The time since 1850 - pt. II
A Journey to the Beginning of the World
Still Going Astray, after 150 years
We always return to the year of 1850, the year European man took over (or thought he did), albeit on the basis of faulty premises, a takeover with all its idiosyncrasies and faults - such as unwittingly measuring the climatic temperature from the lowest point possible.
Up to then, the European conquest of the world had taken place within the framework of church and monarchy, i.e. of unquestioned, God-given premises.
And they had come far, travelling with what the world provided in wood, wind and cloth held together with iron.
Now, no more.
Just 150 years of Doomsay
We have been living in a strange kind of Phoenician death cult
Some may think the era of human sacrifice in modern society has just begun, but in reality (and peaking in World Wars I and II), that has been going on for around 150 years now, ever since the introduction of the machine age - which is a very short time for so much to happen in form of wealth creation (and destruction); and which in itself is strange and paradoxical:
Both Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, arguably the most influential contemporaries of that period, had extolled the benign evolutionary mechanisms of the past, which led to the very existence of human beings, for one; and, for the other, the equally benign revolutionary possibilities for the future of these human beings.
But it was perhaps their common contemporary Rudolf Clausius, the somewhat lesser known German physicist, who formulated the revolutionary laws of thermodynamics and the formula for entropy (the latter without much explanation, or so it seems; but perhaps in the hope, not unreasonable, to have its entity named after himself) that somehow seems to have planted the more or less unconscious belief into the minds of the educated that the universe - and with it, humanity, which would itself then be the result of a freak or even malicious accident - is ever degrading, and will die a death of heat equilibrium.
It most probably will not.
For, as Darwin correctly stated: Humans have, over time, evolved from something more primitive to something more complex - but so has everything else, alive or dead - and there is no reason why this should in any way be contrary to the laws of nature, or a freak accident one-off; or why this eternally continuing development should stop, in the entire universe, just because human beings have reached their present stage of development, here and now.
Instead, the universe is going on, one could argue, regardless, growing ever more complex and orderly over time; losing entropy, not gaining it.
The Galilean atmosphere
There was, in Galilean times, a connection between real religion and worldly science; the church was a university teaching science, and thereby had a say in anything pertaining to a scientific worldview - as well as the religious one, of course.
And so, when Galileo came along and put the Sun into the center of the solar system, and thereby changing the perspective, the European church, in the name of the Vatican, said: No.
This, perhaps, even though they probably knew he was right - and he wasn't even the first; he was maybe, or later became, simply the most prominent (and perhaps the most brave) - but the revolutionary upset this idea would be caused by displacing the Earth from the center the universe, with all its consequences, such as postulating a force that would pull people and objects towards the center of a globe from all sides (much later termed "gravity") - thus doing away with the concept of an eternal and ubiquitous "above" and "below" - would be to big for the church to handle as yet, and thereby threaten its all-encompassing power to determine the view of the world within its jurisdiction.
However, when likewise courageous sailors had proven, once and for all to see, by sailing around it, that the world was indeed a globe, and that navigating it was mathematically possible (because of course the cat was instantly out of the bag), the church, again in the form of the Vatican, found it not above (or below) itself to extend its jurisdiction over the 'newly discovered' entire globe, and carve up the world longitudely into a Portuguese half (the "East") and a Spanish half (the “West"), thereby make a deeply commercial decision.
Note: The connection between science, religion and economics is not an invention.
But it did not stop there.
Far later, the Austrian physicist and Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger (yes, the one with the cat IN the bag - which he did not suppose to be undead, just impossible to pronounce dead or alive), who in his musings on "What is Life?" proposed that it is not primarily energy that we imbibe with our food, but order, structure, or "negative entropy" - a non-existent thing in itself - to maintain the critical structure of our DNA.
He was then, so it is rumored, forced by his colleagues to recant this assertion, as Galileo had been forced to recant his; for, over the centuries, science itself had become the church, taking over the function of the Vatican in proclaiming the official truth; and, with that, religion had been sidelined - at least in ‘scientific’ societies - to mitigate these truths with their own observance, thus both trading places (including in their role to influence economic decisions).
If this rumor was true, it did not cause much of a stir, as it stayed within the boundaries of the ‘Church of Science’, so to speak; just as religious heresy usually stayed within the walls of the church, when it was still powerful.
However, whenever recants are demanded, something is usually amiss.
Why is religion important? (an aside note)
There is in the human - and probably more or less in every mammal - mind a capacity for belief, just as there are other capacities; and if this capacity is not filled by a religious belief in the ancient sense, it’s filled by another; for as it has been stated, a person that does not believe in God will not believe in nothing, but anything.
You cannot not believe.
For instance, a family pet dog believes that his owners will never hurt and always care for it - barring other experience. That is its only way to predict the future and act accordingly - it will accept “playful” attacks, even against its own instincts, something a purely instinct driven animal would not be capable of (reading 'instinct' as a purely stimulus-response model).
Belief, seen thus, is a way of forecasting the future, which is impossible to predict with certainty, and therefore has to be believed in; this may be why this capacity evolved biologically at all: it allows for action in uncertain circumstances, alleviating the need for less effective, but instinctive reactions, such as "freezing”, “playing dead”, flight or attack.
This is enhanced when the majority of a society has a common belief:
The future becomes more predictable if all concerned act and react in a known and certain way towards a recognized input.
Therefore, religious societies prevail; non-religious societies disappear (meaning real religion, not interchangeable, easily disposable “earthly” ones which depend on falsifiable assumptions).
If this is so, then the development of capacity for belief is an evolutionary advantage, especially for higher developed beings. And not the other way around.
It's a feature, not a bug.
Playing with an Idea
So perhaps, now, thermodynamics may have to be dethroned as the primary driver of the development of the Universe; and, in that function, be replaced by gravity, thereby putting the universal and unbendable first; and, especially, the second law of thermodynamics in second place, as a secondary consequence of gravitation; for without gravity destroying entropy, thermodynamics could not even begin to form the cosmos; for chaos cannot augment chaos, maximum disorder may not be made more disorderly, nor a potential of zero be further decreased.
For something to be destroyed, there first must be something to destroy.
You cannot destroy that what does not (yet) exist.
The Darwinistic concept, the one of objects - or subjects? - of creation evolutionary becoming more complex over time, does not begin (nor will it end) biologically with the conception of life on that remote planet of Earth, but it begins (as far as we know) first physically, then geologically.
And more recently, so it seems, another Nobel laureate, Roger Penrose, has picked up Schrödinger's idea, pretty much confirming it.
Though the sentence "All life on Earth is dependent on photosynthesis" is not quite true (as far as we know, life developed ahead of photosynthesis, near volcanic thermal and chemical hotspots in the deep of the ocean, and acquired photosynthesis later, when already existing life forms cam into contact with ultraviolet sunlight closer to the ocean surface), it certainly depends on negative entropy; which, again, is really a wrong expression, as entropy cannot truly be negative, at least not in its original definition; since neither of its components, energy or absolute temperature, can be negative.
Instead, maybe we should think of the process of spawning and feeding life as reducing or lowering or subtracting entropy from its ever-growing pool - lastly through the actions of gravity.
And instantly the trouble begins
Roger Penrose is paraphrased here as:
"Penrose is saying (…) the infant universe must have been highly ordered. The Second Law of thermodynamics leads him to this conclusion."
Which is always the tripwire - if you do not accept a continuous force, such as gravity, to reduce entropy, and thus increase order, after the beginning of space and time, thus turning a universe into a cosmos while it exists in any shape or form.
Which would also call this picture into question, as this is the work of thermodynamics, i. e. result in rising entropy; while true complexity, according to this idea here, is increased through gravity's reduction of entropy with the first instant of the forming of the cosmos 'In the Beginning' of time; and the force that spawned both the increases in complexity and order is probably the same: Gravity.
"The value of something lies in the arrangement of its atoms." (original quote)
Once more: A Second Opinion
to the opposite
I would like to once more draw attention to the paper of Charles H. Lineweaver and Chas A. Egan on the subject. From the review of a book co-authored by Charles H. Lineweaver "Complexity and the Arrow of Time" (2013):
"In this context the relationship between the thermodynamic concepts of entropy and free energy on the one hand, and complexity on the other, are tantalizing. The universe as a whole seems to have become more and more complicated since its infancy when there were no stars or galaxies and no matter other than hydrogen, beryllium, lithium and helium…"
If I understand the position of Lineweaver and Egan correctly, they postulate that gravity preserves negative entropy; in my view it creates it, and negative entropy is a result of physical forces; not an original state.
So what I am proposing here, more or less, is that increasing entropy or decreasing order and complexity is the result of a thermodynamic process, while decreasing entropy or increasing order and complexity is the result of a gravitational process; during which the minimum for entropy is zero, as it cannot become negative.
The term "negative entropy" or “negentropy”, apparently coined by Erwin Schrödinger himself, possibly to draw attention to the problems discussed here, has now almost become a political term; and for that tripwire to be eliminated, the formula may have to be inverted from (originally) S=Q/T to S=T/Q, which would be consequential.
Necessarily, this implies that the force that shapes the universe, has shaped it and will shape it, gravity, a property of matter, would be the primary force, the protagonist; and thermodynamics, the process that depends on energy or potential created by the primary force, which it cannot do by itself, becomes the secondary force, the antagonist, that mooches off the first.
And we belong to the second.
The action of that primary force, gravity, that which brings forth everything in the universe but matter itself, of which it is a property, is the action of matter, its mass or dead weight, upon itself; it is the active force.
While life, along with any other turnover of the energy created by matter attracting itself, could be seen as the passive force, using the potential the active force provided; whereby increasing (or rather, re-instating) disorder, and again reducing that potential which ultimately lies in the arrangement of matter, what may be termed complexity, though this does not make it more calculable; but it seems that some energy, as an example, lies in the arrangement of electrons, which can be simple or complex.
Any which way, thermodynamic action cannot exist without gravity pre-sourcing it, together with providing the sink, after the first turmoil wears off; and life cannot exit without something to live on and something to live off, both of which have to be provided by the action of gravity over time.
Destroying Potential
All thermodynamic entities, including living beings, must deplete potentials to be able to function: Shut in an airtight pace, humans actively deplete the potential expressed in oxygen availability with every breath until they die - a death they would equally ensure by trying to stop breathing to avoid that depletion.
Similarly, it is said that all thermodynamic entities, i. e. humans, bound as they are by the second law, and the inevitable rise of entropy through action, can produce order only by creating even bigger disorder "somewhere else".
Cleaning up your desk will mess up the room, cleaning up your room will mess up the house, cleaning up your house will mess up the street, an so on. In the end, entropy in the universe will rise.
However, for disorder and entropy to be able to rise, there first must exist some order to destroy; and this itself cannot be the result of thermodynamics, as chaos cannot be made more disorderly and a potential of zero cannot be depleted.
vs. building Potential
Gravity, however, can exist before and without thermodynamics (not its laws) or, indeed, life.
The primary phenomenon enables the secondary; the secondary does not enable the primary.
Gravity feeds thermodynamics
- by providing it with self-augmenting, thus everly increasing potential, and reducing entropy in the process; on the other hand, thermodynamics have no influence on gravity.
It seems to me that, throughout the past 150 years, and beginning with the first attempts to understand the workings of the steam or heat engine in theory, the most brilliant minds have been divided on how to handle the concept of entropy in a given context - as positive, or a negative. This makes me suspect there may be some unremedied flaw in the somewhat arcane, unexplained, almost arbitrary original physical definition of entropy by Clausius, which apparently has since been modified or even partly abandoned.
There always seemed to me to be a bit too much explaining and interpreting needed, to cope with 'unexpected' logical or mathematical results, and that such controversial behavior of a physical property may be an artifact; at least it seems worth while to test this possibility. So what happens if you change the underlying definition of entropy from S=Q/T to S=T/Q, for instance?
Now, over the last couple of decades, along with a bunch of amateurs (such as myself), some professionals have also been quietly probing this scientific dogma.
Some ultimately came up with the exclamation "Gravity is God!", to express that the power of creation, which in the realm of religion is attributed to God the Creator, physically is exerted by an ubiquitous, eternal and almighty force that we call "gravity", which is an inseparable property of matter itself, and which expresses itself to us in the pull that keeps us glued to this earth, all the while using thermodynamics to separate ourselves from it; and which in fact not only keeps this solar system and every galaxy in the universe from disintegrating, but is also the sole cause for the material and physical prerequisitions, such as energy and large atoms, for there to be any thing and any way to even possibly interact thermodynamically at all.
So why has this not taken off?
There are several possibilities.
The whole concept is completely wrong (and need not even be refuted)
- and if not -It runs against the grain of power of the current church of science, which expresses itself psychologically in a cult of eternal debt and inevitable doom, as mentioned in the introduction above, and which always has an economical component as well
- and -There is a theoretical stumbling block that is tripping it up - and this could perhaps be rid of by the inversion of the formula for entropy (which in itself seems arbitrary in a way) - which, if possible and viable, would be as upsetting as Galileo's alleged revision of the formula for speed, which ultimately served to be rid of the forbidden zero in the denominator.
The issue of the (im) possible zero
The “forbidden zero" refers to a physically independent (im)possible zero in the wrong place - for instance, in the denominator of a mathematical expression of a physical formula, in the form of a fraction of two quantities such as
A=B/C:
If there is a theoretical possibility that a physical quantity may independently achieve the value of zero, then that quantity MUST be placed in the numerator - in this case: B
If it is theoretically impossible that a physical quantity may independently achieve the value of zero, then that quantity MUST be placed in the denominator - in this case: C
So the problem might be quite simple, and the solution might be too.
But because it is all- encompassing, getting from one to the other is slightly more convoluted; and as seems to be the general case in thermodynamics, the problem presents itself in a variety of possible expressions.
One being the following:
Life, as any thermodynamic event, needs an external source and sink which it cannot provide for by itself - and the same goes for any mechanical thermodynamic event, too; no matter if within an artificial machine, such as a steam engine, or a natural occurrence, like the evaporation of water on a planet.
Yes, the source is provided for by the sun - but where, then, is that sun's external thermodynamic source - and what external force created the sink?
For not only does the maintenance of a living being, or a machine, a planet or a solar system involve thermodynamics; so does their original and ongoing creation
Going further, the external source and sink needed for the thermodynamics involved in the creation, and the energetic maintenance, of a solar system of any planet must, as always, be independently provided from outside - just as those for the galaxy it is contained in, and finally for the entire universe - which means that either there is physically something outside of the universe which it interacts with - or that the sources and sinks necessary for the thermodynamics of the universe must spring from within the universe itself - and therefore their creation cannot be thermodynamic in nature.
This involves requirements, for example, that this 'non-thermodynamic' force, which must spontaneously and ubiquitously create sources and sinks within the universe, be complementary to thermodynamics in every way; such as that it is devoid of prerequisitions, self- augmenting, and involves no turnover of external energy, and that the conservation of matter and energy may not apply.
And, of course, it must reduce entropy; it must, in other words, create order - and energy! Along with complexity - by reducing or eliminating chaos.
Reduce it to what level? Zero?
That is where the question of the formula for entropy sets in.
In its original presentation of S=Q/T (as a measure for the further inability to do work, or live, as your finite source and sink are inevitably depleted), it can reach zero (minimum entropy, or maximum potential) only when the energy content of whatever you are observing reaches zero - and on the other hand it reaches a non-definable maximum at or near the temperature of empty space.
Which does not make a lot of physical sense.
The force which creates maximum order by separating all something from all nothing, collecting it in pinpoints and emptying space in the process, is called gravity.
Its only prerequisition is the existence of something (what we call "matter") - and without anything, musings on nothing would be pointless (and there would be no-one to exercise the musing); it is ubiquitous, eternal, and even almighty, as everything (except matter itself) that exists, including energy (all of which is created by the self-acceleration of matter), is brought forth by its action; one could argue, even time and space.
Continuously, over time, gravity enhances not only the order within, but, with that order, the complexity of the universe it rules; up to, but not stopping at, bringing forth sentient life - which prompted more than one scientific mind to extol: Gravity is God.
At least, it could be termed 'God's physical tool'.
And so there exist two scientific or religious narratives, that contradict one another:
Humans, their surroundings and their predecessors, down to the single cell and the warm watery clay it sprung from - as well as the planet that brought forth the heated watery clay, and the preconditions for it to be - all evolved blindly, and randomly, from more primitive forms of existence and being (or, as Genesis puts it, were purposefully created, and in that order):
The general trajectory of development is upward toward less chaos, and more complexity, order, and potential - ultimately, though, ending in a black hole singularity.
Humans, their surroundings and their predecessors came to be (or were purposefully created as lesser, or flawed, images of Gods or God), then were expelled from a Paradise or Mount Olympus at the end of their development for being imperfect, thus doomed to a sorrowful existence in a sinful, deteriorating world of inescapably rising entropy, from which there is no material redemption, though perhaps spiritually for the soul, through death:
The general trajectory of development is downward toward more disorder, rising chaos and diminishing complexity and potential, en route to the universal heat death.
Well, as reality, within a real world, can hold no real contradictions, the solution lies in the circumstance that these conditions are not really mutually exclusive; instead, both, i.e. increasing complexity, order, and potential (i. e. decreasing chaos) and increasing chaos (i. e. decreasing complexity, order, and potential) exist side by side in the universe in the form of gravitationally vs. thermodynamically induced processes (in which gravitation represents the primary process, as it depends on less preconditions - in fact, solely on the existence of matter; and thermodynamics represent the secondary, complementary processes, depending on the existence of matter AND the energy or potential first brought forth by gravitational processes).
For the narrative, this means that humans, their surroundings and their predecessors, all the way down to the most primary and primitive atom, neither evolved randomly or by chance (for which ever way you look at it, both the time in the universe is insufficient, by far, to create purely random, but viable forms of physical existence by chance, and the material laws of physics, chemistry and biology force both physical and biological evolution into very narrow roads), nor were they created as less complex forms of pre-existing higher forms of existence, as the fossil records show these did not exist (and, even if life on this particular planet was indeed seeded by a superior alien life form, that only kicks the can up the road).
Instead, humans (and every other form of living, or even dead matter) inevitably came into existence by the one force that has been raising the complexity of that matter throughout the universe from the beginning of time, within the boundaries that be, while then engaging in the thermodynamic process of the destruction of that same "given" complexity; so as to be able to exist, as thermodynamic entities, alive or dead.