Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [44]
The problem with simple systems is that they are already near equilibrium. No wonder Boltzmann had arrived at the “heat death” scenario.
But systems far from equilibrium behave quite differently. To be sure, the entropy of a closed system still grows. But an open system can theoretically decrease its entropy by passing some of it to the outside environment, so that the total entropy still obeys the second law of thermodynamics. The incredible thing is that, as discovered by Prigogine, open systems far from equilibrium exhibit a tendency completely opposite to the “heat death” scenario: on average, they tend to decrease their entropy, spontaneously self-organizing! Think of this as an unnumbered “fourth law of thermodynamics.”
A mix of hot and cold water, when left alone in an isolated vessel, equalizes in temperature. But if the water is continually heated, when it boils, hexagonal convection cells spontaneously develop, the water moving up and down in hexagonal cylinders. Once the heat is removed, the water stops boiling and equalizes. In order to keep lowering its entropy and thus increasing order, a system must remain open, must remain in a constant energy exchange with the environment.
The water cannot boil forever. Nor can an even more complex system, much farther from equilibrium—such as a human body—function forever. Every individual system eventually succumbs to entropy. But statistically, in terms of populations, spontaneous self-organization keeps growing. And so must the energy exchange keep growing. Living systems, for example, exchange energy much faster and through many more channels than non-living matter.
But evolution, understood in the broadest sense as an ever-growing spiral of self-organization, is not limited to living systems. From the fractal large-scale structure of the universe to the formation and evolution of galaxies, to stars and planets, to the geological processes, to life—it’s no fluke!—and to the brain and consciousness, to our society and culture and economy, the self-organization keeps growing. And in an infinite universe, which is the only truly closed system, this progression can keep going without limit.
Evolution must be God’s design!
Who knows what comes next?
This is why Prigogine’s discovery is so important. It is universal, encompassing everything. It gives us an entirely new scientific paradigm—a science of complexity—bringing the evolutionary principle into many diverse disciplines in its most general form. Prigogine will be remembered long after most of the scientific darlings of the 20th century have been forgotten.
Murray Gell-Mann (b. 1929) discovered quarks (the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics). Later, he turned to the study of complexity.
THE SYSTEMS THAT DEVELOP BY THE EVOLUTIONARY PRIN-ciple were called complex adaptive systems by Murray Gell-Mann. They, and the complex nonlinear systems far from equilibrium in general, have an important property. Any classical or quantum system can be described in terms of individual particles’ trajectories (classical) or wave functions (quantum), and in terms of the statistical density distribution function (classical) or density matrix (quantum). For a simple system, these descriptions are equivalent; these systems are reversible. But complex systems far from equilibrium have statistical solutions not expressible in terms of individual particles at all (this is what it means to be far from equilibrium). The whole is more than the sum of its parts. And it is these solutions that are irreversible.
What cannot be experimentally tested must be believed in (including the belief that God does not exist). This kind of knowledge is the subject of religion and philosophy. If neither religion nor science intrudes on the other’s territory—which has happened both ways and many times—then they are not in conflict.
It is important to understand that the subject of science is the kind of knowledge that can be tested by experiment. Therefore, the goal of science is not to establish absolute truth