JOLLY DAYS

E. Coli Rules

This article by NYT science writer Carl Zimmer discusses the subject of his new book on E. coli, the well-known rock group. Er, no, I mean the bacterial group. Zimmer makes it a fascinating subject, describing the incredible flexibility of a seemingly simple organism.

Looking in from the outside, without a specialist's knowledge, it appears that science is able to describe the biological universe in scalable terms, but not the physical world. Science can build from this relatively simple organism a credible journey to the most complex biological outcroppings, like us. But physicists are stuck in two worlds, with Quantum physics beautifully describing the micro, and Relativity the macro, but no connective tissue — no Theory of Everything, no algorithm to scale up and down.