Evolution: Pendulum Dance Between Laws of Thermodynamics

For years, I have pursued a purely thermodynamic definition of evolution.

My reasoning is informed by the observation that change is independent of domain, process, or the physical laws and behaviors upon which a system is based.  As the science of thermodynamics has itself matured (evolved), the boundaries of its applicable domain have expanded far beyond its original focus on heat.  It is generally accepted that the laws of thermodynamics apply to ANY system in which change occurs, that the laws of thermodynamics are agnostic to energy type or form.  Furthermore, scientists studying information/communication independently discovered laws that match almost perfectly, the laws of thermodynamics.  This mirroring of domains has thrilled logicians, physicists, mathematicians, and cosmologists who are no more and more convinced that information (configuration) and energy are symmetric with respect to change over time.

Even conservatively, the implications of this symmetry are nothing short of profound.  If true, it suggests that one can, for instance, calculate the amount of information it would take to get a certain mass to the moon and back, and it means that one can calculate how much energy it would take to compute the design a moon rocket.  It means that the much vaulted "E" in Einstein's Relativity equation can be exchanged with an "I" for information (with valid results).  It means, at some level, that information is relativistic and that gravity works as a metric of information.  Same goes for the rules and equations that govern quantum dynamics.

And this from an eyes-wide-open anti-post modernist!

At any event, the symmetric relationship between energy and information (at least with regard to change) provides a singular foundation for all of physics, and even perhaps for all of ANY possible physical system (equally applicable to other universes with other rules).

It would seem that thermodynamics would provide a more than solid base from which to define the process that allows for, limits, and possibly demands the (localized) accumulation of complexity – evolution!

The Zeroth and First Laws of Thermodynamics work to shape and parameterize action. Given the particular configuration immediately prior they insure that the next action is always and only the set of those possible actions that together will expend the most energy.  In colloquial terms, things fall down and things fall down as fast and as completely as is possible.  Falling down, is a euphemism for the process of seeking of equilibrium.  If the forces attracting two objects is greater than the forces keeping them apart, they will fall together.  If the forces keeping them apart is greater than the forces attracting them, they will fall apart.  Falling down reduces a system to a more stable state – a state in which less force is pushing because some force was released. Falling down catalyzes the maximum release of energy and results in a configuration of minimum tension.

The Second Law of thermodynamics dictates that all action results in a degradation of energy, or configurationally speaking, a reduction in density or organizational complexity.  Over time the universe becomes cooler, more spread out, and less ordered.

The falling down dictated by the the zeroth and first law result in particular types of chunking determined by a combination of the materials available and the energy reduced.  About a million years after the big bang, the energy and pressures of the big bang had dissipated such that the attractive forces effecting sub-atomic particles were finally stronger than the forces all around them.  The result was a precipitation of matter as hydrogen and helium atoms in plasma.  After a few hundred million years, the mass in these gasses exerted more attractive energy than the much cooler and less dense universe, and precipitated into clumps that became stars.  As the fusion cascade in these first stars radiated their energy out into an expanding and cooling universe, the attractive force of gravity within became greater than the repulsive forces of nuclear reaction and the starts imploded upon themselves with such force as to expel their electrons and precipitate again into all of the other elements.  These heavy elements were drawn by gravity again into a second generation of stars and planets of which earth is but one lonely example.

You will have noticed that each precipitatory event in our cosmological history resulted in a new aggregate class – energy, sub atomic particles, light atoms, stars, heavy atoms, stars and planets, life, sentience, language, culture, science, etc).  The first two laws of thermodynamics dictate the way previously created aggregate objects are combined to form new classes of aggregate objects.  The second law guarantees as a result of the most contemporary precipitation event, a coincidental lowering of energy/configurational density which allows still weaker forces to cause aggregates in the next precipitatory phase.

If you still aren't following me, it is probably because I have not been clear about the fact that the lower environmental energy density that is the result of each precipitatory cycle optimizes the resulting environmental conditions to the effects of the next weaker force or the next less stable configuration.

For instance, the very act of the strong force to create atomic nuclei, lowers the temperature and pressure to such an extent that the weak force and the electromagnetic force can now overcome environmental chaos and cause the formation of atoms in the next precipitatory event.

This ratcheted dance between the laws of thermodynamics is the why of evolution, and results in the layered grammars that sometimes or at least potentially describe ever greater stacked complexities that led to life and us and what might come as a result of our self same actions as the dance continues.

Stepping back to the basic foundation of causality, it is important to be re-reminded that a configuration of any kind always represents the maximum allowable complexity.  In recent years, much has been made of the black hole cosmologies that define the event horizon as the minimum allowable area on which all of the information within the black hole can be written as a one bit thick surface membrane of a sphere.  The actual physical mechanical reason that this black hole event horizon membrane can be described as a lossless "holographic" recording or description or compression of the full contents of the black hole is complex and binds quantum and relativistic physics.  Quantum because the energies are so great structure is reduced to the structural granularity of basic quantum bits.  Relativistic because at this maximally allowable density everything passing the event horizon has reached the speed of light,  freezing time itself… the event horizon effectively holds an informational record of everything that has passed.

The interesting and I think salient aspect of an event horizon is that is always exactly as big as it needs to be to hold all of the bits that have passed through it.  As the black whole attracts and eats up any mass unlucky enough to be within its considerable influence, the event horizon grows by exactly the bits necessary to describe it at the quantum level.

The cosmological community (including Sir Steven Hawking), was at first shocked by the sublime elegance of this theory and then by the audacious and unavoidable implication that black holes, like everything else, are beholding to the laws of thermodynamics.  The theory predicts black hole evaporation!  Seems black holes, like everything else, are entropically bound.  There is no free lunch. The collapse of matter into a black hole results in a degradation of energy and informational configuration, the self same entropy that demands that heat leak from a steam engine, demands that black holes will evaporate and that eventually, when this rate of evaporation exceeds the rate of stuff falling into it, a black whole will get smaller and ultimately, poof, be gone.

This is heady stuff.  The biggest and baddest things in the universe are limited!  But to me, the most profound aspect of this knowledge is not that event horizons can be describes as maximal causal configurations, but that we are shocked by this!  All systems are, at each moment, the maximal allowable configuration by which those forces and those materials can be arranged.  If they could be arranged any tighter, they would have already collapsed into that configuration.

To say this is to understand that time is not separable from configuration.  As Einstein showed, time is physically dependent upon and bounded by the interaction of mass, distance, energy, and change.  Cosmologists use limits to understand the universe.  The maximal warpage of space-time caused by a black hole's density effectively flattens the allowable granular complexity of the configurational grammar  to binary bits held in the minimally allowable physical embodiment.  But, lower energy configurations, configurations like dogs, planets, and the mechanism by which I am attempting to explain this concept, are bounded and limited by the exact same causal rules.

The difference between a black hole horizon and an idea?  Well it has to do with the stacking of grammatical systems (quarks, sub atomic particles, atoms, molecules, proteans, cells, organs, bodies, culture, language, etc.) that allows for complexities greater than the binary bits, the only stuff allowed to pass through an event horizon.  But these stacked grammars that allow us to be us are every bit as restricted to the same maximally allowable configuration rule that minimizes the size of a black hole's event horizon.  In a system configured by a stacked grammar, the minimum complexity rule is enforced at the transition boundary between each two grammatical layers.

Things fall, but only as fast as the stacked grammars that govern causal reality will allow.  This isn't a metaphor, the speed of diffusion, of degradation, of falling down, is always and in all situations, maxed-out.  The exact same physical topology that bounds the size of the a black hole event horizon contributes to the causal binding effecting the rate at which any system can change.  This is because at the deepest causal layer, all systems are bound by relativity and quantum dynamics.  The grammatical layers built successively on top of this lower binding only serve to further influence entropy's relentless race towards heat death.

[to be continued]

Randall Reetz

How Engineers Get Thermodynamics And Information Theory All Wrong

There is probably no other area of higher education where what is taught is so out of step with what is in fact valid. Engineering programs the world over, in the interest of simplicity and practicality, teach thermodynamics and information theory towards practicality and real-world solutions. What could be wrong with that? What is the negative side of practicality?

Well, usually, nothing. In most cases, cutting corners doesn't invert the causal bedrock upon which engineering is based. The field equations used to abstract relativity, do not usurp or demand a reformulation of E=mC^2. Neither do feynman diagrams mess with or disrupt an accurate understanding of quantum electro-dynamics. But in thermodynamics and information theory, the practical methods taught and used by engineers are based on assumptions that have resulted in an almost universal and wholesale misunderstanding of the base meaning and the causality that animates the bedrock of energy and information dynamics.

In thermodynamics, the problem is probably best described by the idea of "the perfect wall". To cut corners, engineers are taught arithmetic tricks that work in the usual atmospherically-dense and energy-conductive environments in which human's live. Unfortunately, these computational short-cuts do far more then introduce the usual errors of computational fidelity, they actually reverse the meaning of thermodynamics as a science. Thermodynamics as a science is about the way systems interact with the systems they are embedded within. But more than that, thermodynamics asserts the absolute necessity and inevitability of interaction and transference of energy that will result from ANY change within or without a system.

It should therefore be obvious that the teaching and use of practical methods that sidestep the central tenet of a field of science will have an unusually strong an adverse effect on the understanding of that science. Whole generations of engineers are being unleashed into the world with an absolutely backwards understanding of the very dynamic that universally informs all other dynamics. This is more than unfortunate. The growing population of scientists and engineers that march forward from universities with a backwards understanding of thermodynamics interferes with progress in all fields of science.

Same can be said of thermodynamics' sister, information theory. Because everything we do is increasingly keyed to progress in computation, the miss-map between the causal truths that inform information theory and the practical methods taught in their stead, may potentially have a much larger and deleterious impact on our potential as a species.

Where thermodynamics dictates the way energy leaks across the spacial dimensions, information theory dictates how information leaks across time. Purists will say that energy and information are equivalent. Ultimately, this is true. So when energy is measured in its more general form, as information, as bits, then information theory also dictates the lossy transfer of energy across time.

Because the two disciplines show how no system exists independent of other systems, we must concern ourselves with how systems are related through this leaking of energy and information. What can be said absolutely about the way information and energy set up directional relationships between systems with regard to space and time?

The Butterfly Effect; Isn't

In the none academic world, causality suffers a different abuse altogether. It is tempting for people to take notions of system interconnectedness to ridiculous and self-defeating extremes. We loose ground when the perfectly valid logic showing why a system can never act in isolation is illogically extrapolated to, "All systems effect all other systems equally". Making exceptions for speed of light (event cone) isolation, it can indeed be shown that all gravitational systems effect all other gravitational systems… the movement of a butterfly in South America will indeed effect (however infinitesimally) a dam in Montana. But if one were to rank, by degree of effect, all of the systems effecting the gravity fields surrounding a dam in Montana, a butterfly in Argentina would be very very low on the list. Even if one is butterfly obsessed, wants to ignore the one dog on the corner who has more mass than all of the butterfly's in the rocky mountains, there are tens of millions of butterflies closer, each of whom's infinitesimal gravitational pull would none the less have a larger causal effect on our poor dam's future.

This particularly populist breed of cause-and-effect miss-mappings is not the focus of my essay. As wacky as pedestrian notions become, they probably can't significantly derail scientific progress to any great degree. But when entire generations of science students are raised on incorrect understandings of basic science, we are all in trouble. This is especially devastating when the topic of delusion is as fundamental to the causal stack as is thermodynamics, energy and information.

"The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

What determines the causal morphology and behavior of the hierarchy of influence (dictated by thermodynamics and information theory)? If we define the shape of causality we define process itself, and by extension, the shape of reality.

Information Theory specifies ways to measure the capacity of a storage matrix and the reliability of a communication channel. But all of it's metrics are agnostic to the meaning encoded and transmitted. Each bit and each bit pattern are treated as equal. Only frequency and order, not meaning, not saliency, not fidelity of representation.

What would you have to fold into or add to information theory and thermodynamics in order to measure meaning and saliency? Is it there already? Are we missing something in our approach to and use of an already semantically robust set of laws and equations?

Several years ago, the mathematician Stephen Wolfram (founder of the maths software "Mathematica") wrote a book called "A New Kind Of Science". It is a dense and repetitive work over twelve hundred pages long. I tried to get through it and gave up. Feels like a giant fractal, built of some obscure philosophy based on fractals. Not feeling OK with my initial critique, I forced myself to come up with a theory, any theory, that said or not, I could attribute to his work. The best I could do was to suppose that Wolfram was trying to say that science had historically used equations to understand the components of nature that could be accurately described by equations, but the really interesting things about nature were iterative, and open ended, they required logical descriptions that required continuous computation. To bad he couldn't have just said that.

At about the same time, the social biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote a book called "Consilience". He argued for a cross-discipline coming-together of the various branches of scientific exploration, a holism, for the advantages of looking at nature (and those who study it) as the one large and interdependent super-system it is.

Of course dynamic, ever changing, "evolving" systems are systems simple equations (calculated once) will never accurately represent. Traditional thermodynamics and information theory engineering maths and methods work best on simple systems that are or can be thought of as repetitive and isolated. The conditions (input energy, output work) might change, but the conditions of the conditions never do. At any sufficiently salient level, real systems are never that well behaved or that removed from their environments or situations.

Real systems are direction of time dependent. It is more than ironic that the one scientific law that defines exactly why causal systems are non-reversible is used primarily by engineers who choose to use it in ways that ignore the direction of time it demands. I can forgive newtonian or relativistic or quantum physicists for ignoring the asymmetry of time… their maths don't require it. But thermodynamicists? Information theorists?

[more to come…]

Randall Reetz