Chapter 2 – How Things Change

Fall of 1973 found me a 16 year old freshman at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC. While I was a science and math geek in high school and I had plans to major in Biology and go to medical school. During orientation, I signed up for classes and got my small stack of computer cards that had my classes listed on them. I thought I had signed up for Introduction to Biology, Freshman English, Being Human in the 20^th Century and Calculus. As I looked at the cards, I noticed that instead of Calculus (MATH 101) I had a class called Foundations of Mathematics (MATH 201) and went to the head of the mathematics department to tell him of the error. J.R. Boyd was like no Texan I had ever known. He was short, bald, never wore boots and smoked unfiltered Camel cigarettes all the time. He was also one of the few non-PhDs at Guilford and had arrived in 1962 to impart mathematical knowledge in a way called the “Moore method.” This is a Socratic teaching style made famous in mathematics by R.L. Moore who taught at the University of Texas. Mr. Boyd told me not to worry about the mistake and he thought MATH 201would be a good fit for me. Only later would I find out that it was Mr. Boyd who had identified me as a math major before I even hit the campus and the “mistaken” MATH 201 class was no mistake at all, He wanted me in that class. MATH 201 was one of the pivotal moments in my academic life and my association with JR Boyd continued until his death, 25 years or so after I was graduated. At a later orientation function I met Dr Rex Adelberger who was new to the school and taking over as the head of (well, actually the only person in) the Physics Department. Between Mr. Boyd and Rex, I forgot about the Biology major, cured myself of medical school and became a math and physics major and lifelong geek. I had no idea that the interactions with JR and Rex would have such a profound effect on my life. It changed so many things about how I thought and put me on a completely different path than what I could have ever imagined.

I bet your could sit down and write your own list of people who have had a great impact on you. These interactions were not something you tried to make happen, but happen they did. Humans interact all the time and if you spent a little time thinking about it you’d figure out that interactions are the most important part of your life. I spoke with someone who had the opportunity to go to the Boca Grande, Florida with her family for the week between Christmas and New Years. Boca Grande is a wonderful island in Southwestern Florida with gorgeous winter weather. What did they think about the trip? They weren’t excited because they didn’t want to spend 5 days with their “dysfunctional” family. It wasn’t the location but the people they were going to interact with that made the biggest impression on them. That’s true for pretty much all of us. Interacting with people can change us. That’s the basis for this chapter; looking at how things change. Here is the only law of the universe that you need to know as everything else derives from it:

Universal Rule of Change (U-ROC):

The only way anything changes is through an interaction.

An interaction is the exchange of something between two (or more) objects.

If the universe was made up of only one thing, there would be no interactions, nothing would ever change and there wouldn’t be a universe. If the things that make up the universe did not interact, there would be no universe. In fact, you can describe the universe is an entity whose sole function is to have things interact. It is through interactions that the entire complicated world we live in today came to exist. It might be hard, initially, to believe that the universe, which seems so complicated, can be expressed in this one simple rule.

This idea is not new and has been expressed by other people throughout the years. In 1714, Gottfried Wilhelm von Liebniz, in his Monadology, said that relation gave rise to substance, not, as Newton had it, the other way around. Because we came to the universe after a lot of the hierarchy had been formed, it appeared that the hierarchy gave rise to the interactions. Scientists spent years peeling back the layers of the universe’s hierarchy to understand how things were put together. Not nearly as much effort was put into trying to figure out how the hierarchy was created. The clearest explanation for this imbalance is that reductionism is much simpler to do so scientist went after problems they could solve. Science was able to find a lot of patterns in the hierarchy, enough to allow them to predict things that were previously unpredictable. Eclipses and the path of projectiles were two early applications of science and predicting the future better than someone else grants a competitive advantage to the predictor. Hence science went down the path of reductionism to figure out how things worked to allow more and better predictions.

We’re not saying that all interactions are equal. Interactions differ depending on where you are in the hierarchy of the universe. At the lowest organizational levels of the universe – elementary particles – the interactions consist of the exchange of a single particle. Electrons interact with other electrons by exchanging a photon. This is the simplest type of interaction in the universe. As you move up the hierarchical levels, the interactions become more complex. Living cells interact by exchanging molecules. Organic molecules form the basis of all living things. Compounds like DNA, RNA and ATP form the basis of all cellular interactions. More complex animals, like dogs, can interact through making sounds. Humans, currently at the top of the organizational hierarchy list, have an almost unlimited number of ways to interact. Our senses form a high level means of interacting. What we call hearing is a series of interactions between the air, the bones in our ear and electrical impulses sent to the brain. We’ve developed forms of interaction based on speech so that talking has nuances to it – irony, parody and sarcasms – which makes human speech a complex and powerful interaction. U-ROC applies at all levels, the only thing that changes are the types of interactions.

Is it “fair” that the universality of U-ROC depends on changing the definition of interaction, based the level of the hierarchy? To some, it seems that there should be one definition of an interaction. In that view, the interactions of the electrons are so different from human interaction that they should be considered entirely different things. Fair enough but consider that it is the universe itself that builds up the hierarchy, which introduces new interactions. With an interaction defined as simply an exchange of something we take advantage of the hierarchy to define what that something actually is. The development of new interactions is at the heart of the universe’s hierarchy and is why the first chapter started with hierarchy. Hierarchy hides the lower levels of interaction which I believes give us free reign to consider the new “higher level” interactions as equivalent to the lower level interactions. It is simply amazing that the universe would take so simple a concept to build up the universe so it makes sense to ask if it can be done this way. We have a ways to go before we can make that claim but first let’s look at how the U-ROC maps onto one of the basic laws of physics.

Since we were mentioning Newton a little while ago, let’s look at Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and how they fit with the universal rule of change:

1. An object at rest remains at rest unless acted upon by a force.

2. An object experiencing a force experiences acceleration.

3. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Let’s see how this maps into the U-ROC. In physics the terms force and interaction are different words for the same idea.

1. The first law says if an object does not interact, nothing changes – the object remains at rest.

2. The second law says that an interaction between a moving object and something else leads to an acceleration (speeding up, slowing down or changing direction are the three ways a moving body can accelerate) which is a change.

3. The third law says that when two things interact, they are both affected by the interaction, a byproduct of the exchange of something.

Newton’s three laws are just a special case of the U-ROC for objects that move. When it comes to moving objects, the only way an object changes speed or direction is if it interacts and that interaction affects the objects that interact.

In the previous chapter, I discussed how things are organized hierarchically and the fact that moving through different levels of the hierarchy introduces additional ways to interact. Let’s spend a little time discussing the relationship between hierarchy and interactions; starting at the lowest levels – elementary particles.

Electrons are very simple. They have only five things you can say about them:

1. Charge (negative 1)

2. Spin (1/2 - don’t ask one half of what - spin is a scientific term associated with angular momentum which, to us humans feels like spinning)

3. Mass (similar to weight for us humans)

4. Location (where is it)

5. Velocity (where it is going)

The limited organization leads to only one way for elementary particles to interact. Not only do they have no feelings but they don’t have a structure like a rock or even liquid or gaseous water. Lack of structure limits them to interactions that consist of the exchange of a single particle. Electrons (and other particles that have a charge) interact by exchanging photons. In fact, at this quantum level, there are only three ways for elementary particles to interact. These are so fundamental they are described as the three fundamental forces. (Remember that force is the physics term for exchanging particles which is the same as interacting.)

1. Electromagnetic – All charged particles interact through the exchange of photons.

2. Weak Nuclear Force – The exchange of W and Z particles account for the weak nuclear force. There are two types of W particles so a total of three particles are responsible for this force. This force is responsible for the nuclear decay which is, in turn, responsible for nuclear reactions.

3. Strong Nuclear Force – Neutrons and protons exchange gluons (8 different ones) for the strong nuclear force. This is the force that keeps the atomic nucleus together. Since all protons in the nucleus are positively charged and repel each, you can imagine that this is a very strong force (hence the name). It takes a lot of force to keep them in the nucleus.

Why is gravity not on this list? We’ll postpone that discussion but suffice it to say that while gravity is well understood at some levels, trying to unify our knowledge of gravity with our knowledge of how elementary particles interact has been a source of frustration. For now, I believe (as do some others) that the force of gravity does not derive from the interactions of particles (some scientists believe gravitons exist, but no one has ever provided experimental evidence of their existence). Gravity is an essential part of the story but we’ll not deal with it just yet.

We are ready to approach the question of how the U-ROC – things change through interaction – lead to the complex universe we see around us. The short answer is – we don’t know exactly how, but there are some ideas how this could happen and we’ll look into those now. First off, is there any reason to think that a simple set of rules for interaction between something like elementary particles could lead to anything approaching complexity? Yes. Stephen Wolfram’s “New Kind of Science” is an unwieldy, over 1,200 pages, tome that shows how simple rules of interaction can do just that. He starts with a type of program called cellular automata. The great thing about cell automata programs is that their results can be expressed visually so you can see what he’s talking about. In his initial work, a cell is a square that can be either black or white. He starts with a line of white squares with a single black square in the middle. He then studies how many sets of interactions (he calls them rules but the tell us how adjacent squares interact) can there be in this simple systems – black and white squares – and found there were exactly 256 sets of rules. Being a computer literate individual, Wolfram wrote a program to start with the initial configuration (one black and the rest white squares) and apply a specific set of rules. Since I can only interact with my immediate neighbors, each of his rules consists of 8 outcomes. As an example, rule 254 is as follows:

If you are a black square

If your two neighbors are black, remain black.

If your left neighbor is black and your right neighbor is white, remain black.

If your left neighbor is white and your right neighbor is black, remain black.

If your left neighbor is white and your right neighbor is white, remain black.

If you are a white square

If your two neighbors are black, turn black.

If your left neighbor is black and your right neighbor is white, turn black.

If your left neighbor is white and your right neighbor is black, turn black.

If your left neighbor is white and your right neighbor is white, remain white.

I have included the pictures of the rule and the results of 10 sets of interactions below.

It seems that a simple set of rules leads to simple behavior so Wolfram thought it would always be this way. Indeed, almost all of the rules lead to patterns - all black (like number 254 above) or all white or lines or checkerboards. Patterns are very important in the grand scheme of things so it is comforting that patterns are part of the outcome. However 10 of the rules exhibited complex behavior defined by non-repeating patterns. Three of them are shown below. The only difference between rules 254 (which yields all black) and these three are the rules of interactions. It’s not clear at the outset why ten

of these rules of interaction yield such a different outcome. It was a complete surprise to Wolfram. Showing that a simple set of interactions yield complex, non-deterministic behavior doesn’t prove that the U-ROC is the basis of the universe’s structure, it is a necessary condition. If the opposite were true, simple rules always lead to simple patterns of behavior, and then we’d be done with this line of reasoning.

I don’t want to underestimate the power of Wolfram’s work. Using a system that has only one descriptive element (black and white) and a simple set of interactions he generated highly complex systems. We previously discussed how simple elementary particles are - photons only have velocity and spin and electrons and protons add mass and charge but are still pretty simple. So we can imagine that elementary particles interacting in simple ways could lead to a complex set of outcomes. Now the number of particles in the universe is almost impossible to imagine. So if only a few black and white squares can lead to complex behavior, the insanely large number of particles interacting should have no problem generating even more complex behavior.

Can anything in the real world support the idea that a simple set of interactions can lead to a complex result? The clearest example comes from embryology. In humans, a single egg and sperm cell merge to form a single cell that then begins to divide. (This division makes up the interaction.) From a single cell, an entire human being is created in just 9 months. There is no over arching blueprint that governs the emergence of a human from a single egg. At every point, the local cell division determines what happens next. Now, as the cells divide and start to specialize, the interactions get more and more complex. But that is the nature of complex systems, as they grow and organize, they build up more levels of hierarchy that contain different interaction methods, which leads to more hierarchy and more interactions. All of this comes from a single cell with no “grand plan.”

I want to spend a little time discussing what it means for elementary particles to interact and look at one of the corollaries of that behavior. In reality, we really don’t understand elementary particle behavior because they are so different from things in our world. Trying to put elementary particle behavior into what is a called our classical world always fails, or leads to paradoxes. However, experimental data indicates that when two particles interact, the exchange another (different) particle. The elementary particle world is neatly divided into particles that “carry” the force (we called them out above when we talked about the three basic forces) and particles that interact using the force particles (electrons, protons, neutrinos, etc.) When two electrons interact via the electro-magnetic force, one electron emits a photon which is absorbed by the second electron and then the second photon emits a photon. As far as we know, there is no way to tell different photons apart so it makes no sense to ask if it is the same photon that is absorbed and emitted. When the second electron absorbs the photon, it adds energy and so is changed. When it emits the photon, it changes energy levels again and may change position in response to the emission. Since there’s not in the description of an electron, there’s not much change going on here. However, as we move up the level of hierarchy interactions will become much more complex and can lead to massive change. A tornado interacting with a house leads to a lot of change in short amount of time but a tornado is a long ways away (hierarchically speaking) from an electron.

Remember how most interactions lead to patterns and only a few lead to complex, random behavior. If you look around, you’ll see that reflected in the world around you. We have a lot of patterns in the universe and some complex behavior. The universe could have started differently, but you’d find that you need that stability in order to consolidate the change that comes from the random behavior. If everything was random, you could never get anything to “stand still” long enough to be anything other than chaos. If everything was a pattern, nothing new would come into being – things like living beings. The universe is built with just the right balance between chaos and patterns to allow the changes to solidify and then build new changes upon them. Daniel Dennett, in his book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, calls this “The Principle of Accumulated Design.” I prefer to describe it as you can always make something better. (It is interesting that you things can only get so bad. We’ll discuss this after we’ve had some time to explore entropy.) As the changes in the universe build up a new level of hierarchy, a stable pattern on interactions forms. From that stable level, new levels of hierarchy can develop, and so one and so on.

East coast white water enthusiasts have a term for this phenomenon, drop and pool. As you go down almost any white water river on the east coast, there are periods where the river runs fast and hard (drop) and periods where the waters deepens and slows (pool). The action is during the drop and the pool (the old saying, still waters run deep comes from this pooling) portion allows you to rest and sort things out for the next drop. While I don’t believe there is any direct connection between the process the river uses to form these drop and pool sections, I am amazed at how much the drop and pool has permeated the universe.

Let’s explore in more detail how this combination of complex interactions and patterns interactions are manifested in the real world.

Chapter 1 – Descriptions and Hierarchy

Around midnight on Dec 15^th, 1973 a Lockheed Super Constellation cargo plane carrying 666 bundles of Canadian Christmas trees, bound for Maiquitia Airport in Caracas, Venezuela, took off from runway 9L, heading east. The weather was clear with visibility of 10 miles and a temperature of 67 degrees. The plane never made it to Caracas. It never made it more than 120 feet in the air and crashed into a parking lot just over a mile from the airport, slid through a number of homes, destroying several of them, destroyed some automobiles and, somewhere along the way, burst into flames. The three crew members were killed along with 6 persons on the ground. (Imagine being awakened from your sleep by a flaming Super Constellation crashing into your house.)

I lived in Hialeah, about 2 miles from the airport, and was home from my first semester of college. Although I suspect the story did not make the national news, it was front page news in the Miami Herald. My buddy Gene (we’ve known each other since 2^nd grade) thought we should do our own crash site investigation. Since I was now partially college educated, it sounded like we had the proper qualifications for crash scene investigators, so off we went. We drove Gene’s Camaro (I didn’t have a car of my own and wouldn’t have one for 4 more years) down to where the police crime scene tape blocked the road. Some folks might have been put off by the yellow tape but we’d never been anywhere near a crash site and we weren’t about to be denied. We turned at the tape, drove down a parallel street and parked on the street. We got out and started walking down the sidewalk, looking for an opening. We didn’t have to go very far before we found a clear path between two houses. Hearts pounding, we walked (we probably thought we were strolling nonchalantly) between them and onto the blocked off street. Trying to look like we were official (or at least as official as two nervous teenagers can look) we surveyed the crash scene.

The plane’s wreckage was gone (it was completely destroyed by impact and fire) but you could see the skid mark of the plane (about 60 feet wide and 500 feet long) and the damage to the houses. (Four were destroyed and several others slightly damaged.) Burnt pieces of paper, part of the flight books the crew carried with them were scattered on the ground. We were a few days past the crash so things were getting back to normal for most of the world - except for the missing people, missing houses, charred papers and skid marks. Birds were singing, people went about their business, the sun was shining (as it usually does in the South Florida winter as that is the dry season) and flights were taking off from the airport. I was still new to flying and to me it was still an adventure. This scene was of adventure gone seriously wrong. What caused this scene? As the plane’s nose left the ground, the 666 unrestrained bundles of Christmas trees were thrown backwards towards the tail, causing the nose to rotate up and the plane to go down. (Restraining straps and cargo nets were generally not used to secure cargo, according to a freelance pilot who had flown this type of airplane.) The crew may have contributed to this problem because of “deficient crew coordination.”

What does it mean to describe something? In the paragraphs above, I tried to describe a crash scene from over 25 years ago. I am still intrigued by the scene and use it as a starting point for a discussion of how we view the world around us. In the case above, I mentioned some of the facts of the event and the scene. I even described a little bit about how I felt. We spend a lot of time as humans describing and categorizing things – both objects and people. We do it so often we don’t even think about it. It seems to come naturally and that’s a pretty good way to describe how we have gone through this learning process. We learned at a young age that nouns stood for things and people, adjectives described color and texture, verbs describe action and adverbs (well some people – seems a minority - learned about adverbs) describe types of actions. Starting when their children are born, parents teach them about the world around them, describing things and helping to associate words with things, actions and feelings. It may take a number of months, but over time most of us learn about the world around us and how to describe it. I want to focus on the descriptions and how they mimic the way the world is organized.

If I was asked to describe myself, how would I start? I could talk about how old I am, how tall I am and other various physical pieces of information. I could talk about where I’m from, where I am going and what I do for a living. In the south, the schools you attended say a lot about you so I might mention my alma mater. I could talk about how I felt – sick or well - and I could talk about how I feel about certain issues – like universal healthcare. In fact, I could go on for a long, long time (too long for anyone else to listen) talking about these things and when I finally bored everyone to tears, I still wouldn’t be anywhere near a full description of myself. Why?

Well I haven’t even begun to tell you about my organs or blood or nerves. Those things that come together to make me who I am. Usually, the only time these parts of me ever come into a discussion is if they aren’t working well. So a description of me when I go to a doctor to review test results yields a much different description of me. And the description doesn’t need to stop there. My organs are made up of cells which are made up of an uncounted number of molecules, the alphabet soup that makes up living things – DNA, RNA, ATP, etc. Those molecules are made up of ever more uncountable elementary particles – electrons, protons, gluons, quarks.

So my description of the events of December 15^th, 1973 doesn’t even begin to account for all of the things that were there or the events that took place. In fact, there was so much going on that on that one day that I could never describe “everything.” From the very start, humans have been interested in this notion of hierarchy and it is such a large part of our existence, we don’t even have to think about it. But while we’re here, I’d like to discuss some notions of hierarchy as we endeavor to explain how it comes about. First off, let me talk at a high level about how the universe’s hierarchy, as shown in the figure below.

____________________________________________________________

\ _____________Quantum particles ____________________________/

\_____________Classical Matter____________________________/

\___________Single Cell Living Matter_____________________/

\___________Multi-cell Living Matter_____________________/

\__________Self Aware Living Matter __________________/

\_________ Intelligent Living Matter__________________/

The picture is drawn as an inverted triangle for a reason. At each level of the hierarchy, there is less matter than the level above it. There are far fewer intelligent things in the universe compared to all living things. (Some might argue there is no intelligent life on earth.) Living matter (by weight) is a tiny fraction of the mass of the entire universe. This is a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics which states that the total organization of the universe decreases over time. It’s worth discussing this a little more.

You experience the consequences of the second law (and see hierarchy in action) if you own a car. Let’s look at how a car comes into existence. First, someone designs the car and decides how the various parts (engine, body, drive train, interior, etc) should fit together. Whole groups of people search the world for the parts and arrange for the parts’ creation and shipment to the assembly line. On the assembly line, people and machines assemble the car from these component parts. If we look at the finished product we see that the car is not just a random assemblage of parts, but the parts have been “organized” into a new hierarchical level. This new organization came into being by using energy from the workers and machines on the assembly line and turned those disparate parts into a car. The second law of thermodynamics says that in order to create a car from the parts, you need to add energy. In this case, the energy came from people and machines that assembled the parts. You not only need to add energy, but the energy has to be applied to specific tasks on the assembly time and in a certain order. The term used for this is “useful” energy. So a car comes into being by applying useful energy to the component parts. Even more amazing, you can do things with a car (drive it) that you can’t do with the individual parts. It’s not too early to note that there is something more going on in the car’s assembly than the traditional notion of hierarchy. Traditionally, we think of hierarchy as a structural notion – like the “Russian Nesting Dolls” – where each doll is a smaller version of the largest one. In the doll hierarchy, each level is the same (only smaller) and the whole group is a play thing for children but doesn’t come close to the hierarchy that we call a car. The car is built up of smaller components but, when complete, exhibits behavior that none of its components exhibited.

Unfortunately, the second law of thermodynamics also comes into play when you drive the shiny new car off of the lot. If you’re lucky, you never experience a collision where “useless” energy is applied to your car and causes things to come apart in an explosive manner. Even without a collision, your car and its components age and stop working. Listen to Car Talk on National Public Radio and you are regaled with people who call to ask why some part of their ancient car no longer works the way it used to. The second law of thermodynamics says that things fall apart over time and you need to put useful energy into fixing them. Going back to Figure 1, the pyramid is inverted because there is a fixed amount of energy in the universe, so in order to organize some part of the universe, some other part must become more disorganized. The sun is a huge nuclear reactor that is becoming increasingly less organized as it burns its fuel to heat the earth. Our gain is due in large part to the sun’s loss.

Just as our car example, the universe is governed by the notion that at each level of the hierarchy in Figure 1 - the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Unlike the Russian nesting doll, as useful energy is added to create the next level of hierarchy, a new function, or capability, comes into being. This new function did not exist in the previous level but notice that the new level of the hierarchy is made up entirely of things from the previous levels. A living thing is made up completely of non-living matter but it is clear to us living things that we’re not the same as non-living things. Each level of the hierarchy “hides” the complexity of the level below it- for the most part – but that lower, hidden level continues to operate. At the level of intelligent life, I deal with other intelligent beings on a certain level. We talk to each other; write letters, e-mails or texts. I do not text my dogs, but I do interact with them but at a different level. I interact with my body by eating and exercising, but I don’t talk to my kidneys.

The notion of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts is hard to study. You might have noticed that there is no theory or law of the creation of life. You would think that something as important as how did life come into existence would have been subject to such extreme study that we’d have some sort of an answer. We don’t and that’s because the problem is so hard that it is beyond our current abilities to answer. I also believe it is related to how science has evolved to solve problems. Traditional science works on the principle of reductionism; you study the whole by taking it apart and observing the pieces. Since the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, reductionism is flawed. You cannot study a living thing and take it apart to see where the life is located. You end up with a lot of dead pieces! Scientists, the keepers of reductionist thought, cannot agree on a definition of life. There are a lot of things are clearly alive and a lot of things that are clearly not alive. Unfortunately, the line between them is not clearly drawn and will be the topic of the third chapter. Having the whole greater than the sum of its parts leads to a hierarchy of organization shown in Figure 1. Hierarchy has both a structure – I am made up of organs that are made up of cells, etc – and an interaction – my interactions with other people are not at all related to the way my organs interact which is not like the way my cells interact. However, they are related and connected which is why the universe is such a wonderfully complex place. In fact, it is the reason we are here to observe that the universe exists at all.

Hierarchy’s ability to “hide” lower level complexity makes it possible to live as humans. If we had to spend our time and energy thinking about making our heart beat or breathing, we’d have no time left to think. Usually, the only time we think about the lower hierarchy levels are when they don’t do what they’re supposed to do. When our blood chemistry goes awry, we know about it. When your appendix goes sour, we know about it. We stop thinking about the higher level things and drop down the hierarchy to take care of business. When ‘fixed” we resume our focus on the higher levels of the hierarchy and “get on with life.”

It also should be noted that as you move “down” into the levels of hierarchy it takes fewer words to describe them. In short, that is a way to describe where you are in the hierarchy and helps define what we mean by something being more organized. Describing your heart requires fewer attributes than describing yourself (or someone else). You don’t need to discuss your heart’s feelings or what it saw last night. It takes even fewer attributes to describe the cells that make up your heart and fewer still for the molecules that make up the cells and the elementary particles that make up your molecules. In fact, when you get down to the lowest known levels of the universal hierarchy; some of the things are downright simplistic. Physicists use the word state to describe the attributes of the things they study (and describe). For example, a photon (which we view as light or heat) has no mass and always travels at the speed of light. Photons are so simple, the only thing you need to describe them in their frequency (which is related to their energy) which, for humans, is related to their color.

Basic elementary particles have a handful of attributes that describe them – spin, charge, mass, speed and direction – but that’s it. The most basic elementary particle are photons which has only two attributes – wavelength and spin. That’s it! Photons have no mass, only travel at the speed of light and have no electrical charge. At the basic levels of our universe’s hierarchy, it doesn’t take much to describe something. There’s also very little structure in a random collection of elementary particles, such as what existed after the “Big Bang.” The wonder of the universe is how things so simple in structure could possibly turn into something as complicated as the world we live in. We’ve gotten the basic idea of organization and hierarchy so let’s move on to how this hierarchy is built.

Gravity, Big Bang and Dark Matter/Energy Revisited

It sure hurts when you think you've come up with some nifty idea and find out you have it almost totally backwards. My last post fits that description pretty well but as I've reqd and thought some more about it, I'm cautiously optimistic I just got it reversed. As I was reminded (more than once) dark matter ONLY interacts via gravity (that's why it is call dark matter). That means that the Big Bang was the emergence of the three forces of matter (weak nuclear, sting nuclear and electromagnetic) that then organized the visible universe.

I'm thinking more about the best way to characterize these "emergent properties" that evolution creates and will write about that next. In any case, my postulation that evolution is not just an integral part of the universe (as opposed to the traditional sense of biological evolution) but evolution is the process that created the universe. Evolution is an organizing process that builds upon previous "successes" - defined by a more organized - to make even more highly organizaed systems. The Physics of Hope is my way of saying that the world can always get better but it can only get so bad.

The End of the Search for the Grand Unified Theory

I've been thinking about gravity a lot lately. (Perhaps it is because I watched Back to the Future recently and when he goes back to the 1950's Marty says the word heavy a lot prompting Dr. Brown to ask if there's something wrong with the Earth's gravity in the future. In any case, I have been aprticular musing over the failure of science to come up with a Grand unified Theory (or Theory of Everything) that unifies the four basic forces - strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electro-magnetic and gravity. The first three have been unified for quite a while and the fourth has been quite a sticking point.

Today I realized that gravity is not one of the basic forces of the universe. Gravity evolved (I'm not sure exactly how forces evolve yet, but stick with me for a while.) from the other three (or there might have been more, some of which disappeared) some time in the early part of the universe. That makes gravity what some term an emergent property of the universe. other emergent properties are life and intelligence. Life emerged (or evolved) from non-life. We don't completely understand how that happened or how awareness or intelligence evolved. I suspect it is because these are not easily modeled events (not continuous and not linear) so need to be attacked in some other ways.

What evidence is there that gravity evolved? I see three:

1. The amount of dark matter greatly exceeds the amount of matter. Before there was gravity, there was just stuff - elementary particles, I suspect. Through the interactions of elementary particles, gravity evolved as a new "force" and proceeded to "organize" the universe. (I'm struggling with the language here since it isn't clear what gravity did to the stuff to make matter so I refer to it as organize. Similarly, life emerge red on the Earth and started organizing itself.) With emergent properties, the "universe" affected by this new property is a subset of the original universe. For example, the number of living things in the solar system (measured by mass) is a small percentage of the entire mass of the universe. Measurements show that dark matter is much more prevalent than matter that was effected by gravity. We would also see that dark matter would not be effected by gravity, but may have some other properties in common with gravitational matter (like quantum properties).

2. The pace of evolution increases by about an order of magnitude once the emergent property is entrenched. I don't have the data, but I'd bet that the time create galaxies and solar system is an order of magnitude shorter than the previous (non-gravitational) epoch.

3. Some gravitational models approach a singularity as the model gets closer to the "Big Bang." If gravity did not exist at the Big Bang, then the singularity is eliminated.

If there's anything to this evolving gravity model, then we should find evidence of a time in the universe' life where gravity did not exist. I'm not sure yet how to do that, but perhaps someone smarter than me can come up with an experiment or observation to investigate.

The corollary the gravity as an evolved force is that there is no grand unified theory to discover. Gravity is not one of the basic forces but evolved from them so just like there is no grand unified theory of life/non-life, there is no grand unified theory of the three basic forces and gravity. It would be illuminating to understand how gravity could emerge or evolve from the other forces. I certainly see some similarities (like an inverse-square power law) but we're not good at understanding evolutionary processes at this time. That gives me something to think about this week.

Evoloution - Directed Change

The infinite monkey theory states that a monkey (or a group of monkeys, is the way I heard it) typing on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will type out any specific piece of literature at some time. Some people have used this as a metaphor of evolution but I want to say that it is not even close to evolution. A monkey or a computer generating random letters (which is equivalent and not so hard on the monkey) is generating independent events, by the very definition of random. However, you’ll have a hard time (it may be impossible) finding a sequence of events in the universe that are independent. Some things are more independent than others; but every interaction changes the things that interact so the next interaction depends on the previous one. We tend to ignore the dependency if it is small but this is a convenience of science or mathematics to make the computations easier. I submit that random change by itself would be a pretty uninteresting thing and it isn’t obvious that random change would be much more interesting than no change at all.

As another example, consider the random walk. It is described as a drunken person who needs to hold on to lamp post to steady him self. (It’s always a guy, never a drunk co-ed from some party school. Oh, the indignity of it all!) He wants to go home but is too incapacitated to see where he’s going so he takes his steps at random. This turns into a stagger where the steps go away from and back towards lamppost but over time he moves away from the post but probably never gets home without some help.. We can accomplish the same thing (and eliminate the inherent political incorrectness) by replacing the drunk with a sober person (or even a robot) who decides which direction to move by tossing a dice. This notion of random, independent events leads to a universe where random things happen. Clearly that is not the universe we live in. There appears to be something “driving” the universe towards some place or something. It clearly is not random! So what is going on here?

As we discussed before, the way things change is through interactions and these interactions constitute a force. In the elementary particle world, these forces wither attract or repel the other particle. Nothing more and nothing less is going on here. What a simple way to put a universe together. But how on earth could such a simple set of rules create the complicated universe we see around us? Let’s see if we can look into this a little more. First off, let’s note that no one will ever be sure how it came to be that the universe was created. Volumes upon volumes of writing and speeches have been made trying to decide what I believe is a truly un-decidable issue. (It’s one of the differences between science and religion that I’ll discuss in a later post.) I have come up with four things that exist in the universe that have lead to it evolve from its initial state to the current state we’re in:

1. The universe is made up of individual objects. It is not an amorphous blob of protoplasm. These individual objects range from sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules, rocks, elements, gases, viruses, bacterium, plants and animals - all the way through humans. This is not to imply that humans are the reason the universe was created but we are one of the most complex objects the universe has created to date. We’re all inter-related and inter-connected and dependent on other objects for existence. You’ll also notice a hierarchy within objects – we have sub-atomic particles that make up atoms which make up molecules, etc. One of the most fascinating things about this hierarchy is how the individual-ness of objects get hidden as they come together to make a more complex object. For example, when you are looking at a piece of gold, you do not need to know how the individual gold atoms join into a crystal structure to make a piece of gold large enough for you to see. You need not consider that the gold atoms are made up of neutrons, protons and electrons. We even see this sort of behavior when people get together ad act as a group. I believe this phenomenon is related the item 3, below, and I’ll deal with this phenomenon in a later post.

2. Objects change thorough an interaction and these interactions are the embodiment of forces. In the case of physics, there are four basic forces that make up all forces known to us – weak nuclear force, strong nuclear force, electro-magnetic force and gravity. When an electron and proton (which are opposite charges) exchange a proton, they are attracted to each other. That attraction is the electro-magnetic force.

3. Forces lead to attraction or repulsion and define the notion of entropy. Hence interactions are not just random events, but the forces of nature (and their corresponding biological and cultural forces) in some sense guide the direction of interactions. It is this sense of guiding that we’ll spend some time discussing. I find it fascinating that there are four basic forces of nature and three of them are attractive and only one of them is repulsive. (Actually, only part of one of the four is repulsive – the like charges repel portion of the electro-magnetic force,) Having more attraction than repulsion makes it seem more likely that things arrange themselves into groups of objects. The forces of nature are also hierarchical in their range. Gravity seems to apply no matter how far apart two objects are as does the electro-magnetic force. However, the strong nuclear force operates in the range of nano-meters and the weak-nuclear force on the order of 1/100 of a nano- meter. It follows that there should be a hierarchy in the way objects gather together and the whole is more than the sum of the parts. (More on this in a later post.) Forces and interactions also give us the ability to define "progress", which we’ll also discuss more later on.

4. The outcome of an interaction is a change in the state of an object which directly relates to the next interaction. This is the notion of feedback. A lot of work has been done for interactions that are independent. For example, when you are trying to calculate probabilities of heads coming up when you flip a coin, one of the assumptions you make is that the result from one coin flip does not affect the next coin flip. A sI mentioned above, there is no such thing as complete independence, one coin flip changes the coin and hence the next flip is different from the next. However, the change is very small and seems like it could be ignored for most of these calculations. Therefore, independence is merely one side of the feedback continuum. On one end is complete independence and on the other is complete dependency. Nothing is ever one of these extremes, but everything is somewhere in between.

Independent ------------------------------------------àDependent

A system set up with these four characteristics evolves. Evolution has gotten a bad rap in religious fields so I want to take a few moments to address evolution. In the current press, evolution is identified with biological evolution and, specifically, that evolution is the process invoked that allowed apes to evolve into humans. First off, I want to keep in the mode of Dennett and make sure that every time we refer to the process of evolution we remind ourselves that it is a forward-looking process and it has no pre-ordained destination. When you say humans descended from apes it leads one to the conclusion that there was a pathway the apes followed in becoming human. That is not at all what we mean by evolution! Apes evolved and humans are one of the things along the path. More than likely, there were other paths (dead ends) that apes took during their evolutionary journey. As Dennett points out, evolution does not know where it is going. The evolution we describe above is just a process and can be applied to many different systems. In this way of thinking, evolution is a Theory along the lines of the Theory of Gravity and the Theory of Quantum Mechanics. It is not just an idea with no facts to support it. It is supported by an incredible body of evidence. (See the April 2007 National Geographic for a detailed report on the evidence supporting biological evolution.) Evolution is also supported in non-biological studies – physical and cultural. In short, to deny evolution is to participate in what I call willful ignorance. [Ignorance is a part of life. There are many more things we don’t know than we know. However, to purposefully ignore factual evidence is something that should be outlawed. It leads to a number of corollaries but the biggest problem I have with willful ignorance is that if you can ignore some facts because they do not fit with what you want the world to be, then you can be lead to ignore other facts. In short, you can more easily taken advantage of by those who can use your willful ignorance against you. I hope to get back to willful ignorance at a later date.]

I want to concentrate on the idea that evolution is not just a biological or social idea, but the very fabric of the universe. Biological evolution is a special case. Now, as we’ll discuss later on, science cannot explain how evolution lead to life on the earth. That doesn’t mean evolution is not a valid theory, it just means there is a lot to discover about the evolutionary process. Science has not fully explained how human life evolved from lower primates. That does not mean evolution is “wrong,” but it certainly indicates a lot more work is necessary in biological evolution. A better question to ask the scientists, “How did life come to be?” As hard as it might be to explain how primates evolved into humans, we are much further away from a reasonable explanation of how life came into existence. There have been some early experiments where a primordial broth was put into a flask and electrical sparks shot into it. These experiments showed that some complex molecules could be created from simpler compounds but we’re nowhere close to figuring out the chain of events that lead to the creation of RNA/DNA and the associated life that came into being.

Is it true that simple rules can lead to complex behavior? The simple answer is yes. There has been increased interest in the study of complexity in recent years but I believe the first hint of simple rules leading to a complex system was done by the German mathematician Georg Cantor in late 1800s. He came up with a set of simple rules as follows:

1. Start with an inch long line segment.

a. 0 .-------------------------------------.1

2. Remove all the points between 1/3 and 2/3.

a. 0.--------.1/3 2/3.-----------.1

b. Now we have two intervals, each 1/3 of an inch long so the total length of the intervals (when you add the segment lengths together) is 2/3^rd.

3. Next remove two line segments, between 1/9^th and 2/9^th and 7/9^th and 8/9^th.

a. 0.--.1/9 2/9.---.1/3 2/3.---.7/9 8/9.---.1

b. Now we have four segments, each 1/9^th of an inch long so the total length of intervals is 4/9^th.

Continue this process forever, [Cantor did a lot of work defining what is meant by infinity which, while fascinating to mathematicians, is a little impenetrable. David Foster Wallace has written a magnificent little book on infinity, called “Everything and More,” which goes into enough detail to help you understand how truly amazing and difficult it is to get your arms around infinity. ] When you are done you have what is now known as the Cantor Set. We had a very simple rule above,” remove the middle third from the line segment.” What’s left has some remarkable properties:

· The “total” length of the line segment is zero.

a. We started with a line of length one inch. At the first step we removed a segment of length 1/3, at the second step we removed a segment of length 1/9, etc. If you add up the length of the removed segments, it adds up to 1 inch. So what’s left has length zero. However, there are still an infinite number of points (all of the end points of the intervals we removed) like 0, 1/9, 2/9, 1/3. etc.

· Between any two points in this set there are an infinite number of points but there is also a non-zero “gap” between any two points. The mathematical term is that the Cantor set is totally disconnected. No point is “close” to any other point.

Wolfram in his book, "A New Kind of Science," has an enormous number of examples of simple rules leading to complex behavior.

Not much work was done in trying to understand complex behavior in this way (simple rules leading to complex behavior) until the 20^th century. Some of early understanding was done by Edward Lorenz, who was trying to understand why his weather model behaved so strangely when he changed some of the inputs. This lead to a whole new branch of mathematics now referred to as chaos theory. Benoit Mandlebrot did a lot of the work in chaos theory, applying chaos theory to a number of problems, most recently Economics in his book - The (Mis)Behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward . Stephen Wolfram has opened up a new way of analysis in his book, “A New Kind of Science.” He explores (in over a thousand pages) in great detail how simple rules for interaction can lead to complex behavior. We’re now seeing this work spreading to other areas of study. A recent National Geographic article on swarming talks about ants and ant colonies. “Ants aren’t smart. Ant colonies are” says Deborah M. Gordon in this article. The intelligence of the colony comes from “the collective abilities of such animals – none of which grasps the bug picture.” When handling the problem of job allocation, “Ants communicate by touch and smell. When one ant bumps into another, it sniffs with its antennae to find out if the other belongs to the same nest and where it has been working.” Communication is just another way of interaction so by “dumb” individuals interacting with each other, the entire colony can become intelligent. This also looks like a good model to describe humans. We’re made up of cells, none of which are smart. Even the brain cells are not smart as individuals. It is ONLY when they interact and communicate that intelligence comes into existence. So not only can simple rules for interactions and communications lead to complex behavior, they also lead to intelligence.

The power of these evolutionary systems is what Dennett calls “The Principle of Accumulated Design.” I prefer to talk about the idea that things can only get so bad but there is no limit to how good things can get. A few examples are in order:

Example 1: Microprocessors

You might not believe it (depending on your age) but there was a time when appliances and phone did not have microprocessors. In fact, microprocessors didn’t exist at all! The first microprocessors were slow as molasses compared to today’s computers but, amazingly, the technology behind microprocessors has remained steady over the past 50 years. What engineers have been able to do is continually improve the process by which the chips are made. In the 1960s, Gordon Moore (co-founder of Intel) made the observation that microprocessor speeds doubled about every 2 years. Considering how poor most predictions go, this one has been quite accurate. The reason it is amazing that the doubling has remained at 2 years is that to double the speed of a processor takes on the order of 4 times as much work. This is a great example of how engineers can take advances two years ago and use them to advance the technology at a an ever increasing pace.

Example 2: Frontal Lobe

I just finished a book, “Stumbling upon Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert. It has a lot of things in common with the Physics of Hope, from a psychological point of view. Some psychological experiments show that the frontal lobe of the brain is involved in thinking about the future. People who have had their frontal lobes damaged cannot think about the future. Gilbert goes into some detail on the ability to think about the future and how it developed. I’ll let you read his book for the details but one of the things I took umbrage to in his writing was that it made it appear as if evolution “caused” the frontal lobe to develop. As mentioned above, evolution is not forward thinking and does not cause anything to happen. Things happen and interact and they lead to new things that are useful and increase survivability.

I’ll take some time in the next post to go after the notion of progress, since it seems to flow from evolution. However, progress will mean different things at different levels of the evolutionary chain. What is progress for the atomic world is definitely not what applies to the biological or cultural world. Just be clear, while there appears to be a direction to evolution, it is an illusion, just like time is an illusion. There are forces directing the evolutionary process, but while the forces shape the outcome, the outcome is not pre-ordained at all – remember the non-computability of a feedback system.