2012 : WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?

Cosmic Complexity

What explains the extraordinary complexity of the observed universe, on all scales from quarks to the accelerating universe? My favorite explanation (which I certainly did not invent) is that the fundamental laws of physics produce natural instability, energy flows, and chaos. Some call the result the Life Force, some note that the Earth is a living system itself (Gaia, a "tough bitch" according to Margulis), and some conclude that the observed complexity requires a supernatural explanation (of which we have many). But my dad was a statistician (of dairy cows) and he told me about cells and genes and evolution and chance when I was very small. So a scientist must look for the explanation of how nature's laws and statistics brought us into conscious existence. And how is that seemingly improbable events are actually happening all the time?

Well, the physicists have countless examples of natural instability, in which energy is released to power change from simplicity to complexity. One of the most common to see is that cooling water vapor below the freezing point produces snowflakes, no two alike, and all complex and beautiful. We see it often so we are not amazed. But physicists have observed so many kinds of these changes from one structure to another (we call them phase transitions) that the Nobel Prize in 1992 could be awarded for understanding the mathematics of their common features.

Now for a few examples of how the laws of nature produce the instabilities that lead to our own existence. First, the Big Bang (what an insufficient name!) apparently came from an instability, in which the "false vacuum" eventually decayed into the ordinary vacuum we have today, plus the most fundamental particles we know, the quarks and leptons. So the universe as a whole started with an instability. Then, a great expansion and cooling happened, and the loose quarks, finding themselves unstable too, bound themselves together into today's less elementary particles like protons and neutrons, liberating a little energy and creating complexity. Then, the expanding universe cooled some more, and neutrons and protons, no longer kept apart by immense temperatures, found themselves unstable and formed helium nuclei. Then, a little more cooling, and atomic nuclei and electrons were no longer kept apart, and the universe became transparent. Then a little more cooling, and the next instability began: gravitation pulled matter together across cosmic distances to form stars and galaxies. This instability is described as a "negative heat capacity" in which extracting energy from a gravitating system makes it hotter—clearly the 2^nd law of thermodynamics does not apply here! (This is the physicist's part of the answer to e e cummings' question: what is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart?) Then, the next instability is that hydrogen and helium nuclei can fuse together to release energy and make stars burn for billions of years. And then at the end of the fuel source, stars become unstable and explode and liberate the chemical elements back into space. And because of that, on planets like Earth, sustained energy flows support the development of additional instabilities and all kinds of complex patterns. Gravitational instability pulls the densest materials into the core of the Earth, leaving a thin skin of water and air, and makes the interior churn incessantly as heat flows outwards. And the heat from the Sun, received mostly near the equator and flowing towards the poles, supports the complex atmospheric and oceanic circulations.

And because of that, the physical Earth is full of natural chemical laboratories, concentrating elements here, mixing them there, raising and lowering temperatures, ceaselessly experimenting with uncountable events where new instabilities can arise. At least one of them was the new experiment called Life. Now that we know that there are at least as many planets as there are stars, it is hard to imagine that nature's ceaseless experimentation would not be able to produce Life elsewhere—but we don't know for sure.

And Life went on to cause new instabilities, constantly evolving, with living things in an extraordinary range of environments, changing the global environment, with boom-and-bust cycles, with predators for every kind of prey, with criminals for every possible crime, with governments to prevent them, and instabilities of the governments themselves.

One of the instabilities is that humans demand new weapons and new products of all sort, leading to serious investments in science and technology. So the natural/human world of competition and combat is structured to lead to advanced weaponry and cell phones. So here we are in 2012, with people writing essays and wondering whether their descendents will be artificial life forms travelling back into space. And, pondering what are the origins of those forces of nature that give rise to everything. Verlinde has argued that gravitation, the one force that has so far resisted our efforts at a quantum description, is not even a fundamental force, but is itself a statistical force, like osmosis.

What an amazing turn of events! But after all I've just said, I should not be surprised a bit.