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.