If a person is born a boy, raised a man, looks like a man, acts like a man. We assume he is a man. However if we discover he was born intersex is he still a man? Is he a woman? If he is neither then what is he? Is he only a man if he can produce fertile sperm? If so that raises the question. If an otherwise biologically definitive man cannot reproduce is he still a man? If not is he a woman? If he isn't a man or woman, again, what is he?
Then do it please. And not to take anything away from chemists or chemistry, but it isn't exactly the same field of expertise. How do guassian functions explain that we only have two sexes and genders? That's some serious extrapolation that I would love to see.
Okay I'll do my best here im between sets at the gym, assuming that you have no background knowledge of quantum, statistical, and classical mechanics
1st thing to understand is that classical mechanics is derived from quantum mechanics, by the use of statistical mechanics. Originally, classical (aka Newtonian mechanics after Newton who codified them in
Principles of Natural Philosophy) mechanics was held as inviolable, until the dawn of quantum mechanics 1st realized by Planck. This discovery was spurred by what was called the Ultraviolet Catastrophe, where classical mechanics yielded an absurdly incorrect result as compared to what was observed in experimentation. Planck fixed this by introducing a "fudge factor" number to make his model work (which then modelled thr phenomenon accurately). That fudge factor is now known as h, Planck's constant, a transcendental number. Rambling a bit, this led to Heisenbergs uncertainties principle which posited that particles actually
do not have a defined position and momentum as classical mechanics states, but there exists an uncertainty in their values, where the product of this uncertain is greater than or equal to the reduced Planck constant, h-bar (h/2pi) divided by 2. Cool, nice.
Now, micro properties (such as individual atoms and molecules) had their behaviour explained by quantum mechanics, and classical mechanics was wrong. However, if you take a macro ensemble of particles and apply statistical mechanics, you end up at the limit towards classical mechanics. So classical mechanics will work on macrostates but not microstates.
Now let's explain this with a practical example, boiling water. You stick a thermometer in and it reads 100 degrees C. But since Temperature is purely a
macro property, it doesn't actually exist in reality, only the summation of the individual kinetic energies of each molecule of water. This is analogous to Pressure, which also doesn't exist in reality. These kinetic energies of water are normally distributed (Gaussian) which means that some water molecules have high kinetic energy, while other molecules have low kinetic energy. The water molecules that have high enough kinetic energy to break the surface tension of the water surface escape as a gas. This gives the macrostate of a rolling boil, bubbling water.
Now this kinetic energy distribution also applies to every single molecule in your body. Biology is a macrostate of the individual chemical reactions of molecules in your body, a ridiculously complicated and ridiculously precise symphony of chemistry in action. However, since
some, very little of these molecules have such a high kinetic energy (the very far end of the Gaussian distribution) that they'll react with things that they are not supposed to, breaking the activation energy. This is the
fundamental reason why biological errors occur. One wrong reaction in the wrong place can completely change how your body functions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_mechanicsThis post was edited by El1te on Feb 21 2025 06:25pm
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