Rupert Sheldrake on Polarity in Plants

This is really interesting. It's about his plant research in the seventies and eighties which was inspired by reading Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants. 

There is also a substack article he did on this: https://rupertsheldrake.substack.com/p/the-polarity-of-plants.

I looked up Auxin on Wikipedia and it's really complicated. It's actually a group of endogenously synthesized compounds. I was wondering how they made this radioactive tracer version with Carbon-14 and whether or not it was metabolised in the process of "transport". What he was measuring were the counts of (the electronic effects of!) radio-active decay events, and from this inferring the Auxin transport, presumably on the assumption that the only Carbon-14 was that bound in Auxin molecules.

See this 2017 survey article What Has Been Seen Cannot Be Unseen—Detecting Auxin In Vivo by Barbora Pařízková, Markéta Pernisová and Ondřej Novák.

On electricity, water and climate, see YouTubers Testing High School Science. I think that the effect will be the same on leaves as on flowers, simply because the electric field is more intense at the edges. I noticed the other evening that the air temperature at this place near the river in the evening fluctuates wildly at the end of a warm day. I thought at first that was the trees and grasses but whilst listening to this talk I started wondering whether it was also due to the effects of the high-voltage electricity pylons overhead.

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I made this shortly after posting this:

 And when I got home, I found this new article by Gabriele Carcassi: Physical objects are not physical systems. See his recent post on YouTube.

In the past few months, I have been clarifying the starting points I need to create a general theory of states and processes. In particular, I finally clarified for myself the difference between a physical object, something that exists in our world, like a ball attached to a piece of string, and a physical system, which is the abstract entity that ends up being modelled, like a pendulum. One big source of confusion is that the same physical object can correspond to multiple physical systems, and that the same physical system can be made of multiple objects. If one confuses objects with systems, then one opens oneself to a crucial category error.  ...

The same physical object can be part of multiple systems. That is, the way we partition systems is not necessarily along the lines of division of physical objects. Biological systems are very complicated to understand precisely because the same object (e.g. bones) provides different interfaces with different functions (e.g. mechanical support, mineral storage and blood cell production).