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A New Physics Theory of Life (2014)

DigitalNoumena 3y ago
And a follow up from a few years later: https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-theory-of-life-20170726/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-t...
galenmarchetti 3y ago
This is one of my favorite threads of theoretical physics. An entropy modeling of life. The article says it "underlies rather than replaces" Darwinian evolution but I'm not sure that's necessarily the case. Sure general relativity "underlies rather than replaces" Newtonian gravity, but honestly, the understanding of GR gravity does "replace" a pure Newtonian understanding. Darwinian evolution focuses on survival pressures to force natural selection. An entropic basis for evolution can explain things other than survival pressures; evolution can occur on a basis that rather than "improving survivability" it simply is a more functional expression of entropic drive. How would this change how how we view evolution? It would be massive and perhaps explain a lot of the oddities in the evolution of very complex features where full functionality and marked increase in survivability is very delayed... Would love to see further research along these lines
- mannykannot 3y ago
  Darwinian evolution explains how self-replicating entities can evolve into the sort of life we see around us today, but it does not explain how those self-replicating entities got that way in the first place. It is not clear to me from the article, however, that this theory goes so far as to explain the latter, either. It seems to be saying that if you take something like what we believe the primordial earth was like, then one might expect life to emerge, but it does not seem to have suggested specific processes leading to that outcome. Nor does the article give any example of how it has led to a satisfactory non-Darwinian explanation of an allegedly problematic case of evolution. If that has changed since the article's publication in 2014, I would be very interested in hearing about it.
  - DigitalNoumena 3y ago
    Indeed these are normative claims, not descriptive. The emergence of life is is an extremly complex stochastic process, and likely impossible to describe. However, it does seem plausible that if a) high dissipative systems are more likely to perdure in time given the 2nd law, b) self-replication enhances the global entropic dissipation of a category of systems (because there are more) and c) the process of developing such a system is easier done by replication than by the same evolutionary pathway that led to the appearance of said system in the first place, then given enough time a self-replicating system MUST appear. I would like to see a formalisation of c) though, my formulation is quite tenuous. I don't see why it would have to lead to a non-Darwinian explanation of evolution. As has been said by in the parent comment, survivability might just be a high-level manifestation of entropic drive of self-replicating systems. It's remarkable that this is a claim that can be falsified, whereas Darwinian evolution, well..
    - mannykannot 3y ago
      > then given enough time a self-replicating system MUST appear. The cause "given enough time" seems to leave the questions of how probable it is, and how widespread a phenomenon it would be, wide open. > I don't see why it would have to lead to a non-Darwinian explanation of evolution. To be clear, I don't think it does, and I don't read galenmarchetti as going that far, either. > It's remarkable that this [survivability might just be a high-level manifestation of entropic drive of self-replicating systems] is a claim that can be falsified. Can it be falsified? It seems a rather broad claim, and it is unclear to me that the falsification of England's theory would rule out some other theory succeeding.
      - DigitalNoumena 3y ago
        Agree. I cannot comment on how probable or how widespread, but only that it is possible, and in fact it is arguably a certainty based on the premises above. Now if entropy was the only driver then self-replicating systems would be the norm. But alas, the Fermi paradox. I think we are asking too much. Could it be falsified? I think if you could show that natural selection led to the survival of less dissipative life forms then you could claim falsification.
- DigitalNoumena 3y ago
  Quoting England: > I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon. I think this is exactly alligned with your Newtonian-GR analogy.
dcre 3y ago
Enjoyable read — would be nice to have 2014 in the title, it's easy to miss. This[0] is a nice writeup from 2019 that does a better job of connecting England's work to contemporary complexity theorists like Stuart Kauffman. [0]: https://qz.com/1539551/is-the-universe-pro-life-the-fermi-paradox-can-help-explain https://qz.com/1539551/is-the-universe-pro-life-the-fermi-pa...
KhoomeiK 3y ago
For those who are unaware, this is the same worldview that underlies e/acc thought: https://effectiveaccelerationism.substack.com/p/repost-notes-on-eacc-principles-and https://effectiveaccelerationism.substack.com/p/repost-notes... TLDR: the universe's telos is entropy increase, and thus its emergent structures like life, intelligence, and capitalism favor entropic acceleration
- skybrian 3y ago
  I thought e/acc was some kind of in-joke or hoax? Does anyone really believe that stuff? This anonymous Substack isn't particularly convincing.
- yedava 3y ago
  It's interesting to see how new religions are born after old religions are found wanting. Whereas earlier we had a God overseeing Earth, we now have Teleological Universe that ordains capitalism. But just like old religion, the new religion too works purely out of wishful thinking and not on evidence. In a Universe that favors capitalism, you would think there would be plenty of evidence of a few entities exploiting the rest to drive entropy maximization. Instead what we see is that life is scarce, so scarce that we can't even be sure that there is other life in the Universe. Where are the Universe's capitalistic overlords who can make us pee in bottles lest we waste precious time maximizing entropy generation?
  - mikhailfranco 3y ago
    There is sense in which the core essence of capitalism is derivable from the entropic laws of nature. Consider an active entity with a finite lifetime (e.g. child, factory). A production function can be defined as the net balance of flows in/out of the entity. This could be resources, energy, money. As time progresses after t=0 (pregnancy, project plan), the production curve starts off negative (even a self-employed craftsman has to buy tools), perhaps it dips more negative (debt, nurture/education). Eventually the curve slopes upward and crosses the breakeven point. Growth slows, the curve reaches a maximum positive value, then falls asymptotically toward zero, maybe going a little negative, before being truncated (death, scrap - even funerals and demolition cost money). The net contribution is the area under the curve. Resources have to be invested before there can be any benefit. The fact of any final net positive contribution is uncertain at the outset.
xipho 3y ago
Some weeks ago I wrote down some ideas that "feel" like this after watching Feynman https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/fml.html#5 https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/fml.html#5, but before I read this (or maybe I did read this, and it's all just latent thought, who knows). What the hell, I'll share them here- * Life "obviously" evolves where heat/energy is isolated into packets at some (many) levels * What is the F's 3 gear problem with respect to life? * The origin of life as a heat-management problem, with time-reversibility, sensu the video. * Life evolves in some time-reversible (mostly isolated) system that allows energy back and forth, a "DNA molecule" separating, and joing back, and separating, and joining back (until there is a little moment of chaos, and it doesn't separate, or come back, because the process is interrupted), at this point systems that can manage heat, i.e. shunt energy packets away, can prevent "mutations", at just the right time, so that they continue to go back and forth, separate the DNA, bring it back (time reversable). * "Shunting energy away" -> moving chaos to another place * Life is irreversible, therefor it must be a "machine" that shunts energy away * In as much as the collective Earth/Gaia "learns" to shunt energy away, then it will become collectively "alive" * We are at the point where we need to shunt Energy away, therefor the Earth is "Alive" * The earth / heat - at some point the finned shaft sensu F has to break through to space, to let the heat "out" * Why are trees? Yes this is a complete sentence. I.e. if there is some "fractalness"/"modularity" to earth, then this heat managing problem should repeat at many different levels. What are the "cold" counterparts to trees? If the gear is a tree, then what is the "fin"? How does the tree gear energy move back to the fin?
baerrie 3y ago
Prigogine’s original work on dissipative structures seems to have already “proved” this as much as this scientist. They both are hindered by the speculative nature of any abiogenetic theory, we cannot go back to the birth of life and prove anything
- bmitc 3y ago
  I have also not understood why this theory gets solely ascribed to England instead of Prigogine and others. Is England even working on this stuff anymore? He left MIT and is a machine learning scientist at a massive pharmaceutical company now.
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    The follow-up article traves the history from Prigogine. https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-theory-of-life-20170726/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-t... It says that England made more meaningful contributions to the biological aspect.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  I'm hoping that England did some new math, and didn't just rediscover lost work. That's in the paper, not the article. The rest of the article is physicists making ill-informed statements about biology they don't understand. The conceptual model isn't novel, it's rather standard to students of evolution and entropy. But the specific concrete mathematical-physical model of how light becomes life is incredibly important, but up to the experts to validate and product in experiment.
dang 3y ago
Related: A New Physics Theory of Life (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33203733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33203733 - Oct 2022 (1 comment) A New Physics Theory of Life (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19453946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19453946 - March 2019 (1 comment) First Support for a Physics Theory of Life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15770011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15770011 - Nov 2017 (18 comments) First Support for a Physics Theory of Life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14858250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14858250 - July 2017 (66 comments) A new theory sheds light on the emergence of life’s complexity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14831747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14831747 - July 2017 (35 comments) A New Physics Theory of Life (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13103215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13103215 - Dec 2016 (31 comments) A New Thermodynamics Theory of the Origin of Life (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10859691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10859691 - Jan 2016 (2 comments) A New Physics Theory of Life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8750630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8750630 - Dec 2014 (94 comments) A New Thermodynamics Theory of the Origin of Life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8733759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8733759 - Dec 2014 (1 comment)
jug 3y ago
So it's like how you inevitably tend to end up with tangled headphone cords even if you swear you never tangle them yourself and they're just "lying" there? The reason behind it is also a simple matter of probability. It's more probable that they'll tangle than untangle, so eventually they do. Even with only small oscillations or disturbances, like here. Only this is on a microscopic level where eventually, particles, through probability, find _their_ configurations that disperse energy (settling where they "want" to be per thermodynamics) and in the process form more bonds among the particles. Maybe a tiny human diving in to that microcosmos might have found that annoying too! Who would've known, annoying bunched up cords and wires might have carried a hint to bunched up complex molecules and genesis itself!
throwaway2562 3y ago
This is not a new idea, but it is a cool idea. See Kay and Schneider on exergy (2002) https://archive.is/jlrpl https://archive.is/jlrpl
- bmitc 3y ago
  Do you have a title for the specific resource you're linking to? That link isn't working for me.
  - jonsen 3y ago
    The meaning of life by Jr Minkel NewScientist 5 October 2002
crazygringo 3y ago
At least from the way it's presented in the article, I don't see how this makes any sense at all. Maybe someone else here can explain it better? Because the idea the article presents is that if you have matter that is being bombarded with energy (e.g. electromagnetic radiation) and is in an environment where it can dissipate heat (like the ocean), that this leads to self-organization of that matter to more efficiently convert the energy to dissipated heat, and that this could explain the early evolution of life. Key quote: > "Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment. This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments,” England explained. But there's zero explanation of why. It's not like the matter has some goal of dissipating the energy or becoming resonant in order to do so. It seems far more likely that the matter just absorbs or reflects or transmits the energy, and that it heats up to the extent that it absorbs it (and maybe melts a bit or something, e.g. becomes even less structured). But I don't understand what principle would lead the matter to become "resonant" or structure itself to "more efficiently" absorb and dissipate the energy. Clumps of atoms don't care, do they? It's like the article is relying on some new physical principle of "desire to dissipate energy efficiently" in non-living matter but without naming or justifying it. Can someone else point out what that principle might be, or if there is one at all? I've gone through all the links in previous submissions and can't find any mention of it. Or am I misunderstanding or missing something here?
- DigitalNoumena 3y ago
  How I understand it: Entropy (according to Boltzmann) is proportional to the number of microstates that can give rise to a particular macrostate of a system. The macrostate with the highest number of possible microstates is the uniform one, where all the accessible microstates are equally likely. So if by the 2nd law entropy must increase, the system will tend towards the uniform configuration. In other words, if a force is pushing water, the configuration with the highest number of states is that where all the particles of water are also moving i.e. indistinguishable microstates, doesn't matter how you rearrange the moleculles, it will look the same as they are all moving uniformly. It would be extremely unlikely that there were a pocket of water that is mysteriously still in the middle of the stream no? Clearly there are not a lot of rearrangements of the mollecules that will keep the macrostate the same, so low entropy, which tends not to be the case. (Edit) How this connects to the "desire to dissipate energy efficiently": Essentially, when we talk about "energy" we really mean "free energy". This is the amount of work that we can extract from a system. This is nothing but a measure of how far a current system is to it's maximum entropy state. So dissipating energy = increasing entropy. The mindblowing part for me is the connection that the process of extracting free energy is the same process that moves a system to its most likely state, uniformity, high entropy. So somehow, the ability to _accelerate_ an already inevitable process lets us reconfigure other systems _away_ from their most likely state!! So if we imagine the arrow of time to progress at the average rate of entropic decay, we are essentially reversing it for some systems by accelerating it for others!!! Man...
user__name 3y ago
This lecture by Jeremy England and the related Quanta magazine article, really added the missing piece to my world view! (1) Why does evolution happen in one direction only? (2) Why (and therefore how) does evolution happen AT ALL? (3) Life is about inevitably absorbing and dissipating a very small fraction of sun's photonic energy by turning it into information ( = complexity). THAT is also the reason why both are measured in Joules! (1 bit = 2.9 x 10^-21 Joules: LANDAUER Principle). I now look at the world (and bio-diversity) very differently.
EdwardCoffin 3y ago
Anyone interested in this kind of thing might find Freeman Dyson's paper A Model for the Origin of Life [1] interesting. It's a purely statistical model, dealing with the most abstract properties of the component molecules. The summary from the paper: Summary. A simple statistical model is constructed, describing the transition from disorder to order in a population of mutually catalytic molecules undergoing random mutations. The consequences of the model are calculated, and its possible relevance to the problem of the origin of life is discussed. The main conclusion of the analysis is that the model allows populations of several thousand molecular units to make the transition from disorder to order with reasonable probability. I got on to this from the bit of his Web of Stories interview talking about it [2]. I listened to the whole interview recently, and highly recommend it. [1] https://www.icts.res.in/sites/default/files/LivingMatter2018-Zorana-Zeravcic-Research-Paper-3.pdf https://www.icts.res.in/sites/default/files/LivingMatter2018... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxlYsAzM_8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxlYsAzM_8I
entropicgravity 3y ago
A mysterious man once said,"The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon"

And a follow up from a few years later: https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-theory-of-life-20170726/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-t...

galenmarchetti 3y ago

This is one of my favorite threads of theoretical physics. An entropy modeling of life. The article says it "underlies rather than replaces" Darwinian evolution but I'm not sure that's necessarily the case. Sure general relativity "underlies rather than replaces" Newtonian gravity, but honestly, the understanding of GR gravity does "replace" a pure Newtonian understanding. Darwinian evolution focuses on survival pressures to force natural selection. An entropic basis for evolution can explain things other than survival pressures; evolution can occur on a basis that rather than "improving survivability" it simply is a more functional expression of entropic drive. How would this change how how we view evolution? It would be massive and perhaps explain a lot of the oddities in the evolution of very complex features where full functionality and marked increase in survivability is very delayed... Would love to see further research along these lines

mannykannot 3y ago
Darwinian evolution explains how self-replicating entities can evolve into the sort of life we see around us today, but it does not explain how those self-replicating entities got that way in the first place. It is not clear to me from the article, however, that this theory goes so far as to explain the latter, either. It seems to be saying that if you take something like what we believe the primordial earth was like, then one might expect life to emerge, but it does not seem to have suggested specific processes leading to that outcome. Nor does the article give any example of how it has led to a satisfactory non-Darwinian explanation of an allegedly problematic case of evolution. If that has changed since the article's publication in 2014, I would be very interested in hearing about it.
- DigitalNoumena 3y ago
  Indeed these are normative claims, not descriptive. The emergence of life is is an extremly complex stochastic process, and likely impossible to describe. However, it does seem plausible that if a) high dissipative systems are more likely to perdure in time given the 2nd law, b) self-replication enhances the global entropic dissipation of a category of systems (because there are more) and c) the process of developing such a system is easier done by replication than by the same evolutionary pathway that led to the appearance of said system in the first place, then given enough time a self-replicating system MUST appear. I would like to see a formalisation of c) though, my formulation is quite tenuous. I don't see why it would have to lead to a non-Darwinian explanation of evolution. As has been said by in the parent comment, survivability might just be a high-level manifestation of entropic drive of self-replicating systems. It's remarkable that this is a claim that can be falsified, whereas Darwinian evolution, well..
  - mannykannot 3y ago
    > then given enough time a self-replicating system MUST appear. The cause "given enough time" seems to leave the questions of how probable it is, and how widespread a phenomenon it would be, wide open. > I don't see why it would have to lead to a non-Darwinian explanation of evolution. To be clear, I don't think it does, and I don't read galenmarchetti as going that far, either. > It's remarkable that this [survivability might just be a high-level manifestation of entropic drive of self-replicating systems] is a claim that can be falsified. Can it be falsified? It seems a rather broad claim, and it is unclear to me that the falsification of England's theory would rule out some other theory succeeding.
    - DigitalNoumena 3y ago
      Agree. I cannot comment on how probable or how widespread, but only that it is possible, and in fact it is arguably a certainty based on the premises above. Now if entropy was the only driver then self-replicating systems would be the norm. But alas, the Fermi paradox. I think we are asking too much. Could it be falsified? I think if you could show that natural selection led to the survival of less dissipative life forms then you could claim falsification.
DigitalNoumena 3y ago
Quoting England: > I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon. I think this is exactly alligned with your Newtonian-GR analogy.

dcre 3y ago

Enjoyable read — would be nice to have 2014 in the title, it's easy to miss. This[0] is a nice writeup from 2019 that does a better job of connecting England's work to contemporary complexity theorists like Stuart Kauffman. [0]: https://qz.com/1539551/is-the-universe-pro-life-the-fermi-paradox-can-help-explain https://qz.com/1539551/is-the-universe-pro-life-the-fermi-pa...

KhoomeiK 3y ago

For those who are unaware, this is the same worldview that underlies e/acc thought: https://effectiveaccelerationism.substack.com/p/repost-notes-on-eacc-principles-and https://effectiveaccelerationism.substack.com/p/repost-notes... TLDR: the universe's telos is entropy increase, and thus its emergent structures like life, intelligence, and capitalism favor entropic acceleration

skybrian 3y ago
I thought e/acc was some kind of in-joke or hoax? Does anyone really believe that stuff? This anonymous Substack isn't particularly convincing.
yedava 3y ago
It's interesting to see how new religions are born after old religions are found wanting. Whereas earlier we had a God overseeing Earth, we now have Teleological Universe that ordains capitalism. But just like old religion, the new religion too works purely out of wishful thinking and not on evidence. In a Universe that favors capitalism, you would think there would be plenty of evidence of a few entities exploiting the rest to drive entropy maximization. Instead what we see is that life is scarce, so scarce that we can't even be sure that there is other life in the Universe. Where are the Universe's capitalistic overlords who can make us pee in bottles lest we waste precious time maximizing entropy generation?
- mikhailfranco 3y ago
  There is sense in which the core essence of capitalism is derivable from the entropic laws of nature. Consider an active entity with a finite lifetime (e.g. child, factory). A production function can be defined as the net balance of flows in/out of the entity. This could be resources, energy, money. As time progresses after t=0 (pregnancy, project plan), the production curve starts off negative (even a self-employed craftsman has to buy tools), perhaps it dips more negative (debt, nurture/education). Eventually the curve slopes upward and crosses the breakeven point. Growth slows, the curve reaches a maximum positive value, then falls asymptotically toward zero, maybe going a little negative, before being truncated (death, scrap - even funerals and demolition cost money). The net contribution is the area under the curve. Resources have to be invested before there can be any benefit. The fact of any final net positive contribution is uncertain at the outset.

xipho 3y ago

Some weeks ago I wrote down some ideas that "feel" like this after watching Feynman https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/fml.html#5 https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/fml.html#5, but before I read this (or maybe I did read this, and it's all just latent thought, who knows). What the hell, I'll share them here- * Life "obviously" evolves where heat/energy is isolated into packets at some (many) levels * What is the F's 3 gear problem with respect to life? * The origin of life as a heat-management problem, with time-reversibility, sensu the video. * Life evolves in some time-reversible (mostly isolated) system that allows energy back and forth, a "DNA molecule" separating, and joing back, and separating, and joining back (until there is a little moment of chaos, and it doesn't separate, or come back, because the process is interrupted), at this point systems that can manage heat, i.e. shunt energy packets away, can prevent "mutations", at just the right time, so that they continue to go back and forth, separate the DNA, bring it back (time reversable). * "Shunting energy away" -> moving chaos to another place * Life is irreversible, therefor it must be a "machine" that shunts energy away * In as much as the collective Earth/Gaia "learns" to shunt energy away, then it will become collectively "alive" * We are at the point where we need to shunt Energy away, therefor the Earth is "Alive" * The earth / heat - at some point the finned shaft sensu F has to break through to space, to let the heat "out" * Why are trees? Yes this is a complete sentence. I.e. if there is some "fractalness"/"modularity" to earth, then this heat managing problem should repeat at many different levels. What are the "cold" counterparts to trees? If the gear is a tree, then what is the "fin"? How does the tree gear energy move back to the fin?

baerrie 3y ago

Prigogine’s original work on dissipative structures seems to have already “proved” this as much as this scientist. They both are hindered by the speculative nature of any abiogenetic theory, we cannot go back to the birth of life and prove anything

bmitc 3y ago
I have also not understood why this theory gets solely ascribed to England instead of Prigogine and others. Is England even working on this stuff anymore? He left MIT and is a machine learning scientist at a massive pharmaceutical company now.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  The follow-up article traves the history from Prigogine. https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-theory-of-life-20170726/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-t... It says that England made more meaningful contributions to the biological aspect.
hgsgm 3y ago
I'm hoping that England did some new math, and didn't just rediscover lost work. That's in the paper, not the article. The rest of the article is physicists making ill-informed statements about biology they don't understand. The conceptual model isn't novel, it's rather standard to students of evolution and entropy. But the specific concrete mathematical-physical model of how light becomes life is incredibly important, but up to the experts to validate and product in experiment.

dang 3y ago

Related: A New Physics Theory of Life (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33203733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33203733 - Oct 2022 (1 comment) A New Physics Theory of Life (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19453946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19453946 - March 2019 (1 comment) First Support for a Physics Theory of Life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15770011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15770011 - Nov 2017 (18 comments) First Support for a Physics Theory of Life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14858250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14858250 - July 2017 (66 comments) A new theory sheds light on the emergence of life’s complexity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14831747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14831747 - July 2017 (35 comments) A New Physics Theory of Life (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13103215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13103215 - Dec 2016 (31 comments) A New Thermodynamics Theory of the Origin of Life (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10859691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10859691 - Jan 2016 (2 comments) A New Physics Theory of Life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8750630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8750630 - Dec 2014 (94 comments) A New Thermodynamics Theory of the Origin of Life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8733759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8733759 - Dec 2014 (1 comment)

jug 3y ago

So it's like how you inevitably tend to end up with tangled headphone cords even if you swear you never tangle them yourself and they're just "lying" there? The reason behind it is also a simple matter of probability. It's more probable that they'll tangle than untangle, so eventually they do. Even with only small oscillations or disturbances, like here. Only this is on a microscopic level where eventually, particles, through probability, find _their_ configurations that disperse energy (settling where they "want" to be per thermodynamics) and in the process form more bonds among the particles. Maybe a tiny human diving in to that microcosmos might have found that annoying too! Who would've known, annoying bunched up cords and wires might have carried a hint to bunched up complex molecules and genesis itself!

throwaway2562 3y ago

This is not a new idea, but it is a cool idea. See Kay and Schneider on exergy (2002) https://archive.is/jlrpl https://archive.is/jlrpl

bmitc 3y ago
Do you have a title for the specific resource you're linking to? That link isn't working for me.
- jonsen 3y ago
  The meaning of life by Jr Minkel NewScientist 5 October 2002

crazygringo 3y ago

At least from the way it's presented in the article, I don't see how this makes any sense at all. Maybe someone else here can explain it better? Because the idea the article presents is that if you have matter that is being bombarded with energy (e.g. electromagnetic radiation) and is in an environment where it can dissipate heat (like the ocean), that this leads to self-organization of that matter to more efficiently convert the energy to dissipated heat, and that this could explain the early evolution of life. Key quote: > "Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment. This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments,” England explained. But there's zero explanation of why. It's not like the matter has some goal of dissipating the energy or becoming resonant in order to do so. It seems far more likely that the matter just absorbs or reflects or transmits the energy, and that it heats up to the extent that it absorbs it (and maybe melts a bit or something, e.g. becomes even less structured). But I don't understand what principle would lead the matter to become "resonant" or structure itself to "more efficiently" absorb and dissipate the energy. Clumps of atoms don't care, do they? It's like the article is relying on some new physical principle of "desire to dissipate energy efficiently" in non-living matter but without naming or justifying it. Can someone else point out what that principle might be, or if there is one at all? I've gone through all the links in previous submissions and can't find any mention of it. Or am I misunderstanding or missing something here?

DigitalNoumena 3y ago
How I understand it: Entropy (according to Boltzmann) is proportional to the number of microstates that can give rise to a particular macrostate of a system. The macrostate with the highest number of possible microstates is the uniform one, where all the accessible microstates are equally likely. So if by the 2nd law entropy must increase, the system will tend towards the uniform configuration. In other words, if a force is pushing water, the configuration with the highest number of states is that where all the particles of water are also moving i.e. indistinguishable microstates, doesn't matter how you rearrange the moleculles, it will look the same as they are all moving uniformly. It would be extremely unlikely that there were a pocket of water that is mysteriously still in the middle of the stream no? Clearly there are not a lot of rearrangements of the mollecules that will keep the macrostate the same, so low entropy, which tends not to be the case. (Edit) How this connects to the "desire to dissipate energy efficiently": Essentially, when we talk about "energy" we really mean "free energy". This is the amount of work that we can extract from a system. This is nothing but a measure of how far a current system is to it's maximum entropy state. So dissipating energy = increasing entropy. The mindblowing part for me is the connection that the process of extracting free energy is the same process that moves a system to its most likely state, uniformity, high entropy. So somehow, the ability to _accelerate_ an already inevitable process lets us reconfigure other systems _away_ from their most likely state!! So if we imagine the arrow of time to progress at the average rate of entropic decay, we are essentially reversing it for some systems by accelerating it for others!!! Man...

user__name 3y ago

This lecture by Jeremy England and the related Quanta magazine article, really added the missing piece to my world view! (1) Why does evolution happen in one direction only? (2) Why (and therefore how) does evolution happen AT ALL? (3) Life is about inevitably absorbing and dissipating a very small fraction of sun's photonic energy by turning it into information ( = complexity). THAT is also the reason why both are measured in Joules! (1 bit = 2.9 x 10^-21 Joules: LANDAUER Principle). I now look at the world (and bio-diversity) very differently.

EdwardCoffin 3y ago

Anyone interested in this kind of thing might find Freeman Dyson's paper A Model for the Origin of Life [1] interesting. It's a purely statistical model, dealing with the most abstract properties of the component molecules. The summary from the paper: Summary. A simple statistical model is constructed, describing the transition from disorder to order in a population of mutually catalytic molecules undergoing random mutations. The consequences of the model are calculated, and its possible relevance to the problem of the origin of life is discussed. The main conclusion of the analysis is that the model allows populations of several thousand molecular units to make the transition from disorder to order with reasonable probability. I got on to this from the bit of his Web of Stories interview talking about it [2]. I listened to the whole interview recently, and highly recommend it. [1] https://www.icts.res.in/sites/default/files/LivingMatter2018-Zorana-Zeravcic-Research-Paper-3.pdf https://www.icts.res.in/sites/default/files/LivingMatter2018... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxlYsAzM_8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxlYsAzM_8I

entropicgravity 3y ago

A mysterious man once said,"The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon"