Essay Abstract

If we scale down ourselves to the size of simple bacteria, and look at its processes, we can find that its entire existence relies on three basic abilities. One of them is the feeding process by which it accumulates an "internal energy" for the time when food is scarce, the second is the skill to adapt its basic processes when environment changes, and the third is the "regeneration" process by which it self-replicates when conditions permit. With these three uncomplicated strategies it is very likely that billions of years from now, us will still find bacteria on Earth. And even if our Sun will cease to exist, somewhere else in the galaxy, where similar conditions exist, we assume that the same type of bacteria will continue its existence in a cycle that could last forever. If we can change our scale from the size of the entire Universe to the smaller size of the gravitational particles, what basic processes we could uncover during this journey? At the largest scale we may find what the Big Bang theory tells us, which is that everything had a rough start few billions ago and everything will end few more billion years down the road. However, it is strange that uncomplicated bacteria did discover a way to last forever while the largest structures have their dismissal built into their dawn. Or it is possible that everything we see, stars and galaxies, atoms and quarks, are engaged in a cosmic dance that uses the same basic processes of "regeneration" to fight their inexorable fate... This essay proposes a new theory which views all the matter and all the energy, linked together in a layered context-based hierarchy, structure which makes it possible for everything we see to continue their existence and evolve for eons to come.

Author Bio

VASILE COMAN is the founder of eSkill, an online testing service, and XCLSoft, a consulting company. Vasile's current practice is focused on the enterprise architecture and the way it is applied in practice. He has more than 15 years experience in the IT industry. He held technical, consulting and management positions with companies like Spyglass, eSkill, Instrumentation Lab, Cigna, and PRTM. Since 1990, Vasile developed the Dynamically Stable Enterprise, an advanced enterprise architecture concept, that draws from his knowledge in aeronautics, software development, and management consulting. He holds an MS in Aeronautics from the Polytechnic Institute, Bucharest, Romania.

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  • Post #2

Mr. Coman,

To begin my comment on a positive note, your essay is very well and clearly written, and it is obvious that you have given a great deal of thought to these issues. On a less positive note, however, some of your ideas diverge rather dramatically from currently accepted and well verified physical principles, without offering sufficient justification for doing so. In the game of billiards, there is a rule that even while trying to make a very difficult shot a person must keep at least one foot on the floor. I think that perhaps in striving for too ambitious a goal in your essay you've violated this rule of keeping at least one foot on the floor. If you could find ways to relate or to "tie in" your ideas more closely with established scientific principles, however, it would be interesting to see where they might lead. Good luck!

Mr. Smith,

Thank you for your kind words. Your comments are really appreciated.

Regarding the lack of grounding in my essay I think that it comes from the confusion it exists when we try to define the basic concept of information. To use your billiard analogy, we need to "land" two "feet" on the ground to define information:

On one "foot" we can see information and its processing as the most important attributes of our organizations. However, a year ago, Grady Booch said in an interview for Scientific American titled "Software's Dirty Little Secret" that "In other disciplines, engineering in particular, there exist treatises on architecture. This is not the current case in software, which has evolved organically over only the past few decades. All software-intensive systems have an architecture, but most of the time it's accidental, not intentional. This has led to the condition of most software programming knowledge being tribal and existing more in the heads of its programmers than in some reference manual or publicly available resource." As a result, not much grounding here... and it comes from one of the top experts in the field.

In our practice we have been very successful "anchoring on the ground" the concepts of information and organization presented in the essay. On this topic, we are presenting two papers this fall. One paper will be presented at BICA 2009 AAAI Conference in Washington and is titled: Back to the Basics - Redefining Information, Knowledge, Intelligence, and Artificial Intelligence Using Only the Adaptive Systems Theory. The other paper will be presented at TePRA, a conference about robotics and its title is: A Generic Information-Centric Architecture for Robotic Systems Derived from a New Theory for Adaptive Systems.

The other "foot," which extends the same information concept and its processing to the entire Universe I agree that it is based on a very bold assumption. However, I have a hard time to see some solid "ground" in current theories where I can land this "foot." The way I see it, there is some basic confusion when comes to the relation between information and the atomic world. I will give only two examples:

(1) If we define information as an interaction, black holes can easily "escape" information, contrary to what is believed (in 1970's physicist Stephen Hawking asserted that any information sucked inside a black hole would be permanently lost). Gravity and magnetism fields can carry information that can be "exchanged" (including "escape") with other external objects with no problem. The big difference is in energy level required.

(2) The other example is the huge effort researchers spend in quantum computing field. Experiments show that a worm called C. elegans has only 1000 cells and 302 neurons and is more adaptive and reliable than any complex, multi-billion, information-based military equipment we ever built. This shows that we still need to uncover how basic stuff works before we jump to qubits.

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  • Post #4

To eat but not excrete is hardly a winning strategy. A mouse is every bit the miracle of life that is an elephant, but the elephant is bigger - and not merely a bigger mouse. To postulate that conservative inverse-square fields exhibit interchageable behavior is simply, demonstrably wrong. Charge separation sparks, magnetic fields do no (1/r^3 but no sparking even close in), and gravitation is a universal pat hand. Bacteria are vigorously self-mixing by diffusion and Brownian motion, a big pot of stew requires physical stirring or iti burns, galaxies are deeply churned by magnetohydrodynamics. It ain't the same stuff.

Hi Al,

You've been short, so I'll be short...

Eating is only one way to "accumulate" energy to face uncertainty. Other way is to go to work and save money, or evolve towards "optimizing" an arrangement for your electrons (like the element of Carbon) which is very stable...

Regarding comparison between the sparks you have between electrical charge and the attraction you have between two magnets I agree is wrong, but not for the same reason you mention. In the charge case we know we have a PHYSICAL separation of negative and positive charges, while in the magnetic field case we know the magnetic monopoles ARE ALWAYS BOUND TOGETHER IN THE ATOM (they are just arranged differently to create the field at the macro level). Assuming that we are able to separate the magnetic monopoles physically (create a different number of magnetic monopoles positive and negative on two separate magnets or electromagnets) I am quite sure you will see a lot more than a spark. This could be true especially when we don't even know how to separate them in the first place...

Regarding mixing, stewing, or churning I don't think it is that important...

Again Al, thanks for your input.

Mr. Coman,

I liked your essay even though it is greatly at odds with well established physical theories. I am often wondering if other "fuzzier" domains like economics and sociology can be also made mathematically rigorous like physics, and what would be the way of doing it? Your essay provided me with good food for thought. If you are interested, check out my essay: "Heuristic rule for..." and comment on my proposed physics principles. Good luck to you in this contest.

PS: I can make one suggestion for your essay: on Table 1, the temperature scale of the socio-economic realm should be "1/(interest rate)" which follows from simple thermodynamical arguments on the market.

6 days later

Dear Florin,

I do believe we can make domains like economics mathematically rigorous. The way I see it goes back to how you find optimum when everything around you changes, and each change can trigger other changes. This is what I see it as the adaptability problem for a system that operates in an environment populated by other similar systems. Obviously, just because we don't have the mathematical tools to model such problems that doesn't mean they are not possible. In the last few years I've developed on an information-centric model that models organizations and could be a starting point. You can find some ideas into a paper I'll present in November this year at the AAAI conference.

Regards,

Vasile

4 days later

Dear Vasile Coman,

All biological matters that are live have cosmic connectivity. For example, the endocrine system in correlation with super-hormones is been observed as influenced by environmental factors such as: Biological clock, gravitational waves etc.

Thereby we need a Coherent-cyclic cluster-matter universe model to explain this and I hope that the emerging physics from this model may resolve the existing paradoxes in physics and may explain the cosmic connectivity of live biological matters by tuning up the existing chemical principles and may emerge with new biochemical phenomena to provide solutions in healthcare. I think there is difference between 'stratum' and 'layer'.

jayakar

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