Essay Abstract

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice (quoting Robert Frost). If entropy holds true for the universe, it will be ice, and it will be a natural goal, one shared by all living and inanimate things, according to a new theory by physicist, Jeremy England. Beyond this "mindless" law for humans are goals and endeavors that touch on life's origins and life's meaning.

Author Bio

James Hoover is retired from the Boeing Company in Huntington Beach, California, working as a systems engineer. His career in aerospace stretches back over twenty years and involves cost analysis, cost modeling and logistics research. In that span of years he has taught college courses in education, economics, computer science and English. Before his aerospace career, he taught high school. He recently published a science fiction novel called Extraordinary Visitors and publishes essays on university websites regarding his scientific interests. His personal interests include studies in particle physics, cosmology and interplanetary technology. He has advanced degrees in Economics and English.

Download Essay PDF File

Hi, While the topic of the essay contest was wandering towards a goal, this essay seems to have interpreted that literally as it seems to wander and not arrive at a clear objective.

    James Lee Hoover

    You thinking is impressive. The section 3 Emergence of Life in my entry seems to be along the lines you are following. You seem to have thought about things in which I'm interested.

    I have written papers on cosmology and suggested a TOE. Summaries an be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCc0mfCssV32dDhDgwqLJjpw

    particularly the video on CMB temperature because it talks about your topic and how life's increasing rate of entropy can be maintained - neither fire nor ice.

    The videos are easier. The papers are referenced if you want the math heavy versions.

    Perhaps you could comment on the STOE model.

    Where do you publish? Links?

    email: jchodge@frontier.com

    John Hodge

    Thank you, Harry, for taking time to look at my essay. I would seriously be interested in how you would wander toward a coherent solution to the puzzle. Perhaps I lack the ability to clearly state the tie of mathematical laws to humankind's drift toward coherent goals and meaning, or perhaps that drift itself lacks the coherence the aim of this essay seeks. Again, I appreciate your interest.

    Given the title, I didn't expect to enjoy this essay but I actually thought it was a neat account of higher level unfoldings rarely discussed. Teleology is the 'explanation of phenomena by the purpose they serve rather than by postulated causes', so in one sense talk of entropy as something we derive purpose from is controversial in as much as its controversial to derive purpose and actions from evolution. But here I think the causal elements of entropy that may explain our actions, outside of the purposes we conceive in our head, is interesting. Thanks for submitting.

      James Lee Hoover

      Thanks for responding in my essay.

      The "How the Universe works" videos are the currently accepted model. The trouble is these models (GR and QM) are inconsistent and each has many observational anomalies. Some of the anomalies are described in only ad hoc additions. The STOE corresponds to both cosmology and the small of light. It has made 3 predictions about the pioneer anomaly and the theory predicted the result of an experiment in photon diffraction. It has also explained many observation anomalies. Physics philosophy suggest the STOE to be a candidate for a replacement model.

      Hodge

      Thank you James for your kind comment on my essay getting to the pointy end of this contest question. I certainly found your entry particularly interesting at the level at which it addressed the question though, and found it quite unique, which reinforces the value of having contests like these.

      Good Essay sir, you started with "Does mindless mathematical law rule the universe, entropy bringing the universe's end in ice, as energy diminishes and is no longer dissipated - a heat death in trillions of years? ".................. ended with" Still, goals of open-minded, intelligent creatures must invest all ventures with facts and contingencies: for example, what affect does an1.8 billion light-years across supervoid have on a cosmologist's views and are thermodynamic systems in question open, closed or isolated?"

      So some questions for further analysis.....

      What will happen to all the energy dissipated by all energy sources in the Universe...

      Will that energy go infinities of space in the Universe....?

      What about enthalpy of the system?

      Is it an open Universe you are proposing.... ?

      Will the Universe required to have an end ...

      6 days later

      It is my thinking that what makes this possible is an open world. In my entry I outline a quantum form of open universe. It is similar to Prigogine who argued for open thermodynamics.

      As for fire or ice, in the long run it is ice. The universe will exponentially expand to become ever colder and dark. Already we are in the dying out phase of stellar formation. Stellar formation is about 10% what it was 10 billion years ago. It will be 10% reduced in another 10 billion years. Already this galaxy is populated by about 60% (as I recall) red dwarfs, and in 10 billion years that will be over 90%. These stars will endure for 100s of billions to trillions of years. These will form the last embers and dying sparks.

      In the short run we will die from fire. The sun will heat up and Earth will in a billion or two billion years become Venus #2. In 5-6 years the sun will swell up and potentially burn the Earth up.

      Your essay was good. Cheers LC

      Your comment on my paper's page:

      Paul,

      We posit some of the same mysteries, issues and questions but I tend to leave nature in the realm of a process we are left with and God in the realm of faith to embody what we can't seem to fathom. Entropy is a natural process which seems to govern the animate and inanimate -- the tiny and the colossal.

      An interesting read.

      Jim Hoover

      Dear James,

      Your concept of God is common among those who don't actually believe in the actual existence of God. The general belief is that as science advances all of the things we currently can't fathom will be explained and then there will be no need for a concept of God. The problem with that concept is that there are two possibilities. One is that God exists and created the universe and the other is that God does not exist and the universe came about in some other way. Putting blinders on oneself and only looking at and trying to work for justification of only one of the two possibilities will likely end in false results because they will be founded on the wrong assumptions. Only a balanced approach that honestly looks at and analyzes both possibilities and looks for all the information that can be found that would support both possibilities and also all the information that would be against both possibilities can after full analysis be expected to be able to likely give a truly valid answer to the question. As an example, suppose that God does exist and that he created the universe and everything in it, but suppose that he made it such that it works automatically, so that you find that it appears to you that no God is needed. If God made it for some purpose, such as to create a body for himself and left signs of that purpose hidden in the structure of the universe in such a way that you would not see them unless you were purposely looking for them and also gave explanations of his purpose to certain men who then wrote them down in a book for people to read and get an understanding of his purpose, which included that he made us to become parts of his body which will live eternally in a new universe after this one is destroyed by him when he has all of his body members made, but we must choose to become members in a certain way that he has provided for us to do so, you would likely not read that book because you would think that you have the answer that you desire to have. The result would be that you would spend a lot of time coming to a conclusion that would leave you out of the whole purpose of the universe and the life that can be had after this one. A true scientist looks at and analyzes all of the possibilities and then makes decisions based on all the information available. Even then he always keeps his mind open to new evidence that could possibly change that decision.

      I spent over twenty two years looking for that answer in man's science as that advanced over the years and in other sources all of which together ultimately led me to understandings that go well beyond man's current understandings of how the world works. I then, by what I at that time thought was just by chance, happened to open and read a part of the Christian New Testament scriptures and found to my amazement that it contained information that was not currently known by man in this world. That a book written about two thousand years ago contained such advanced information caused me to decide to read it all and I have since found much more information, some of which I still don't yet completely understand about many different areas of knowledge. I also found that the Old Testament contains similar information. I included a small amount of that information in my paper, but the paper was too short to include very much of that information in it.

      When I first started my quest to determine whether God exists or not, I found it relatively easy to believe in a natural universe because the accepted theory at that time was the steady state theory, which held that the universe has always existed and that stars would eventually burn out and explode and that the dust from that explosion would eventually come back together to form new stars, etc. Evolution was also easy to believe because living creatures were said to be composed of cells that were filled with protoplasm and cytoplasm and some mysterious unknown life force. This sounded simple enough to possibly come about naturally and evolve. As the steady state theory was ultimately disproven and it became evident that the universe had a beginning and that living creatures were made of cells that were actually very small factories that produced very complex structures that are even today beyond man's ability to make, etc., it became evident that the universe could not have created living creatures because it tends to break down such structures instead of making them and since the universe had a beginning, that also fit into the concept that it was created by God. I still did not fully accept the existence of God until I saw the information that was provided in the scriptures about him and the world that he created. Since then I have also come to understand other problems with concepts such as evolution. As an example, If you use a DNA copy error rate and a positive result rate that are great enough to possibly allow the production by evolution of all of the types of living creatures that have ever existed, those rates would cause an exponential increase in evolution due to the population increase of all of the creatures, so that today we should see many major evolutionary changes happening all around us, but we don't.

      You are right that entropy is a natural process and that it governs both animate (living creatures) and inanimate (nonliving structures) and applies to things of all sizes. The main difference between the living and nonliving things is that the nonliving things behave completely according to entropy while the living creatures apply some of the motion (energy) that they use to build very complex molecular machines and thus work contrary to entropy in that respect. The nonliving things don't do this. Of course, living creatures use more motion than they place into the building of these complex structures, so they still can't completely escape entropy. All of the fossil fuels that man is currently using and has used in the past are the remnants of that stored motion that living creatures have produced over a long time. The natural world does not generally build and store such motion. Instead it tends to break down and disperse any such stored motion over time.

      I looked at your paper and found some of the usual attempts to justify the concept that the universe somehow created life. The idea that entropy could drive matter to acquire life-like physical properties ascribes an intelligence to inanimate matter that it does not possess. Inanimate matter can only act in accordance to its built in structural information which means that it behaves in accordance with entropy and tends to average the motion contents of all entities in the system toward the center or average of their motion amplitude range and tends to disperse evenly throughout available space. Larger entities that are more subject to gravity tend to be pulled together by it, etc. There is a long way from matter that is placed in an environment with a lot of motion forming clumps and the generation of complex protein machines and DNA molecules. If that is a natural tendency, why do we not see naturally produced protein molecules and DNA molecules everywhere? The planet Mercury receives a great amount of energy that needs to be dissipated. It should, therefore, by the theory that you support generate a very great amount of life on that planet to help to dissipate all that energy. The same could be said about Venus. If that theory really worked it would be very good because if I made a kettle of chili, every time I warmed it up it would reproduce and automatically make more for me in order to dissipate the applied heat, so I would never need to make more. I might, of course, have to add some dirt or something for it to convert into more chili every so often or something like that. One of the problems with the concept that life would form as a natural process to aid dissipation of energy is that building complex molecular structures is not energy dissipation. It is energy storage. Nonliving matter would tend to dissipate all applied energy, but living creatures would store much of the applied energy into the complex molecular structures that they make. This would actually hinder energy dissipation, not aid it.

      Evolution does not intrinsically increase complexity in living creatures. It would only support successful adaptation to the environment. If the environment were to change so that no creature larger than an ant could survive, we would all die out, but ants would still survive and that would be evolution in action even though it would be supporting less complex living creatures over the more complex ones.

      The earth's environment could support the 7+ billion people on this planet if man would stop burning the fossil fuels and use solar energy to generate needed power. If this was done properly, man would take energy that hits the earth from the sun and needs to be dissipated anyway and use it to produce the motion that is needed and then allow it to dissipate back into space normally. This would also get rid of the pollution problems.

      It took me quite a while to fully accept the evidence that the universe and life were created by God, so I can understand why those who desire a natural answer to the question of the source of the universe and of life would tend to rationalize some way to look at the world in a way that would support that result, but it is evident that entropy works against life which is why all living creatures have machinery to repair the damages that it causes to them. If the big bang actually happened to create the universe, its cause cannot be discerned because all of man's theories break down before getting all the way back to the actual beginning of the expansion. With two possibilities (created by God or by some natural occurrence) and no way to determine which it is, any reasonable person would say that it is a fifty percent chance either way. The only thing that could change that understanding would be if the universe's structure indicates that it was created by an intelligent being or by natural random processes. In that respect its complex multilevel hierarchical structure implies that much intelligence went into its construction, especially into the production of living creatures. To me an attempt to convince people that the thing (entropy) that works to break down and destroy living creatures and the things that they make actually is what works to create life is the ultimate misinformation campaign. Of course, each has the right to have his own delusion if he desires to do so. I just desire to know and understand how things really work too much to continue down that path when it is now so obvious that it is a dead end path.

      I find it interesting that we are coming to the end of a complete cycle of understanding. If you go back into history in the United States, when the country was more Christian oriented, someone with the naturalist philosophy would have been considered either very naïve or foolish. At that time there was little scientific evidence either way. Later scientists bought into that philosophy which gave it much credence in the intellectual world and it got to the point that those who believed in God were considered very naïve or foolish. When I came on the scene, I did find that most Christians that tried to disprove evolution did not understand its concepts, so that led me to tend to agree with the scientists of the time. As time went on and the true complexities of the world and the life in it became more and more known, it became apparent that a natural explanation was not practical. Now I find that some scientists are purposely trying to reinterpret the facts of how things actually work in the world to continue to support the naturalist philosophy when the scientific evidence is actually showing it to be wrong. In addition to that I am now finding some Christians who have gone into scientific fields such as genetics and biology who recognize the problems and are beginning to publically address them. The main good thing that has come out of all of this is that science has greatly advanced in the process of trying to prove it in one direction or the other and in the end God still wins because his works prove him.

      Sincerely,

      Paul

      6 days later

      James Lee Hoover,

      An informative and easy to read essay. You note that "the most pervasive natural force permeating all aspects of human experience is entropy. It perhaps has the largest impact on why the universe works and why it supports life." In this sense it is interesting that Lee Smolin* pointed out that

      " Gravity subverts ideas about thermodynamics ... gravitationally bound systems are anti-thermodynamic."

      *See my 2013 FQXi essay: Gravity and the Nature of Information

      In this sense I found England's idea that entropy drives matter to acquire life-like physical properties interesting, but self-replication to support the goal of dissipating ever more energy is a big step. I'll study his paper.

      You say "our pursuit of goals depends on the contextual occasions of life", which is compatible with neural-pathway-based dependence in my essay.

      And your statement: "our bodies contain the stuff of the universe, elements born and reborn - sometimes, animate; sometimes in animate." brings to mind the Santayana quote I mentioned elsewhere:

      "All of our sorrow is real, but the atoms of which we are made are indifferent."

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

      • [deleted]

      Hi Jim:

      Thanks for reading my essay and thoughtful comments.I would greatly appreciate it if you could please provide your valuable rating to my essay.

      I very much enjoyed reading your paper as well. Your paper asks the important questions and addresses all the key goals, purposes of human life beyond the mere survival of species on this planet earth. The mainstream science has to go a long way to see beyond the inanimate matter and biological-only evolution to recognize deeper cosmic and universal realities. I am particularly impressed by your expressed thoughts in your paper -

      "So we use these piecemeal guides of mathematical laws, hoping, like a piece of life's puzzle, we can put them all together into a universal whole. We wonder about ourselves, a living, breathing scalar example of universal things that live and die, achieving this cycle on a much smaller and less cosmic scale than a galaxy, composed of stars, planets, black holes, and gases, or the entire universe."

      The key theme of my paper is to provide a quantitative scientific model to address the above with empirical evidence and test-ability in future.

      Best Regards

      Avtar Singh

        Dear Jim:

        Thank you so much for your kind consideration and valuable feed back on my essay. I appreciate it deeply.

        Best Regards

        Avtar Singh

        James

        Thanks for this interesting essay. It was very great to hear about Englands ideas of a relation between the second law of thermodynamics and self reproduction. A nice essay.

        Regards __________________ John-Erik

        Dear Hoover,

        I really enjoyed your essay and thought it was very important that you discussed England's dissipation driven adaptation which I think is a very insightful step forward in the right direction. If you have time, check out my essay. You might find the section "An Argument from Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics" in my submission "Intention is Physical" interesting. I show how the emergence of intention and purpose, can be combined with England's idea for adaptation under one single set of idea. Thanks.

        Natesh

        5 days later

        Some say the world began in fire

        Some say in ice

        From what I've tasted of desire

        There are many who would favor fire

        But if the world would begin yet twice

        I think that ice

        Would also surely suffice...

        Hi James

        Well written and pertinent essay again. I've always has issues with entropy as it falls apart with the 're-ionization' we've found and in any recycling model, which is what I've shown wide evidence supports more consistently than the so called 'Concordance' Model. That means it would be increasing 'ice' before going through the hottest 'fire' (a quasar) before the next iteration, so even 'end' may not be the right concept!

        However I like England's approach, and yours to discussing it. In particular I agree and have written about matter being condensed by shear (first discussed by the present Royal Astronomer in quasar jets in the 1960's). Did you know that the galaxy mass function has grown significantly over the last 12bn years?! I assign that to the fresh NEW matter condensed and mixed in with each re-ionization ('recycling').

        Very nice essay, interesting and high up the bunch I think.

        Best of luck

        Peter

        Thanks for the ping Jim..

        Too tired to comment intelligently now, but I read your essay.

        Comments tomorrow, most likely.

        Best,

        JJD

        I'll start anew here..

        I liked your essay, but I didn't know about England's work until reading it. The premise as stated seems a bit too simplistic, but a generalization of that idea could explain a lot. It tends to be the non-linear aspects of entropy that drive life's adaptation, Jim, because life tries to actively exploit the niches which are boundary regions, places of higher fractal dimension (roughness) and so on. The irregular regions are a haven for living creatures, because they provide a significant gradient over a short interval.

        What most people don't realize is that non-linear entropy, and non-linear electrodynamics for that matter, creates islands of order amid the chaos - or rather regimes of order that alternate with chaotic states. To a degree; one can equate converging and diverging regions with purely real vs complex or hyper-complex states with terms that anti-commute or anti-associate as part of the equation. Anyhow; life exploits that to survive, finding a region where a proper mix of order and chaos prevails.

        Did you know that if you overlay a bifurcation diagram on the Mandelbrot Set, it has a branching point every place the Set folds back on itself. But the really cool part is that the islands of order in the chaotic regions of the bifurcation map correspond precisely with the mini-Mandelbrots in the tail region of M. There is a place where all the trajectories seem to be drawn to converge at one point, and this location is called a Misiurewicz point. That place is of special interest to me, and is currently a subject of research. Would you believe a BEC formation quantum critical point and a Black Hole event horizon?

        Of course; that explains the supervoid too.

        All the Best,

        Jonathan