🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4867@dove.nist.gov>, gilligan@bldrdoc (Jonathan Gilligan 303-497-3861) writes:
>I have a hard time believing that biological chirality developed due
>to a part-in-10^7 or smaller effect that's more than four orders of
>magnitude below the thermal noise.

Why is that hard to believe?  Directional subnoise effects, given enough
time (and we're talking teraseconds), can overwhelm noise.  That was, for
example, the principle behind COBE's recent 3K anisotropy detection.

>However, even if it were the case that the weak force were
>biologically significant, I think that results relevant to biology
>would be more likely to come from work like Carl Wieman's.

No kidding.  What do you think I've been talking about?  I have not
specified *any* scenario, simply because no one knows, me least of all.

>							    Wieman has
>measured the the weak mixing angle by measuring parity violating
>electronic transitions in atomic cesium. [...]

Parity violation on the atomic level is currently a lively cottage
industry.  Numerous such effects are known.  Without even looking, I
ran into a new World Scientific conference proceedings on this topic
which showed up at the Penn library this past week.
-- 
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu)