We already know the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Re-submit this when he can provide the question.

Needs more Time Cube.

I have never heard of a peer-reviewed journal called "Life", so I went to Google Scholar and searched for E Andrulis and the title.

It turns out that ED Andrulis is a bona fides scientist, but that his paper is published by MDPI Open Access Journals Platform. This is a sort of "open source" journal for any scientist who wishes to publish outside the peer-reviewed journals of the world, which number somewhere in the vicinity of 150,000.

It's not exactly Science or Nature level publishing in other words.

I wouldn't call it "peer-reviewed". Your peers can review your article if they wish, but I don't believe there are any pre-conditions to publication--it's sort of a cork message board for scientists.

I have to go with "bat shiat crazy" therefore. There's not enough evidence of peer-review of the calibre that would guarantee that the work makes any sense whatsoever, let alone that it is high calibre, respectable, peer-reviewed work.

http://www.mdpi.com/

http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/2/1/1/

An equivalent for a news story would be one of these "press release" sites that allow anybody to publish a press release without any guarantee of the legitimacy of the poster, event, etc. Well, perhaps MPRI is more respectable than those, but by scientific community standards, not a lot more respectable.

The thing is that qualified scientists, even geniuses, can be totally nuts. It's the community that counts, not the authority of the scientists in his own field, much less in any other field.

You'd be committing the "appeal to authority fallacy" if you thought a scientist is authoritative outside of his tiny speciality, and it seems this guy is way, way outside of his speciality, because the origin, evolution and nature of life is inter-disciplinary to say the least. In fact, it eludes religions, philosophy and science, at least to date.

Case Western Univesity, by the way, is the university which created the Freenet ISP phenomenon--not for profit community ISPs that allow people without a lot of money or a sense of community responsability or leftie dislike of for-profit business to access the web "for free", which is to say at the expense of volunteers, donors and paying customers.

Eurekalert is a publisher of press releases with higher standards. This is not to say that many PRs are BS--many legitimate PRs are BS by the time the author, the university PR department and the media get done with them. I used to visit the Eurekalert site frequently to see what was new in scientific research, but Fark and other sites bring me so much news of science and weird science that I don't visit very much any more. In other words, Eurekalert isn't infallible either and publishes a number of BS press releases, albeit generally not really cranky stuff.

This guy's paper has several hallmarks of the crank:

1) really outrageously overblown ambition (the Meaning of Life? really? from a biologist? they spend most of their lives making it impossible to even try to define life;
2) claims that are difficult or impossible to evaluate or confirm, even if you are an expert in the field
3) a claim your theory explains EVERYTHING
4) a completely made up language that is neither a natural language (like English) nor the official jargon of the field (like the terminology of biology, for example).

There are lists of other signs that you are dealing with cranks which you can find on the web, but these are key warning signs, along with a scientist publishing outside of the official peer-reviewed journals of his field. Outside of a small number of fellow experts, even scientists and scientific editors simply can't evaluate papers well. They don't have the expertise or even the instincts to distinguish between BS and genius in unknown or unfamiliar lands

Sorry. I have to make the "screw loose" gesture now. I concur with the article's assessment:

"Nobody who's read the paper seems entirely sure whether it's a hoax, an eccentric intellectual noodle, or an unfortunate symptom of mental illness. But one thing seems certain: It isn't science."

Nope, it's all garbage. If you have to publish a two-page glossary of invented terms to allow mere mortals to understand your paper, you're pushing a crock of shiat.

See kids, this is why you don't do LSD while in college. 30 years later you get hit with flashbacks.

kingoomieiii: Nope, it's all garbage. If you have to publish a two-page glossary of invented terms to allow mere mortals to understand your paper, you're pushing a crock of shiat.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
this is so not news ....
this is what happens when you start to wear your underpants on your head and no one stops you

The belief that everything is alive is called "Vitalism" or "Pan-vitalism" or "pantheism" if you believe that everything is not only alive, but a god or God. I had an uncle by marriage who was a proponent of this philosophy or belief. I can't see what definition of life would allow a rock to be "alive". Dynamic, yes, on a geological time scale, all things change and evolve. When the Earth was born there were only about 12 minerals known to geologists and astronomers, but there are thousands today. The Earth has certainly changed and evolved, possibly in cyclic ways that resemble the cycles of life, but aren't life to my mind.

The articles I have seen on this odd paper mention James Lovelock. James Lovelock and friends (Lynn Margolis, notably) proposed that the Earth forms a system of system which is self-regulating and thus analogous to a living organism. This is called the Gaia Hypothesis. It has found fans among geologists because it explains the difficult and embarrassing amount of order in the geological record--geologist find it embarrassing, for example, that the atmosphere continues to have relatively stable amounts of oxygen and CO2 over the aeons, as if the biological systems of the world were in sync with and stablizing the geological processes.

In the weak form of the Gaia Hypothesis, the dynamic geological and biological processes are in equilibrium. In the strong form, the Gaia Hypothesis is more like the Hippie version or Avatar--Mother Earth is alive, if not sentient, and the Earth and everything in it are her living embodiment.

James Lovelock invented some very important machines for measuing small quantities of atmospheric gas, and he has been a severe critic of human hubris--he believes that Gaia will punish us severely for disrupting her health, or else be killed by us. He regards humans as a sort of infection that has failed to play the game with the giant organism that is Gaia. We can kill Gaia, Gaia can kill us, the only way for us both to survive is for us to become symbiotic rather than a disease, and he's a bit pessimistic about that. He doesn't think we are that good, wise or clever.

The name Gaia was suggested by a friend of his, writer William Golding, author of the Lord of the Flies, another noted pessimist whose view of human nature is in line with the Roman Catholic Church's theology on original sin and Old School Toryism or Conservatism than Whig optimism.

Although the hippies who have embraced (and misinterpreted) Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis are mostly lefties and environmentalists, Lovelock is more of an old-fashioned British lover of the countryside. He's appalled by modern economics and politics, but more from the reactionary side than the progressive side of the spectrum. He's more in sync with people like Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace and Defender of the Canadian Forest Industry.

Lovelock is, for example, one of many British "environmentalists" who are proponents of the nuclear industry. They don't believe that nuclear power (or arms, perhaps) are pure evil incarnate. They believe that they are the only realistic way out of our impasse in the short term. George Monbiot, although a genuine leftie who once tried to make a citizen's arrest of George W. Bush, Jr., is of the same mind. He is skeptical about wind farms and solar panels, but in favour of good insulation and nuclear power in the foreseeable future.

Not every believer in climate change and global warming is a stereotypical liberal hippie commie. These people care about the environment but are more conservative in a Burkean sense of regarding the environment as a legacy of the past that we must pass on to future generations.

All in all, even comparing the author of this paper to Lovelock, who is a genuine scientist and a maverick and possibly a reactionary so romantic and old-fashioned that he wanders around the circle into leftist and progressive ideas, is going too far. Lovelock is Sir Isaac Newton compared to the stuff in this paper. The Gaia Hypothesis is a fundamental doctrine of science compared to this stuff. Controversial, yes, but so is evolution and Deep Time--that doesn't mean that it isn't as solid as the Rock of Ages to mainstream scientists.

Well, at least loonies make life interesting. Perhaps he is on to something valuable. Many nutters were on to something. Sir Isaac Newton may have spent most of his life after his Twenties trying to figure out the date of the Apocalypse and the Second Coming, but he was on to something in physics (several things, in fact). Mahy great scientists have been hopelessly naive in religious, political or mystical matters. Every crank can point to mavericks who make Sir Fred Hoyle look timid. Mavericks and scientific loonies.

"It's a funny old world", as Dame Thatcher put it. She ought to know. She unleashed Viscount Monckton on us.

In 100 years when we prove his theory to be true he'll come back from the dead and have the last laugh.

Friskya: We already know the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Re-submit this when he can provide the question.

What is 7 x 6?

it all has to do with energy-spirit things he calls gyres

Of course. They gyre and gimble in the wabe.

After the conservative fundies get through with this guy for the hubris to claim he's found God, the liberal elite will have their turn whacking him for his hubris for his academic grandiosity.

I'm not saying it's time cubes, but it's time cubes

Gyres? He's basing all this on gyres? The authoritative work on gyres was done over twenty years ago. They are the basis for creation, especially in the Fugue. Certainly, Shadwell knew that to trespass on the rapturous ground of the Gyre would prove cataclysmic. He was all that rarefied region, and its makers, despised: he was Corruption. If Shadwell entered the Gyre, the world would end.

brantgoose: They don't have the expertise or even the instincts to distinguish between BS and genius in unknown or unfamiliar lands

If you can think about it, this makes sense. If it is incomprehensible, you really have no way of knowing if it is so because you aren't able to comprehend it because it is beyond you, or if it is incomprehensible because it is a load of girl's bollocks.

The line between genius and madness may be a thin one, but it's where 99.9 per cent of humanity lives.

Yeah...I'm gonna go with batshiat insane, that reads like some John Nashy craziness.

The truth about creation is ineffable. This guy tried to eff it, but instead just effed it up.

jaylectricity: In 100 years when we prove his theory to be true he'll come back from the dead and have the last laugh.

Or at the very least be spinning gyrating in his grave.

"How life abides by the second law of thermodynamics yet evolutionarily complexifies and maintains
its intrinsic order is a fundamental mystery in physics, chemistry, and biology."

Aaaaand I stopped reading right there.
Idiot. There are fundy creationists who are embarrassed to whip that mouldering old saw out in a serious argument. It's not even wrong.

Here's a link to the paper:

http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/2/1/1/p df

Sorry, no hyperlink. It's 66 pages of material and 39 pages of references... It seems like he just added the word "gyro" to every scientific term he could find and then tried to explain it.

/gyrolectron? Really?
//he's a nut, but he definitely put some work into earning that title

Surely some revelation is at hand.