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"Classical physics, our gift from Newton, is our world written in the passive voice: rivers flow, rocks fall, planets orbit, stars arc in the space-time deformed by their masses. There are no doings, only happenings: myriad, miraculous, but brute.
I broach 78 years as I sit to write, having angled to the kitchen to pick out a nectarine to eat. Yesterday, I clambered aboard the “Poised Realm,” my 22-foot boat, to skiff across to the Crane Dock on Orcas Island to drive to Eastsound, Washington, to buy the nectarine I just retrieved as an afternoon snack. My heart thumps a bit, my own human heart. Most of my readers have a human heart as well.
Just where did my human heart, the nectarine, my kitchen, the boat, and Eastsound come from since the brute happening of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago ?
Since Newton, we have turned to physics to assess reality: what is REAL. But physics will not tell us whence we come, how arrived, why the human heart exists, nor why I can buy nectarines in Eastsound, let alone what “buying” is.
We will talk of these things, for there is more to know than we know and more to say than we can say.
We are in a world beyond physics.
We are in a world of living creatures that construct themselves. Yet we lack the concepts to say it. A tree, from a seed, builds itself, launches itself upward toward the sun. We see it and do not yet know what to say. A forest builds itself, rooted, branched, quiet, as if longing. Our biosphere too grows in diversity into what it can become and has done so for some 3.7 billion years. A giraffe ? Who knew three billion years ago ? None could have known. And nectarines: Who could then have said ?
We estimate that 50 to 90 percent of the 10 to the power of 22 (1022) stars in the known universe have planets cycling them. If, as I believe and will say, life is abundant, the universe is rife with becoming, based on physics but beyond any physics we know.
The concept of perhaps 10 puissance 22 biospheres staggers me. Yes, we thrill at Hubble’s image of billions of galaxies, some 1011 of them. But are there 10 puissance 22 biospheres, ebullient like ours ? Not “a world beyond physics,” but “worlds beyond physics,” as vast as the vastness of the physics we know, almost unknowable.
We miss in our science the idea of a system that constructs itself. I will introduce the requisite concept due to Maël Montévil and Mateo Mossio (2015) called “Constraint Closure”. These young scientists have found a, or maybe “the,” missing concept of biological organization. We will grow to understand it clearly and build on it. The ideas are a tiny bit complex, but not very. We will get to them. But for now we can think of constraint closure like this: it is a set of both constraints on the release of energy in non-equilibrium processes, and those processes, such that the system constructs its own constraints. This is an amazing idea. Cells do this, automobiles do not." (pp.IX-X)
"Living systems achieve this constraint closure and do what are called “thermodynamic work cycles” by which they can reproduce themselves. Living systems also exhibit Darwin’s heritable variation, so can undergo his natural selection, hence evolve. I’ve written about that in some of my earlier books. But I was nagged by a feeling that there was something missing. With constraint closure a crucial puzzle piece is put into place. But what evolves cannot be said ahead of time: what evolves emerges unprestatably—I know of no better word— and builds our biosphere of increasing complexity.
[...] Darwin taught that new species drive wedges into the crowded floor of nature to make room for their own existence: yes, but no. Creatures, by existing, create the very conditions for other creatures to come into existence. Species constitute the very cracks in the floor of nature that constitute the niches for yet new species to come into existence, creating yet more cracks for still more species to spring forth." (p.XI)
"The blossoming biosphere creates its own ever-new possibilities of becoming, yet more diverse and abundant. The same holds, almost unnoted, for the exploding global
economy. New goods create niches for yet further new goods: the invention of the World Wide Web created niches for selling on the Web, hence eBay and Amazon; which in turn created content on the Web, hence niches for search engines like Google ; and for businesses that try to game, the search algorithms to sell more stuff. Or think of all the iPhone apps: and apps upon apps, like the ad blockers that remove the sales pitches from what Safari shows. We stumble into the world we make possible as we lumber forward, with no or little insight or foreknowledge. [...]
We think that in physics—Special and General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory with the Standard Model—we will find the foundations from which we
can derive the world, the ultimate becoming. We cannot. The ultimate may rest on the foundations, but it is not derivable from them. This ultimate, an unknowable unfolding, slips its foundational moorings and floats free. As Heraclitus said, the World Bubbles Forth." (p.XII)
"Since the triumphs of Descartes, Newton, and Laplace and the birth of classical physics, we have come to regard physics as the answer to our questions about what reality “is.” In that search, we have come to think of the world as a vast machine. This Newtonian fundamental framework is wonderfully extended by Special and General Relativity. Quantum Mechanics, and Quantum Field Theory, alter some of the basic deterministic aspects of classical physics but not the view of reality as an enormous “machine.”
My thesis in this book is that, with respect to an evolving biosphere, ours and any in the universe, the “machine” thesis is wrong. Evolving life is not a machine. Elaborating how this is so will require some patience on all our parts. The consequences of the change in world view here proposed cannot be anticipated, but I hope they will include the realization that we are members of a living world of untellable creativity in its becoming." (p.1)
"Has the universe made all the possible types of stable atoms ? Yes. Bosons and fermions—the two broad kinds of particles physics knows—have glommed together in every conceivable combination to yield the hundred-odd elements that make matter. But will the universe make all possible complex things ? No, not at all.
Most complex things will never get to exist at all.
It is easy to see why: proteins are linear sequences of 20 kinds of amino acids—alanine, phenylalanine, lysine, tryptophan, and so forth. The specific sequence of these 20 amino acids along the “main chain” of a specific protein, linked by peptide bonds, defines the primary sequence of that protein. Thereafter the protein folds in complex ways to perform its functions in the cell. A typical protein in humans is a linear sequence of some 300 amino acids. Some proteins are thousands of amino acids long. How many possible proteins are there with only 200 amino acids in each ? There are 20 choices at each position, so the total number of possible proteins of length 200 is 20 raised to the 200th power. That is about 10 raised to the 260th power. This is a hyper-astronomical number.
The next point is to see that the universe cannot have made more than a very small fraction of these possible proteins in the time since the Big Bang.
By our best reckoning, the age of the universe is about 13.7 billion years, which is about 10 to the 17th seconds. There are an estimated 10 to the 80th particles in the known universe. Quantum mechanics tell us that the shortest span of time in which anything can happen in the universe is the Planck time: 10 to the –43 seconds.
So if the 10 to the 80th particles in the universe were doing nothing since the Big Bang except making proteins in parallel at every tick of the Planck time clock, it would take 10 to the 39 power times the 13.7-billion-year actual history of the universe to make all possible proteins of the length 200 amino acids, just once. (In contrast, it may have taken only a few billion years to make all 20 amino acids.)
The universe, whatever might happen, can have made only a tiny fraction—1 over 10 to the 39th—of the possible proteins each consisting of 200 amino acids. History enters when the space of the possible is vastly larger than what can become actual. For example, the evolution of life itself is a profoundly historical process. So too may be space
chemistry and the formation of complex molecules. Thus, the becoming of the universe above the level of atoms is a historical process.
The physicist’s phrase for this historicity is “nonergodic.” “Ergodic” means, roughly, that the system visits all its possible states over some “reasonable” time period. The central example, from equilibrium statistical mechanics, is a liter volume of gas falling to equilibrium rapidly. The gas particles darting about in the bottle assume nearly every possible configuration before settling into the stablest possible state. But “nonergodic” means that a system does not visit all its possible states, like the amino acids that cannot make all possible proteins even after an astronomical number of repetitions of the 13.7-billion-year history of the universe.
If we ask whether the universe has created all stable atoms, the answer is yes. So the universe is roughly ergodic with respect to atoms, but it is not ergodic with respect to complex molecules. And the more complex the class of molecules, the more sparsely can that class have been sampled since the Big Bang. Consider proteins of length N = 1,2,3,4, . . . N + 1 amino acids. As N increases, the universe samples the possible sequences ever more sparsely. The universe can explore and surge upward in complexity indefinitely. In this sense, there is an indefinite “sink” upward in complexity. The universe can explore indefinitely vast realms." (pp.2-4)
-Stuart A. Kauffman, A World Beyond Physics. The Emergence and Evolution of Life, Oxford University Press, 2019, 151 pages.
