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A New Physics Theory of Life

161 points by epenn 12y ago

Xcelerate 12y ago
It's a little disappointing to see so many articles like this voted to the front page recently. These articles aren't exactly pseudoscience per se (and indeed they are normally the work of someone at MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc.), but at the same time they're still kind of outlandish. The articles are all along the lines of "What if the universe is [random idea here]?" and then some kind of weird computer simulation or physical analogue (water drop experiment) is done that supposedly backs the idea up in a way that typically doesn't convince me very well. For instance, I feel like I could ask "What if the universe is really a network of time bundles?" and then I make up a definition of "time bundle", generate a bunch of fractals, and then loosely say "hey, that looks like a galaxy". It just isn't very good science to me. It reminds me of that history channel show "Ancient Aliens" where they keep asking "What if?" Yeah, so maybe one of those 8,000 theories is actually true, but it's just not all that satisfying. I prefer traditional science articles: observation or hypothesis, followed by direct experiment, followed by conclusion. This type of science makes up 99% of research today (read any scientific journal), and in my opinion is much more intellectually interesting. It's like everybody in the media focuses on the one article on beer carbonation in Physical Review Letters and ignores the other stuff. Why don't I see many articles on HN about cellular networks, or fuel cell polymers, or organic photovoltaics? These topics are exciting too.
- gaurav_v 12y ago
  This article is not exactly like the others on the front page. Quanta magazine is in general extremely good science reporting. (It's an editorially independent branch of the Simons Foundation.) The title is sensationalized, but I found the rest of the article to be an honest description of (what I understand of) England's paper. I particularly liked the way that the article discussed the (technical) work that led up to England's. Is there something about this article that you really didn't like?
  - vehementi 12y ago
    Not to judge the whole article but on paragraph like three it goes off about how this compares/contrasts to evolution which is a nonsense question and I am shocked that a credible science journal? site? would even go down that road.
    - pygy_ 12y ago
      Why is it nonsensical?
    - dhimes 12y ago
      It struck me that the paragraph was for the benefit of the layman who may not be very conversant with the details of physics or biology. In explaining abstract concepts it's helpful to clarify what something is not as well as find analogs to what it is.
    - jonnathanson 12y ago
      Quanta isn't The Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics. It's not a scholarly scientific journal, meant for an audience of specialists in a particular field. It's a popular-science publication, meant for a lay audience. A smarter-than-average lay audience, perhaps, but a lay audience all the same. From the About page: "Quanta is an editorially independent online publication launched by the Simons Foundation to enhance public understanding of science." The key phrase here is "enhance public understanding." It's natural that the public, upon encountering a theory of the origins of life, will think about Darwin. The article anticipates this line of thought and addresses it. I see nothing egregiously wrong here. Shouldn't we support publications for attempting to bring thoughtful, well-meaning, reasonably well researched science journalism to the lay public? This article does some spoon-feeding, but spoon-feeding is better than junk-feeding, and it's certainly better than no feeding at all.
    - golgappi 12y ago
      Aside from what others have said about Quanta being a layman's website, I would also like to point out that the special thing about science is everything is subject to debate and discussion, no matter however established it might be. We often bring relativity into discussion, why should Darwin's theory of evolution be kept out of it? It seems like lately science is getting more and more defensive to protect itself against religious forces. While understandable, such a change is not good for the progress of science. Science is a free-thinker's religion. Let's keep it that way. Nothing at all is above getting challenged or questioned. Neither god, nor evolution.
- rdlecler1 12y ago
  You need good theory so that you can ask the right questions. We can spend billions of dollars asking the wrong questions.
- pariya 12y ago
  I think these articles are written mostly so that the scientific community can officially hear about who is up to what- not for the average person out there wondering where we came from. Science is an industry just like any other, more often than not they are financially motivated. They distribute press releases, aim to be cited in other papers, apply for grants, get paid to give talks, work towards launching theories (read: book deals). As a species, I don't think we're even ready for the answers to any of the scientific and philosophical questions we've been asking since the beginning of time anyway.
- 31reasons 12y ago
  I am glad I read the article and not judge it based on your comment. Your comment is apparently valid for some research but here its targeting the wrong one.
- ExpiredLink 12y ago
  Technically oriented people tend to believe that science eventually can (and eventually will) explain everything including life, consciousness, time, .... They have no understanding for the inherent and insurmountable limitations of science. I'd prefer more epistemology and less 'science fiction'.
  - cristianpascu 12y ago
    This quote is delicious: “You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant.” :)
    - trhway 12y ago
      “You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a computer.” :)
      - jessaustin 12y ago
        At some level of abstraction, a computer and a plant might be the same sort of thing. Incidentally, why was trhway's comment downvoted? It expresses a perfectly logical objection to the "plant" hypothesis.
  - cromwellian 12y ago
    That there may be limits is not as interesting as what the limits actually are, which itself, may be an unsolvable problem. So it is useful to assume that there aren't limits, and press on. It's like someone telling you the Halting Theorem shows there are undecidable computations. This has never dissuaded a single engineer from working on better compiler optimizations, or even limited detection of halting behavior, it just shows the general problem is insoluble. Perhaps we may never be able to discover exactly how our life came about, or how the universe came about, but there are lots of other related questions narrower in scope that are just as valuable to answer. I'd say the philosophical justifications are frankly irrelevent. I know this rankles people, I've seen it rankle people debating Lawrence Krauss. They provide a good backwards justification for having logical confidence in our scientific endeavors, but really, science is about making predictions and if you come up with a theory that makes useful predictions, allows you to build things and conduct experiments with agree with the model, in other words, something that "works", the philosophical underpinnings are not going to cause anyone outside Philosophy departments to sweat. Thus, more useful than "how did OUR life actually evolve" which may be beyond the limits of the historical data or our ability to analyze, other questions are "are other kinds of life possible", and "how can other kinds of life evolve". If there's a useful theory of how other kinds of life can come about, and if we can actually test it with experiments, and actually create this life, then I'd say the "science fiction" of believing that science can answer the really tough questions, and drove physicists to actually solve a sub-problem, was a worthy bit of cultural driving force. In other words, give me my beliefs in space empires, and warp travel. It inspires me, and others, into science, and useful endeavors, even if the primary goal (FTL) is impossible.
- kijin 12y ago
  There's not much in theoretical physics nowadays that you can verify (or falsify) with a direct experiment. Beyond a certain level, physics becomes philosophical, with all of the usual drawbacks of philosophy: lots of outlandish conjectures with no way to verify any of them anytime soon. The Popperian ideal of science that you describe is only practiced within what Kuhn calls "normal science", i.e. pushing the cutting edge, bit by bit, safely from behind the blade. Sure, this makes up 99% of scientific research, but most of it is boring. Significant progress almost always requires "revolutionary science", i.e. jumping in front of the blade, into the bleeding edge. When you live in the bleeding edge, the normal process of cojectures-and-refutations no longer applies. (How do you verify/falsify the origin of life without going back billions of years in a time machine?) Unfortunately, the unkempt bleeding edge of science tends to attract journalistic sensationalism, just like a pool of blood attracts flies.
  - vixen99 12y ago
    'The Popperian ideal of science that you describe is only practiced within what Kuhn calls "normal science" '. Where do you get this definitive statement from? Popper writes about 'bold conjectures'. Maybe he should have used more vivid adjectives. Popper recognized that the best scientists appreciate the tentative nature of their conjectures and expect that they will be superseded.
    - kijin 12y ago
      > Where do you get this definitive statement from? Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962. For over half a century since then, sociologists, historians, philosophers, and political scientists have been studying how modern science works, both on a small scale (in the lab) and on a large scale (as a society). Most of the results seem to confirm the basic idea set out by Kuhn, although many details remain controversial. Rest assured, the boldness and tentativeness of scientific conjectures are not under any serious doubt. The part of Popper's model that later researchers have challenged is mostly about refutation and/or verification. For political and psychological reasons, as well as practical limitations, it is exceedingly difficult for scientists to conduct experiments that conclusively and unambiguously refute a hypothesis. As a result, the bleeding edge of scientific research often follows fads rather than solid experimental evidence. Personal charisma, funding decisions, and political concerns dominate decision-making processes, and evidence is often so ambiguous at this stage that anyone can cite it to their advantage. It takes a while for this craziness to settle down. In fields like theoretical physics where it is especially difficult to perform meaningful experiments, the time it takes for the dust to settle tends to be longer than in other fields. It can take decades, compared to months or years in other fields. Only when a theory is no longer a fad and falls safely behind the cutting edge (i.e. it becomes "normal science"), do scientists finally get a chance to scrutinize it with solid experiments. Even then, politics can get in the way of proper refutation while the proponents of the theory occupy authoritative positions in academia. As Max Planck once said: > "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (The above quote is often summarized as "Science advances one funeral at a time.") Summary: A lot of conditions need to be just right in order for bold conjectures to be boldly refuted on the basis of solid experimental evidence. Bleeding-edge science often doesn't meet such conditions, due to both technical and human shortcomings. Source: I have a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies (STS) [1], an umbrella term for interdisciplinary studies of science and technology in social, political, and historical contexts. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science,_technology_and_society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science,_technology_and_societ...
- jchrisa 12y ago
  I like this sort of thing and I think it's worth having b/c it has broad implications and might be a useful way of thinking about things. Most of the science articles are useful in that way. I like quotes like this from the article: This principle would apply to inanimate matter as well. “It is very tempting to speculate about what phenomena in nature we can now fit under this big tent of dissipation-driven adaptive organization,” England said. “Many examples could just be right under our nose, but because we haven’t been looking for them we haven’t noticed them.”
- yellowstuff 12y ago
  Feynman discussed this: “Consider a Mayan astronomer, he suggested… the Maya had a theory of astronomy that enabled them to explain their observations and to make predictions long into the future. It was a theory in the utilitarian modern spirit: a set of rules, quite mechanical, which when followed produced accurate results. Yet it seemed to lack a kind of understanding. “They counted a certain number and subtracted some numbers, and so on,” he said. “There was no discussion of what the moon was. There was no discussion even of the idea that it went around.” “Now a “young man” approaches the astronomer with a new idea. What if there are balls of rock out there, far away, moving under the influence of forces just like the forces that pull rocks to the ground? Perhaps it would make possible a different way of calculating the motions of the heavenly bodies. “Yes,” says the astronomer, “and how accurately can you predict eclipses?” He says, I haven’t developed the thing very far yet.” Then says the astronomer, “Well, we can calculate eclipses more accurately than you can with your model, so you must not pay any attention to your idea because obviously the mathematical scheme is better.” Most people would rather read about the wild theory with balls of rock than the refinement of 1 decimal place in the calculation of the location of Venus.
  - nilkn 12y ago
    Feynman was also a very strong critic of purely theoretical physics. See, e.g., his criticism of string theory: "I don't like that they're not calculating anything. I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, 'Well, it still might be true.'" Feynman himself was a theorist, but the domain he worked on, mostly quantum electrodynamics, made very specific numerical predictions which were possible to test.
    - debacle 12y ago
      The problem (or maybe feature) of theory is that it can be accurate to the model but also wrong. It is the constant unwinding of accepted physics that helps us progress.
  - EGreg 12y ago
    Well maybe if the guy's idea was explored and iterated as long as the other, entrenched one, it would yield far better results. After all, the proof-of-concept often performa worse in the beginning, but so many awesome technologies started off that way.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  Journalists want to tell stories--because people want to hear stories--and science is pretty much the anti-story. The vast majority of research is simply not story-friendly. Stories are a tool for making facts meaningful to readers, and except for those in the field, "significantly faster and more robust way of registering two images" or "new limits on the 17 keV neutrino" or even "some genetic markers of this form of cancer vs that" simply aren't meaningful[#]. People will get up in the morning tomorrow knowing those things and live their lives as they did the day before. The average number of meaningful conclusions from an experiment is much less than one. To get meaningful conclusions you need to put a lot of experiments together. This is why theorists get so much press, because their work often covers a great deal of experimental history. Unfortunately, theoretical work is also often nonsense, or over-stated, or wrapped up in a story that makes the theory of the Higgs Boson look like the work of one person rather than four or more (Higgs himself has been quite clear about this.) Bridging this gap between story and science--if it can be bridged at all in an honest and effective way--is one of the great unsolved problems of the age of science. My own contribution to this problem is a novel--Darwin's Theorem--which curiously enough is based on some highly speculative ideas about the mathematical foundations of evolutionary biology: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/B00KBH5O8K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418661963&sr=8-1&keywords=darwin%27s+theorem http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/... [#] all examples from my own work, some of which has ultimately had moderate real-world consequences, particularly the image-registration stuff, but even there it took 20 years for anything very interesting to happen.
zkhalique 12y ago
I remember reading this before and thinking, if this is so obvious how come life doesn't exist on any other planets we know of?
- cryptophreak 12y ago
  Possibly because we don't actually know very much about other planets.
  - isomorphic 12y ago
    Absolutely. We're not even certain if life exists (or ever previously existed) on planets that we have hardware on. The criteria in the article were input energy and a "bath" into which that energy can be dissipated. Perhaps there is a minimum potential difference before structures will self-organize--or perhaps the probability of self-organization is proportional to the difference. Speculating along this line of reasoning: On Mercury, you have plenty of input energy, but few options for dissipating it. On Europa, you may have the reverse problem. For all we know, however, Europa may actually have life. Our sample set is too small.
- vorg 12y ago
  > Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or “closed” system, an “open” system can keep its entropy low — that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms — by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings. Perhaps the Earth biosphere is the only "open" system in the Universe that keeps its entropy low by increasing the entropy of its surroundings, i.e. the rest of the Universe.
  - Dylan16807 12y ago
    I think you'll find that every planet in existence is forcibly receiving light and has entropy to spare.
- devnonymous 12y ago
  We don't know when and where life might have existed or currently exists ...even on the planets that we know about. Some interesting things to read if you wonder about such things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Seager#Seager_equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
andywood 12y ago
As a whole, I think the article finally provides a fair amount of specificness, but I was initially struck by how much space is devoted up front to "he-said she-said". It reminded me of celebrity gossip, sportscasting, and punditry.
Animats 12y ago
It's definitely sensationalized. But the concept that life-type compounds are in some sense thermodynamically downhill from random molecules is worth looking at. It's testable, which beats most of what comes out of physics today.
throwaway39201 12y ago
I didn't particularly like the article since I couldn't really tell what the research was about from it, but I'm enjoying listening to Jeremy England's (the guy behind the theory the article discusses) talk that it links to [1]. Until at least 19-20 minutes in it's presented simply enough that a 10 year old could easily follow along with it, then gets into technical stuff that is kind of going in one ear and out the other for me (as somebody who hasn't studied physics beyond a college survey course level). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e91D5UAz-f4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e91D5UAz-f4
razzaj 12y ago
It is fascinating how much more information is in the article's comments section. In fact, I found many of the comments much more informative than the article itself. I recommend going through those to build a more informed opinion about the theory being discussed.
- xxxyy 12y ago
  One of the first comments point out that this topic was already covered for example in the following 2011 paper: http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/2/37/2011/esd-2-37-2011.html http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/2/37/2011/esd-2-37-2011.html
cromwellian 12y ago
There was a similar application of thermodynamics some time ago to the problem of intelligent behavior/artificial intelligence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT8ZqChv8P0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT8ZqChv8P0
JonnieCache 12y ago
Darwinian survival is so often co-opted for political ends: generations of bad people have used it to rationalise their guilt. If this model of dissipation supersedes it, I wonder what political effects it will have? What will the dawkins of dissipation persuade/permit us to believe about ourselves?
- debacle 12y ago
  Darwinian survival exists. It has existed as a natural phenomenon since the first relics of life ever graced the Universe. The human question is whether we can develop a better localized system for our species. The problem is that if you're on top, Darwinian survival is a pretty sweet gig. That disincentivizes people in power from taking a long-term view.
dr_zoidberg 12y ago
Seeing that nobody has mentioned him, Ilya Prigogine worked on similar ideas quite a lot before this. Order out of chaos, equilibrium and non-equilibrium structures, and the emergence of structures in nature are some of the topics he covered. Nowadays he's mostly forgotten, but its interesting to take the time to read his works, specially because it was (and still is) different from the main/stablished ideas in physics.
jamesblonde 12y ago
My biggest issue with Jeremey England is that he's basically rehashing Ilya Prigogine's ideas. Read Prigogine's books "order out of chaos", " Exploring complexity: An introduction" (best one), and less so "The End of Certainty". Prigogine won the Nobel prize for his "discovery" of dissipative structures, and he was a driving force in the ideas behind complexity theory. Wolfram's early work was full of references to Prigogine, but then Wolfram decided to write him out of history. As did England above. Progigine was derided for his ideas: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/prigogine.html http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/prigo... I think the ideas are great, but we have some work to do.
- unquietcode 12y ago
  What about Eric Chaisson's Cosmic Evolution, Goodwin's Signs of Life, Shrodinger's What is Life?, Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe? All of these books I've read which argue the same damn thing as this guy, so what's new? That last book by Kauffman is probably the most simialr, and I highly recommend it to those interested.
- hackinthebochs 12y ago
  I'm not sure what your point is. Most ideas have some connection to ideas that came before. Are you saying England has added nothing to the idea, or that he is knowingly/intentionally leaving out Progigine as the rightful originator? If neither of these points are the case then your tone is entirely unwarranted. Many times ideas get re-discovered until the timing is right for them to gain wide acceptance. This point takes nothing away from England.
  - jamesblonde 12y ago
    You put your finger on it. He's intentionally leaving out Prigogine as the main thinker behind these ideas. In fact, most of what he is saying is a rehash from the book. The main contribution by England is his idea of replicators as entropy minimizers1 in a closed system. However, his proof for this is a simulation of a simulation. Prigogine came up with the Brusselator, which is essentially the same theoretical model England is proposing for chemical systems. His points about the arrow of time are just the same points Prigogine made, without any attribution. Prigogine's reputation is in tatters now, and England could help rebuild it. Instead, he's going the non-humble path....
deniszgonjanin 12y ago
Life is merely the Universe's answer to entropy
mike_ivanov 12y ago
Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-physics-theo...
carapace 12y ago
Constructal Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructal_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructal_law
mathattack 12y ago
Is it dangerous when Physicists get too far out of their element? Physicists promoted some dangerous ideas in Economics, but good ideas in Chemistry. Where does Biology fit in that mix?

161 points by epenn 12y ago

It's a little disappointing to see so many articles like this voted to the front page recently. These articles aren't exactly pseudoscience per se (and indeed they are normally the work of someone at MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc.), but at the same time they're still kind of outlandish. The articles are all along the lines of "What if the universe is [random idea here]?" and then some kind of weird computer simulation or physical analogue (water drop experiment) is done that supposedly backs the idea up in a way that typically doesn't convince me very well. For instance, I feel like I could ask "What if the universe is really a network of time bundles?" and then I make up a definition of "time bundle", generate a bunch of fractals, and then loosely say "hey, that looks like a galaxy". It just isn't very good science to me. It reminds me of that history channel show "Ancient Aliens" where they keep asking "What if?" Yeah, so maybe one of those 8,000 theories is actually true, but it's just not all that satisfying. I prefer traditional science articles: observation or hypothesis, followed by direct experiment, followed by conclusion. This type of science makes up 99% of research today (read any scientific journal), and in my opinion is much more intellectually interesting. It's like everybody in the media focuses on the one article on beer carbonation in Physical Review Letters and ignores the other stuff. Why don't I see many articles on HN about cellular networks, or fuel cell polymers, or organic photovoltaics? These topics are exciting too.

gaurav_v 12y ago
This article is not exactly like the others on the front page. Quanta magazine is in general extremely good science reporting. (It's an editorially independent branch of the Simons Foundation.) The title is sensationalized, but I found the rest of the article to be an honest description of (what I understand of) England's paper. I particularly liked the way that the article discussed the (technical) work that led up to England's. Is there something about this article that you really didn't like?
- vehementi 12y ago
  Not to judge the whole article but on paragraph like three it goes off about how this compares/contrasts to evolution which is a nonsense question and I am shocked that a credible science journal? site? would even go down that road.
  - pygy_ 12y ago
    Why is it nonsensical?
  - dhimes 12y ago
    It struck me that the paragraph was for the benefit of the layman who may not be very conversant with the details of physics or biology. In explaining abstract concepts it's helpful to clarify what something is not as well as find analogs to what it is.
  - jonnathanson 12y ago
    Quanta isn't The Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics. It's not a scholarly scientific journal, meant for an audience of specialists in a particular field. It's a popular-science publication, meant for a lay audience. A smarter-than-average lay audience, perhaps, but a lay audience all the same. From the About page: "Quanta is an editorially independent online publication launched by the Simons Foundation to enhance public understanding of science." The key phrase here is "enhance public understanding." It's natural that the public, upon encountering a theory of the origins of life, will think about Darwin. The article anticipates this line of thought and addresses it. I see nothing egregiously wrong here. Shouldn't we support publications for attempting to bring thoughtful, well-meaning, reasonably well researched science journalism to the lay public? This article does some spoon-feeding, but spoon-feeding is better than junk-feeding, and it's certainly better than no feeding at all.
  - golgappi 12y ago
    Aside from what others have said about Quanta being a layman's website, I would also like to point out that the special thing about science is everything is subject to debate and discussion, no matter however established it might be. We often bring relativity into discussion, why should Darwin's theory of evolution be kept out of it? It seems like lately science is getting more and more defensive to protect itself against religious forces. While understandable, such a change is not good for the progress of science. Science is a free-thinker's religion. Let's keep it that way. Nothing at all is above getting challenged or questioned. Neither god, nor evolution.
rdlecler1 12y ago
You need good theory so that you can ask the right questions. We can spend billions of dollars asking the wrong questions.
pariya 12y ago
I think these articles are written mostly so that the scientific community can officially hear about who is up to what- not for the average person out there wondering where we came from. Science is an industry just like any other, more often than not they are financially motivated. They distribute press releases, aim to be cited in other papers, apply for grants, get paid to give talks, work towards launching theories (read: book deals). As a species, I don't think we're even ready for the answers to any of the scientific and philosophical questions we've been asking since the beginning of time anyway.
31reasons 12y ago
I am glad I read the article and not judge it based on your comment. Your comment is apparently valid for some research but here its targeting the wrong one.
ExpiredLink 12y ago
Technically oriented people tend to believe that science eventually can (and eventually will) explain everything including life, consciousness, time, .... They have no understanding for the inherent and insurmountable limitations of science. I'd prefer more epistemology and less 'science fiction'.
- cristianpascu 12y ago
  This quote is delicious: “You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant.” :)
  - trhway 12y ago
    “You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a computer.” :)
    - jessaustin 12y ago
      At some level of abstraction, a computer and a plant might be the same sort of thing. Incidentally, why was trhway's comment downvoted? It expresses a perfectly logical objection to the "plant" hypothesis.
- cromwellian 12y ago
  That there may be limits is not as interesting as what the limits actually are, which itself, may be an unsolvable problem. So it is useful to assume that there aren't limits, and press on. It's like someone telling you the Halting Theorem shows there are undecidable computations. This has never dissuaded a single engineer from working on better compiler optimizations, or even limited detection of halting behavior, it just shows the general problem is insoluble. Perhaps we may never be able to discover exactly how our life came about, or how the universe came about, but there are lots of other related questions narrower in scope that are just as valuable to answer. I'd say the philosophical justifications are frankly irrelevent. I know this rankles people, I've seen it rankle people debating Lawrence Krauss. They provide a good backwards justification for having logical confidence in our scientific endeavors, but really, science is about making predictions and if you come up with a theory that makes useful predictions, allows you to build things and conduct experiments with agree with the model, in other words, something that "works", the philosophical underpinnings are not going to cause anyone outside Philosophy departments to sweat. Thus, more useful than "how did OUR life actually evolve" which may be beyond the limits of the historical data or our ability to analyze, other questions are "are other kinds of life possible", and "how can other kinds of life evolve". If there's a useful theory of how other kinds of life can come about, and if we can actually test it with experiments, and actually create this life, then I'd say the "science fiction" of believing that science can answer the really tough questions, and drove physicists to actually solve a sub-problem, was a worthy bit of cultural driving force. In other words, give me my beliefs in space empires, and warp travel. It inspires me, and others, into science, and useful endeavors, even if the primary goal (FTL) is impossible.
kijin 12y ago
There's not much in theoretical physics nowadays that you can verify (or falsify) with a direct experiment. Beyond a certain level, physics becomes philosophical, with all of the usual drawbacks of philosophy: lots of outlandish conjectures with no way to verify any of them anytime soon. The Popperian ideal of science that you describe is only practiced within what Kuhn calls "normal science", i.e. pushing the cutting edge, bit by bit, safely from behind the blade. Sure, this makes up 99% of scientific research, but most of it is boring. Significant progress almost always requires "revolutionary science", i.e. jumping in front of the blade, into the bleeding edge. When you live in the bleeding edge, the normal process of cojectures-and-refutations no longer applies. (How do you verify/falsify the origin of life without going back billions of years in a time machine?) Unfortunately, the unkempt bleeding edge of science tends to attract journalistic sensationalism, just like a pool of blood attracts flies.
- vixen99 12y ago
  'The Popperian ideal of science that you describe is only practiced within what Kuhn calls "normal science" '. Where do you get this definitive statement from? Popper writes about 'bold conjectures'. Maybe he should have used more vivid adjectives. Popper recognized that the best scientists appreciate the tentative nature of their conjectures and expect that they will be superseded.
  - kijin 12y ago
    > Where do you get this definitive statement from? Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962. For over half a century since then, sociologists, historians, philosophers, and political scientists have been studying how modern science works, both on a small scale (in the lab) and on a large scale (as a society). Most of the results seem to confirm the basic idea set out by Kuhn, although many details remain controversial. Rest assured, the boldness and tentativeness of scientific conjectures are not under any serious doubt. The part of Popper's model that later researchers have challenged is mostly about refutation and/or verification. For political and psychological reasons, as well as practical limitations, it is exceedingly difficult for scientists to conduct experiments that conclusively and unambiguously refute a hypothesis. As a result, the bleeding edge of scientific research often follows fads rather than solid experimental evidence. Personal charisma, funding decisions, and political concerns dominate decision-making processes, and evidence is often so ambiguous at this stage that anyone can cite it to their advantage. It takes a while for this craziness to settle down. In fields like theoretical physics where it is especially difficult to perform meaningful experiments, the time it takes for the dust to settle tends to be longer than in other fields. It can take decades, compared to months or years in other fields. Only when a theory is no longer a fad and falls safely behind the cutting edge (i.e. it becomes "normal science"), do scientists finally get a chance to scrutinize it with solid experiments. Even then, politics can get in the way of proper refutation while the proponents of the theory occupy authoritative positions in academia. As Max Planck once said: > "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (The above quote is often summarized as "Science advances one funeral at a time.") Summary: A lot of conditions need to be just right in order for bold conjectures to be boldly refuted on the basis of solid experimental evidence. Bleeding-edge science often doesn't meet such conditions, due to both technical and human shortcomings. Source: I have a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies (STS) [1], an umbrella term for interdisciplinary studies of science and technology in social, political, and historical contexts. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science,_technology_and_society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science,_technology_and_societ...
jchrisa 12y ago
I like this sort of thing and I think it's worth having b/c it has broad implications and might be a useful way of thinking about things. Most of the science articles are useful in that way. I like quotes like this from the article: This principle would apply to inanimate matter as well. “It is very tempting to speculate about what phenomena in nature we can now fit under this big tent of dissipation-driven adaptive organization,” England said. “Many examples could just be right under our nose, but because we haven’t been looking for them we haven’t noticed them.”
yellowstuff 12y ago
Feynman discussed this: “Consider a Mayan astronomer, he suggested… the Maya had a theory of astronomy that enabled them to explain their observations and to make predictions long into the future. It was a theory in the utilitarian modern spirit: a set of rules, quite mechanical, which when followed produced accurate results. Yet it seemed to lack a kind of understanding. “They counted a certain number and subtracted some numbers, and so on,” he said. “There was no discussion of what the moon was. There was no discussion even of the idea that it went around.” “Now a “young man” approaches the astronomer with a new idea. What if there are balls of rock out there, far away, moving under the influence of forces just like the forces that pull rocks to the ground? Perhaps it would make possible a different way of calculating the motions of the heavenly bodies. “Yes,” says the astronomer, “and how accurately can you predict eclipses?” He says, I haven’t developed the thing very far yet.” Then says the astronomer, “Well, we can calculate eclipses more accurately than you can with your model, so you must not pay any attention to your idea because obviously the mathematical scheme is better.” Most people would rather read about the wild theory with balls of rock than the refinement of 1 decimal place in the calculation of the location of Venus.
- nilkn 12y ago
  Feynman was also a very strong critic of purely theoretical physics. See, e.g., his criticism of string theory: "I don't like that they're not calculating anything. I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, 'Well, it still might be true.'" Feynman himself was a theorist, but the domain he worked on, mostly quantum electrodynamics, made very specific numerical predictions which were possible to test.
  - debacle 12y ago
    The problem (or maybe feature) of theory is that it can be accurate to the model but also wrong. It is the constant unwinding of accepted physics that helps us progress.
- EGreg 12y ago
  Well maybe if the guy's idea was explored and iterated as long as the other, entrenched one, it would yield far better results. After all, the proof-of-concept often performa worse in the beginning, but so many awesome technologies started off that way.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
Journalists want to tell stories--because people want to hear stories--and science is pretty much the anti-story. The vast majority of research is simply not story-friendly. Stories are a tool for making facts meaningful to readers, and except for those in the field, "significantly faster and more robust way of registering two images" or "new limits on the 17 keV neutrino" or even "some genetic markers of this form of cancer vs that" simply aren't meaningful[#]. People will get up in the morning tomorrow knowing those things and live their lives as they did the day before. The average number of meaningful conclusions from an experiment is much less than one. To get meaningful conclusions you need to put a lot of experiments together. This is why theorists get so much press, because their work often covers a great deal of experimental history. Unfortunately, theoretical work is also often nonsense, or over-stated, or wrapped up in a story that makes the theory of the Higgs Boson look like the work of one person rather than four or more (Higgs himself has been quite clear about this.) Bridging this gap between story and science--if it can be bridged at all in an honest and effective way--is one of the great unsolved problems of the age of science. My own contribution to this problem is a novel--Darwin's Theorem--which curiously enough is based on some highly speculative ideas about the mathematical foundations of evolutionary biology: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/B00KBH5O8K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418661963&sr=8-1&keywords=darwin%27s+theorem http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/... [#] all examples from my own work, some of which has ultimately had moderate real-world consequences, particularly the image-registration stuff, but even there it took 20 years for anything very interesting to happen.

zkhalique 12y ago

I remember reading this before and thinking, if this is so obvious how come life doesn't exist on any other planets we know of?

cryptophreak 12y ago
Possibly because we don't actually know very much about other planets.
- isomorphic 12y ago
  Absolutely. We're not even certain if life exists (or ever previously existed) on planets that we have hardware on. The criteria in the article were input energy and a "bath" into which that energy can be dissipated. Perhaps there is a minimum potential difference before structures will self-organize--or perhaps the probability of self-organization is proportional to the difference. Speculating along this line of reasoning: On Mercury, you have plenty of input energy, but few options for dissipating it. On Europa, you may have the reverse problem. For all we know, however, Europa may actually have life. Our sample set is too small.
vorg 12y ago
> Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or “closed” system, an “open” system can keep its entropy low — that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms — by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings. Perhaps the Earth biosphere is the only "open" system in the Universe that keeps its entropy low by increasing the entropy of its surroundings, i.e. the rest of the Universe.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  I think you'll find that every planet in existence is forcibly receiving light and has entropy to spare.
devnonymous 12y ago
We don't know when and where life might have existed or currently exists ...even on the planets that we know about. Some interesting things to read if you wonder about such things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Seager#Seager_equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

andywood 12y ago

As a whole, I think the article finally provides a fair amount of specificness, but I was initially struck by how much space is devoted up front to "he-said she-said". It reminded me of celebrity gossip, sportscasting, and punditry.

Animats 12y ago

It's definitely sensationalized. But the concept that life-type compounds are in some sense thermodynamically downhill from random molecules is worth looking at. It's testable, which beats most of what comes out of physics today.

throwaway39201 12y ago

I didn't particularly like the article since I couldn't really tell what the research was about from it, but I'm enjoying listening to Jeremy England's (the guy behind the theory the article discusses) talk that it links to [1]. Until at least 19-20 minutes in it's presented simply enough that a 10 year old could easily follow along with it, then gets into technical stuff that is kind of going in one ear and out the other for me (as somebody who hasn't studied physics beyond a college survey course level). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e91D5UAz-f4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e91D5UAz-f4

razzaj 12y ago

It is fascinating how much more information is in the article's comments section. In fact, I found many of the comments much more informative than the article itself. I recommend going through those to build a more informed opinion about the theory being discussed.

xxxyy 12y ago
One of the first comments point out that this topic was already covered for example in the following 2011 paper: http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/2/37/2011/esd-2-37-2011.html http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/2/37/2011/esd-2-37-2011.html

cromwellian 12y ago

There was a similar application of thermodynamics some time ago to the problem of intelligent behavior/artificial intelligence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT8ZqChv8P0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT8ZqChv8P0

JonnieCache 12y ago

Darwinian survival is so often co-opted for political ends: generations of bad people have used it to rationalise their guilt. If this model of dissipation supersedes it, I wonder what political effects it will have? What will the dawkins of dissipation persuade/permit us to believe about ourselves?

debacle 12y ago
Darwinian survival exists. It has existed as a natural phenomenon since the first relics of life ever graced the Universe. The human question is whether we can develop a better localized system for our species. The problem is that if you're on top, Darwinian survival is a pretty sweet gig. That disincentivizes people in power from taking a long-term view.

dr_zoidberg 12y ago

Seeing that nobody has mentioned him, Ilya Prigogine worked on similar ideas quite a lot before this. Order out of chaos, equilibrium and non-equilibrium structures, and the emergence of structures in nature are some of the topics he covered. Nowadays he's mostly forgotten, but its interesting to take the time to read his works, specially because it was (and still is) different from the main/stablished ideas in physics.

jamesblonde 12y ago

My biggest issue with Jeremey England is that he's basically rehashing Ilya Prigogine's ideas. Read Prigogine's books "order out of chaos", " Exploring complexity: An introduction" (best one), and less so "The End of Certainty". Prigogine won the Nobel prize for his "discovery" of dissipative structures, and he was a driving force in the ideas behind complexity theory. Wolfram's early work was full of references to Prigogine, but then Wolfram decided to write him out of history. As did England above. Progigine was derided for his ideas: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/prigogine.html http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/prigo... I think the ideas are great, but we have some work to do.

unquietcode 12y ago
What about Eric Chaisson's Cosmic Evolution, Goodwin's Signs of Life, Shrodinger's What is Life?, Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe? All of these books I've read which argue the same damn thing as this guy, so what's new? That last book by Kauffman is probably the most simialr, and I highly recommend it to those interested.
hackinthebochs 12y ago
I'm not sure what your point is. Most ideas have some connection to ideas that came before. Are you saying England has added nothing to the idea, or that he is knowingly/intentionally leaving out Progigine as the rightful originator? If neither of these points are the case then your tone is entirely unwarranted. Many times ideas get re-discovered until the timing is right for them to gain wide acceptance. This point takes nothing away from England.
- jamesblonde 12y ago
  You put your finger on it. He's intentionally leaving out Prigogine as the main thinker behind these ideas. In fact, most of what he is saying is a rehash from the book. The main contribution by England is his idea of replicators as entropy minimizers1 in a closed system. However, his proof for this is a simulation of a simulation. Prigogine came up with the Brusselator, which is essentially the same theoretical model England is proposing for chemical systems. His points about the arrow of time are just the same points Prigogine made, without any attribution. Prigogine's reputation is in tatters now, and England could help rebuild it. Instead, he's going the non-humble path....

deniszgonjanin 12y ago

Life is merely the Universe's answer to entropy

mike_ivanov 12y ago

Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-physics-theo...

carapace 12y ago

Constructal Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructal_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructal_law

mathattack 12y ago

Is it dangerous when Physicists get too far out of their element? Physicists promoted some dangerous ideas in Economics, but good ideas in Chemistry. Where does Biology fit in that mix?