Brain Cells in a Dish Learned to Play Pong. What That Says About Sensory Overload
A dish of brain cells learned Pong (and later Doom) by acting to make its world less surprising. What that might say about loud rooms and sensory overload.
Ryan Collison
Synthesis: Free Energy as the Logic of Becoming
Synthesis: Free Energy as the Master Variable
We've traveled through Gibbs free energy from formula to function—from ΔG = ΔH - TΔS to protein folding, membrane potentials, and the persistence of diamonds.
Now we step back. What does it all mean?
Free energy is not merely a thermodynamic quantity.
Membrane Potential: Gibbs Free Energy Across Barriers
Membrane Potentials: Free Energy Across the Cell
Every neuron maintains a voltage across its membrane—about -70 mV inside relative to outside. This isn't a trivial detail. It's a thermodynamic battery, charged by burning ATP and discharged to send signals.
Membrane potentials store free energy in
Diamonds and Graphite: Thermodynamics vs Kinetics
Your engagement ring should slowly become pencil lead. Thermodynamics says so. Kinetics says not yet, and kinetics has the bigger number.
Phase Transitions: Why Ice Melts at Exactly 0°C
Phase Transitions: When Free Energy Surfaces Cross
Water freezes at 0°C. This seems like a fact about water, but it's really a fact about free energy. At that precise temperature, the free energy curves of ice and liquid water cross. Above, liquid wins. Below, ice wins. At
Protein Folding: Finding the Free Energy Minimum
Protein Folding: Free Energy's Masterpiece
A protein emerges from the ribosome as a linear chain of amino acids. Within milliseconds to seconds, it folds into a precise three-dimensional structure—a shape that determines its function.
This is the protein folding problem, and it's fundamentally a
ATP Hydrolysis: The Gibbs Free Energy That Runs Your Body
Cells don't run on ATP's textbook number. They run on how far they keep ATP from equilibrium.