Steve,
This conversation is so fun and exhilarating, all I can react with is grateful appreciation that I've lived long enough to experience it. I look forward to understanding your physics~cosmology knowledge, but have some distressing news for you. I hope you are sitting in a comfortable safe chair that you will not fall out off as I explain. It is this: you may be a physics~cosmology Specialist, but you are in fact ... a General Systems Thinker. I am sorry to be the one to break the news to you, but it is a fact.
:-))))
(Oh that felt good to write. I am laughing. Hope you are too!!! Intellectual pursuits can really be enjoyable for more than the great 'Eureka' moments that some are fortunate to experience when they discover wonderful scientific insights. Good natured humor balances the intensities of the huntings for knowledge that so many of us are dedicated to. The pressure of 'the hunt' needs a human safety valve of joy and humor ... to balance the intensity.)
Your latest post identifies a side problem in modern science and education. There is SO MUCH data now in all the different fields of study, that to become competent and have viable skills in the separate professions to succeed in life, we have drifted away from the equally important thing. That is: for a well rounded mind, it is important - I would even say crucial and especially important - to be exposed to "other fields / other specialties / other perspectives". It is almost the same way that the fine accomplishment of electromagnetic civilization ... great knowledge .. and ARTIFICIALLY LIT ... night time skies, have extended the hours of a solar revolution to accomplish things within ... we have produced 'light pollution' ... which also affects the mindset of humans.
The fog of light has unintentionally washed out the observed dark-night sky for most people. Science may show beautiful Hubble pictures of what is out there in the universe. Some people may hear about tehe new discovered details of the cosmos. But they have lost .. first person experience ... by seeing stars in a dark moonless night sky ... and really grasped their "place in the universe".
Narrow highly focused limited exposure education results in a similar thing .. loss of 'presence of place' in the expanded knowledge environment around them, around any individual, or group. It becomes more and more difficult to understand, let alone appreciate, the RELATED CO-PRESENT information environment we all CO-INHABIT together.
You asked some posts earlier, what might have set me on my mental exploration journey. It was my mother, Lillian Rose, who told me as a grade school child, that nothing is one thing and one thing only. Her analogy: a tree. (we had a lovely garden and small vegetable farm that the family tended around our home)
She pressed me to reach for and appreciate totality. I can only paraphrase her original words: "It is really important, Jamie (my informal name), to see all the qualities of a tree. To know Life, you have got to see it as a farmer would see it .. for the crop growing, or the land having enough water and nutrients; it gives shade shelter on a hot day; a botanist sees the cells structures, the wood, the leaves breathing CO2 and exhaling O2; a carpenter sees potential timber framing planks, or pieces to make a table or spoon; a bird sees the branch split to hold a nest and bring young into the word, and food .. where insects crawl and eat into; a sculptor artist sees shape-able material to carve into things of beauty; the seed .. that can survive dormancy and yet produce - in the right environment conditions (same as a human 'social community of diversity'), new trees in the future; and chop the wood just-so, break it all down into destroyed structure .. and we produce PAPER ... a rebound re-ordering of the wood from pulp. Know ... -all- of it, Jamie .. the so many 'more' relations inherent in the simplistic reductionist thing~word 'tree'. You have to do your best to be aware of -all of it-, as best you can. It's important."
So I have her to thank. And her boy friend in the 1930's who would become my father, Milton Rose. Among his friends was a brilliant mathematician, Edward Barankin, who was Einstein's grad student for two successive years (no other worked that long with Dr Einstein). And she, as a young non-science trained teenager/young woman, was fortunate to have attended a few parties at Einstein's home, hearing him play violin, listening to the wide ranging conversations they all had together. My father died early, and my mother wasn't a scientist, but she was alert and aware and bright. And her message to me, would be what I would tell every young human, growing into the world. Be open to more than the local, more than the 'familiar', more than the habitual.
Apparently, Steve, someone implanted a similar appreciation in you. Ask questions and explore alternative information and perspectives. "Conventional ideas" -may- prove well done already .. true and reliable. But there is life-filling 'more' to recognize. Which, Steve, :-) brings me to your latest post.
Sometimes, the old phrase, "could not see the forest, because there were so many trees" .. is true. [and another example to add to the list above :-) ]
Your paragraph (5th I think), that starts "Entropy, heat spreads out. ..." is magnificently stated. The fact of centralization~accumulation .. towards MORE ORDER .. in the cosmos, is so obvious, so right-in-our-field-of-observation, and it is a phenomena so oppositionally counter to the (unchallengeable?) "max entropy" rule that physics/chemistry/math thinkers place as 'absolute' .. no one tries to examine or discuss it.
Oh, there are researchers who discuss complexity and emergence... but too few, if any, in astrophysics~cosmology. (except for her the recent hypotheses of Dark Matter; but I am not convinced of the arguments/measures; in any event there is no compelling modeled way to get from Dark Matter to biological emergence). So I totally know your frustration that "nobody wants to talk to me about complexity". [Can you see me? I am raising my hand! "I do!"]
And I will ... but for the immediate day, I will leave it for a next installment of our most excellent conversation. I am quietly chuckling to myself since reading your post. You, the non-biologist, promoting the notion of Darwinian essentialness in the basic dynamics of the universe. Me, a biologist, promoting the notion of examining afresh inner properties of thermodynamics (non-biological relations), that have been overlooked in descriptions and math models. That is laugh-inducing. Not because either of us is wrong in deductions, but I think we form a 'well-formed set', a tautology ... where you point tome me and I point to you, in support of our respective knowledge sets and understandings.
How wonderful.
I need to remark on several important things you wrote: A) I loved your depiction of science methodology as exploration of a crime scene. In our case, there is no 'crime' but exploring the results of events, and back building the history from what's left, is indeed the wise way - if not the only way - to proceed.
B) You identified that behaviors~processes on ALL LEVELS of organization proceed OPPOSITE to conventional ideas of 'entropy' (as the only cross tier driver of events), so that complex entities ...of which stars are a premier ... happen everywhere. Science has so far avoided addressing that pervasiveness .. in the
PRIMITIVE levels of existence. Most thinkers stop because, prior modellers said .. its because of 'gravity' (with the fear mongering admonition similar to old maps that identified "Terra Incognita" and the added warning : "Here be dragons" (don't go there!! we don't really know .. but we think it is probably -dangerous-!)
:-)))))
God bless, Steve. Until next postings.
(This is SO terrific. The best shared intellectual conversation I have had in DECADES.)
Jamie
Feb 15 2018 NV USA - pacific coast time ; :-) you are a morning ahead of me !)
