boh

962 Words2 Pages

The language of mathematics has been extensively used to describe natural phenomena of the physical sciences in terms of models based on equations. The mathematical language allows logical reasoning over a representation of the physical entities involved in the phenomenon and makes possible to account for the observations made through experimentation.
In designing the mathematical model of a natural phenomenon the first and fundamental step is to define the mathematical variables that play a role in the phenomenon under investigations, according to the goals which the model is built for. For example, to calculate the decay rate of a certain protein, a variable to describe the changes of the protein concentration in the blood can be used. In this case the dynamics of the atoms and the ions is neglected and the information about the folding of the protein itself are lost. The origin of this oversight is related to the basic principle sometimes referred to as the lex parsimoniae most commonly known as the Ockam’s Razor. “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate” in very simple words states that in the description of a phenomenon, the most useful model is the most parsimonious one in terms of elements used. In this regard, following up the above example, it makes little sense to describe the laws governing the forces accounting for the folding of the protein if we are interested in the half-life of the protein and we can estimate its decay rate by fitting a curve to a set of experimental data about the concentration in the blood of that protein.
William of Ockham was a Franciscan monk and logician who lived in the 14th century in a village of the English county of Surrey. At that time the principle of parsimony in describing and ...

... middle of paper ...

...f multi-scale modeling avoiding to point to a specific and well-defined method to deal with this matter. Indeed, while there are methods borrowed from other field (e.g., computational chemistry) that can be used in special cases, a well developed mathematical framework that is general enough to account for the extremely large variety of biological phenomena, is still missing. Nevertheless, an interesting attempt in this respect is given in [45] together with two examples showing how to bridge different single-scale models. Extensive readings, including specific examples, can be found in the above-cited reviews and also in [2][24][26][29][31][39] .
It is worth stressing that the important role that the environment has in the dynamics of complex physics and living systems is not considered in this paper. Therefore the contents of the present refers to closed systems.

Open Document