ABSTRACT
Latin is intimidating, and people tend to defer to anything expressed in that venerable language. O f all the errors chiseled into our cultural foundation in Latin, the title o f this chapter is remarkably wrong. The creation o f atoms, the movement o f electrons, molecular energy levels, everything is quantized and h (Plancks constant) represents the energy difference between nearest energy states anywhere in the visible universe. We live by feeding the energy difference between ground state and excited electrons into our system, taming the electron on its way down, so to speak, draining it o f its energy one small package at a time. The sub-atomic world is rough but, unlike bacteria and smaller creatures that are buffeted by Brownian motion, metazoans do not feel the roughness. Macroscopic life feels molecular action as temperature, which seems to be a step-less quantity. The world perceived through our senses seems smooth and continuous so that we have to restore some credit to the idiom that is the title o f this chapter.
