Background
Walter Maurice Elsasser was born in Germany on 20 March 1904.
( Are living organisms?as Descartes argued?just machines?...)
Are living organisms?as Descartes argued?just machines? Or is the nature of life such that it can never be fully explained by mechanistic models? In this thought-provoking and controversial book, eminent geophysicist Walter M. Elsasser argues that the behavior of living organisms cannot be reduced to physico-chemical causality. Suggesting that molecular biology today is at the same point as Newtonian physics on the eve of the quantum revolution, Elsasser lays the foundation for a theoretical biology that points the way toward a natural philosophy of organic life. Explicitly repudiating "vitalism" (the notion that the laws of nature need to be modified when applied to living organisms), Elsasser argues instead that the structural complexity of even a single living cell is "transcomputational"?that is, beyond the power of any imaginable system to compute. Beginning from this insight, Elsasser leads the reader through a step-by-step process that ultimately arrives at the conclusion that living and non-living matter are separated by "a no-man's land of irrationality." Trained in Germany as a physicist, Elsasser first pondered the implications of quantum mechanics for biology as early as 1951. The more closely he studied the inherent complexity of life, the more skeptical he became of the reductionist view of organisms as tiny machines. "An organism," he concluded, "is a source of causal chains which cannot be traced beyond a terminal point because they are lost in the unfathomable complexity of the organism." Like the physicist who works within the bounds of an unfathomable universe, Elsasser argues, the biologist must seek answers within a system that is no less unfathomable.
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Walter Maurice Elsasser was born in Germany on 20 March 1904.
Elsasser gained a doctoral degree in physics at Göttingen in 1927, after university studies at Heidelberg and Munich.
Elsasser's employments were diverse, in many institutions and in three countries. He worked at the Technische Hochschule, Berlin (1928 - 1930) and at Frankfurt University (1930 - 1933). While research fellow and guest lecturer at the Sorbonne (1933 - 1936) in Paris, his main work was in atomic physics.
He immigrated to the United States in 1936 and became a naturalized citizen in 1940.
Elsasser's first appointments in the United States were in meteorology at the California Institute of Technology (1936 - 1941) and then at the Blue Hill Observatory, Harvard (1941 - 1942).
During World War II he was employed at the Signal Corps Laboratories in New Jersey, where his research dealt with the atmospheric transmission of radio and radar waves.
Following the war, he engaged in industrial research for a short time at the New Jersey Laboratories of the Radio Corporation of America.
After that he held professorial posts at several universities, including Pennsylvania (1947-1950), Utah (1950 - 1956), California at La Jolla (1956 - 1962), New Mexico at Albuquerque (1960 - 1961), Princeton (1962 - 1968), and Maryland at College Park (1968 - 1974).
In 1985 Elsasser became adjunct professor in the department of earth and planetary science at Johns Hopkins University, and was named Homewood Professor two years later. He retired from teaching in 1989.
In 1958 Elsasser published a book, The Physical Foundation of Biology, an important and highly original work concerned with broad philosophical, physical, and biological matters, strikingly different from his main researches. A sequel appeared in 1966, Atom and Organism.
Other books by Elsasser include The Chief Abstractions of Biology (1975), Memoirs of a Physicist in the Atomic Age (1978), and Reflections on a Theory of Organisms (1987).
Calculations of wind systems led Elsasser by 1938 to consider the possibility that convection motion might exist within the earth's metallic core and might obey certain laws of cosmic magneto-hydrodynamics.
He first studied the phenomenon of "secular variation" and demonstrated that his formulation of the magneto-hydrodynamics of a spherical conductor provided quantitative results in agreement with the observed phenomenon.
Elsasser also explained how eddies with the circulation of the earth's core can account for the secular variation, whose distribution is regional and whose time scale, a few centuries, differs greatly from that of surface geological changes.
Being interested in the origin of the earth's permanent geomagnetic field, Elsasser first proposed a thermoelectric origin, but this did not account for the self-sustaining nature of the permanent field, and he abandoned it in favor of a dynamo theory. According to this model, the presence of a magnetic field in the core results in motion of matter perpendicular to the field, which in turn gives rise to a field producing motion, and so on in self-sustaining action.
In his late research, Elsasser concentrated his efforts on the study of the earth's upper mantle. Elsasser died October 14, 1991.
( Are living organisms?as Descartes argued?just machines?...)
( The Description for this book, Atom and Organism: A New...)
(Book by Elsasser, Walter M.)
The National Academy of Sciences
In 1937 Elsasser married Margaret Trahey. They had a daughter and a son.
After a divorce from his first wife, he married Suzanne Rosenfeld in 1964.