by Tuesday 1 Replies latest jw friends
This is from the Falling In Truth book I read a while back (looks like it's offline now due to an actual paperback version coming out) but there's mention of an expiriment in which some sort of atom when exposed to light turned into an amino acid. I'm looking for the details of this expiriment, you know name of the professor who performed it, the element of the atom, when it was performed, where and so forth. Any help would be really great.
Thanks all!
The experiment you are probably thinking of was performed in the labs at Cornell University in the 1950s by Stanley Miller and his advisor Harold Urey, in which they filled glass vessels with the gases which made up the atmosphere of the early Earth, and subjected them to an electrical spark to simulate the lightning which would have been common (and which is visible in the clouds of Jupiter), and the UV radiation from the sun. After several hours, a rich collection of complex proteins and nucleic acids formed. These are considered to be the building blocks of life, and it is generally considered that if the experiment were allowed to continue for several hundred, or several thousand years, these compounds might have given rise to actual life. Of course, in the early Earth, the experiment DID continue for thousands of years. This was commented on in the book "Cosmos", in the chapter "One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue", and is demonstrated on the video of that chapter.
