When I was a kid, I rode my bike through puddles on unpaved roads, creating as much disturbance as possible; and then watched them reassemble themselves behind my back.
Clearly, something was drawing them together again into the shape and form they had before I had come along; and though I could still see the damage I had caused, it was clear that the puddles had a, shall we say, current state, for which I was responsible; and a, say, nominal state - the state they always returned to (or rather, were returned to): the state or form they obviously should have; and 'were' returned to, passively, because they weren't alive.
But something was doing it; and if I returned the next morning, the traces of my actions were already being blurred out - especially if it had rained over night. And, as lakes are big puddles, this condition (or in this case, result of an action) was later to be known as fractal.
Then, some ten years later, a physics teacher confided in me, almost furtively, that "Plants do not adhere to the second law of thermodynamics" - a sentence which amounted to something akin to the denial of God by a priest.
But it was true nevertheless, or so it seemed; and a big problem as well: were plants really reducing entropy? As living beings? How?
One part of the answer came up when I got hold of Erwin Schrödinger's "What is life?" from 1945 or thereabouts; he seemed to be, then, the only physicist that had even tackled that question.
His answer, in short, was:
Plants accumulate negative entropy from the Sun's rays, (as in discreet packets of electromagnetic waves), and then pass this negentropy on to us in form of low-entropy food, to repair the entropic decay of our genetic information, i. e. the DNA in our cells.
This, he said, is what we ingest - and I might add, respire in the form of free oxygen as well - order, not energy.
He was, or so it seems, one of the first to be "cancel cultured" by his colleagues for this, and is said to have taken the passage out in later editions. Or so.
However, this is only part of the problem (the other is that plants, in growing, have an entropic metabolism, too) - and it just kicks the can down the road: If it were so, where did the Sun get this negative entropy from? Or did it generate it? Did it not generate energy? (And what about those first millions of years of Life on Earth without photosynthesis?)
And:
As no thermodynamic entity or process can ever create itself, or even just sustain itself - in consequence of the iron second law of thermodynamics - and every thermodynamic process needs a source and a sink outside of itself: No matter how far up the food- (or energy-) chain you go, in the end you need a final source and sink outside of the universe; and barring a creating (and sustaining!) divine entity, this is not given.
It was a dead end.
Or you needed a source within the confines of the cosmos - and that source had to be non- thermodynamic, for the second law of thermodynamics to not apply. In fact, it had to be positively anti- thermodynamic in every property, just to counteract the workings of thermodynamics.
This martyred my head.
And then one day, carrying home some shopping, it hit me so hard it nearly floored me: That source that I was looking for, the source of everything there is in the world and indeed shaping it the way it is, is what we call "gravity"; call, for as mere humans, and indeed it's product, there is only so much that we can see.
But once you have seen that, once that infinitely tiny corner of the huge curtain has been lifted, you see everything in its entirety, its eternity and its infinity. For one single moment. And as the memory of that flash vision of utter dynamism burns itself into your completely overloaded brain as a static image, it may be that you regain conciousness…
The next years I spent trying to find a flaw in this idea. I found none. Instead, all problems seemed to solve themselves, wherever the waves of that rock thrown into an imaginary quiet lake lapped up to the shores of reality. There was no resistance. Nowhere.
Of course, I could still be wrong.
But with the internet becoming what it was, I searched it for people who had come up with the same answer; I found few, but a few; and they had all strangely had this epiphany more or less around the same time - some time after turn of the millennium, around 2008 or 2018, if I remember correctly - and then had magically disappeared from view in the world wide web as if dissolved.
It was most remarkable.
For the trouble is, though it may be simple to say something like "Gravity is God" - and go on to describe how gravity did indeed create everything in the universe beyond sheer matter - it is terribly difficult to understand completely; for it goes against the grain. Of everything.
So, what now?
One way to understand this is to think negative. Or rather, the negative. To reverse engineer reality, so to speak.
(Which is also why this thread will mostly be done in reverse logical or historical order. No, not really; I just want to see how far I can go.)
For example:
Every thermodynamic process or event - i. e. every breath you take, yes, even the act of breathing - degrades or decreases an energy potential provided to you (for free, by the way), and enhances or increases entropy or disorder.
Therefore, any process that produces negative entropy will also produce energy; or, read the other way, that which produces or enhances an energy potential will also produce negative entropy - in common parlance, it will create order.
And it does.
Remember what we are talking about?
Gravity.
And indeed, gravity produces energy potential by accelerating matter and thus separating it from itself - and in consequence produces the order we need to exist and survive.
Remember the puddles of my childhood days I mentioned above? That was the work of gravity: it separates the land from the sea, and the skies above - big and small. Nothing escapes it.
And gravity complements thermodynamics: take any property of a thermodynamic process, and you will find a gravitational process doing exactly the opposite; where thermodynamic processes degrade themselves, gravitational ones will enhance themselves, and so on.
Maybe the one thing most difficult to accept in this idea, is, that it seems that there are not one, but two separate processes that rule the universe, turning it into the cosmos of yesteryear, today, and tomorrow: Gravity and Thermodynamics.
And:
Gravity precedes thermodynamics; without thermodynamics, there still may be gravity; but there are no thermodynamics without a preceding gravitational process to provide the energy and order it depends upon to come into being.
Without gravity, you would not exist. Nothing would exist.
Except Chaos and Darkness
Now, let there be light.