and they're all indistinguishable, then it's telling you that you have to go to another resolution.
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