The journal Theoretical Biology Forum, edited by Fabrizio Serra, has honored Antonio Lima-de-Faira (1921-2023) in its current issue with two opening remembrances, one from editor-in-chief David Lambert and the second from me. TBF has published many of Antonio’s evolutionary science papers through the decades and David Lambert was an Osaka Group colleague of Antonio’s.
The Osaka Group were structuralists— Brian Goodwin, Vladimir Voeikov, René Thom, Atuhiro Sibatani, among other distinguished scientists. David considered Antonio a hero for his challenges to the existing evolutionary science paradigms and he had a similar experience to mine in lending copies of Antonio’s extraordinary books to friends and never getting them back.
You can read David’s thoughts about Antonio here.
A very interesting article was published recently in Classical and Quantum Gravity by physicists Ahmed Farag Ali and Aneta Wojnar in which they calculate that “space and time are not continuous in the way we imagined but are shaped by toroidal constraints.” Ali and Wojnar say further:
“This equation, simple yet profound, tells us that what we have long regarded as uncertainty is, in fact, structure. The apparent randomness of quantum mechanics is not a defect of nature but a signature of an underlying order. . . .The toroidal motion of hurricanes, the curvature of ocean waves, the patterns of electromagnetic fields, and even the structure of subatomic interactions all reflect this fundamental principle. There is something universal about the spiral, something embedded in the way energy, matter and space evolve. The torus is not merely a shape; it is the embodiment of motion, of evolution, of time itself.”
Antonio would have very much liked Ali & Wojnar’s conclusion. That there is order to the universe.
OSCILLATIONS 