"Sometimes we'd have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark--which was a candle in a cabin window; and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two--on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened."
My intellectual world occurs at a level far below our technical ability to "see" what we are doing. Oh yes, we can use some very elaborate methods , such as atomic force spectroscopy, to visualise the positions of atoms but only in crystals of heavy atoms.
Any so, if we want to "see" what we are doing in chemistry and biochemistry we sink to metaphor and simile. Whenever we reduce macroscopic objects and even ideas to the microscopic level we lose important information in the simplifications. I don't know how many times I have tried to use a simplified simile to explain a chemical reaction only to end up fighting with students that cannot get past the simile to the concepts taught.
With that all said as a preamble I see a new company has entered the market for industrial animation of science - biochemical - chemical processes. They have a sampler / demo reel at this site:
There are some moments captured in the demo that I like. Such as the moment when an micelle / vesicle carrying a drug molecule contacts a cell wall and submerges like an asteroid into the ocean.
Or this moment that shows a fist full of pills dropping out of the pyloric sphincter an into the acid bath that is your stomach (thankfully a clear colourless liquid in this image, I know I have seen stomach contents in my life and it does not look like this). The pills begin to disintegrate as they travel leaving a drug plume.
And this image captures the moment in time just before a protein touches a glyco-protein receptor on a cell surface.
It is not my intention to get drawn into the whole irreducible complexity debate. I do however appreciate how these kind of images place an accessible window on the microscopic world of biochemistry that exists in my head. We are all large, salty bags of water with amazing and complex chemistry going on in our cells all the time. These images are nothing like what really happens but until we can see with our own eyes they will have to do.
It does not matter if you believe it was made or just happened. It is astonishing how little we know about the complexity of what happens below our skin. Every step towards humility in our discussions on complexity is a step forward.
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