 Dr. Shapiro |
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of SDA Late Nite Radio. As you know, there has been a bit of an ongoing debate here at SDA regarding the applicability of classical thermodynamics and its entropy model to microscopic systems and to open systems, and regarding the information-theoretic nature of reality. This afternoon, for your delectation and pursuant to our distinguished lecture, documentary & interview series, we have a new paper by Dillenschneider and Lutz arguing that Maxwell’s Demon can exist in nanoscale systems, a short video showing visualizations of the molecular-scale machines involved in replicating DNA, extracting RNA, and synthesizing proteins, and a longer video by Dr. Lucy Shapiro on The Systems Architecture of a Bacterial Cell Cycle.
The key thing keep in mind here is that the assumptions upon which classical thermodynamics is based (macroscopic-scale closed systems) mean that classical thermodynamics cannot be used to draw conclusions about the microscopic-scale behaviour of the molecular machines involved in the phenomenon known as life, and that, therefore, it is not necessarily the case that life is subject to the second law of thermodynamics or equivalent. Please note that the debate here is not about whether or not god created and/or controls thermodynamics and/or life, the debate here is about the relationship between thermodynamics, the microscopic machines that implement life, and the question of information as the fundamental metaphysical reality. Also, please note that this is not Reader Tips, our regular Reader Tips entry will appear tonight as scheduled.
The most recent rounds of this debate began when Rick in BC wrote that:
“Entropy requires that the universe started in some condition of high organization, and is gradually running down. The whole concept of evolution, on which our society is based today, is in direct conflict to this fundamental scientific principle. Having studied advanced thermodynamics in university […], I believe I am as qualified as anyone to say there is no rational way to harmonize the two”.
In response to that I mentioned Mark Haw’s essay, From Steam Engines to Life?, which was published in the American Scientist Magazine on the 100th anniversary of the death of Lord Kelvin, in which Mr. Haw wrote:
“[This] brings us back to microscopic engines: the most interesting objects in which the two themes of modern thermodynamics — microscopic scales and open systems — join. Although studies of individual proteins are important foundation stones, the cell depends on millions of molecules in a complex network of machines, their functions interlocked across a range of scales. Such interplay is possible precisely because these living engines are open to fluctuations and not isolated from their environment. It may be that the complex functions of matter that we call life are nothing more than this multiscale interplay of engines, a network through which energy is transformed again and again, as microscopic machines swap and shift matter — manipulate entropy — in a thermodynamical cycle the likes of which Kelvin could hardly have imagined.
“If so, then the theory that accommodates living engines will require both a thermodynamics of microscopic matter, and a thermodynamics of open systems. Current research is providing progress in each of these, but the challenge may be to match them together, to join the palpable chemical reality of protein engines to the heady concepts of non-equilibrium thermodynamics and self-organization. That may lead us, finally, to the second revolution—the thermodynamics of life.”
Rick then wrote, “Again, there is no rational way to harmonize evolution and entropy”.
I responded:
Rick, go back to your thermodynamics texts and review the very beginning stuff. There’s always a “disclaimer” to the effect that this stuff only works in macroscopic scale closed systems. Not everything that exists does so in a context of macroscopic scale closed systems.
Don’t ask classical thermodynamics to do something it
doesn’t do. That’s not fair to classical thermodynamics.
Rick disagreed with those assertions, referring to section 7.14 in his copy of Fundamentals of Classical Thermodynamics by Van Wylen and Sonntag, in which it is written that “The authors see the second law of thermodynamics as man’s description of the prior and continuing work of a creator, who also holds the answer to the future destiny of man and the universe”. To which I responded by noting that in section 2.2 of my copy of Van Wylen and Sonntag it says:
“From the macroscopic point of view, we are always concerned with volumes that are very large compared to molecular dimension, and, therefore, with systems that contain many molecules. Since we are not concerned with the behaviour of individual molecules, we can treat the substance as being continuous, disregarding the action of individual molecules […]”. (Emphasis mine.)
And I noted that it is that sense that Mark Haw is referring to when he writes about the inapplicability of classical thermodynamics to microscopic scales and open systems. And that’s where the debate has stood, until now, when we again take up the matter of the behaviour of microscopic molecular-scale machines.
To begin with this afternoon, we have a new paper in Physical Review Letters, 102, 210601 (2009), by Raoul Dillenschneider and Eric Lutz, entitled Memory Erasure in Small Systems. Dillenschneider and Lutz have found that Maxwell’s demon (which can sometimes decrease the entropy of a system without performing work) could exist in nanoscale systems, even though it would not violate any macroscopic-scale physical law:
“Our research aims at describing the thermodynamic behavior of tiny (nanoscale) objects,” Lutz told PhysOrg.com. “It is known that thermal fluctuations dominate at these length scales. However, our investigations showed that they can have observable consequences in nanomemories: information may be erased by dissipating less heat than required by Landauer’s principle.”
Next up, here’s a video by Drew Berry, of the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, entitled Molecular Visualizations of DNA ¤ (7:47). It shows animations of DNA coiling and replication, RNA transcription, and its translation into proteins. Keep in mind that the molecular-scale machines shown in these visualizations are operating at millions of trillions of times per second in (and on) your body, and likewise in all other forms of life here and elsewhere. They are not (at this scale) subject to classical thermodynamics, which as Van Wylen and Sonntag noted: “disregards the actions of individual molecules”. And note in particular that it is errors in the operation of this uncountably large number of molecular machines which lead over a very long time scale to the mutation events and natural selection forces commonly known as evolution, which Rick thought was denied by classical thermodynamics.
Lastly, this afternoon, we bring together all the above results to show some examples of how they effect life itself. Here, for your delectation, is Dr. Lucy Shapiro, Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research at Stanford University, presenting her Charles M. & Martha Hitchcock Lecture: The Systems Architecture of a Bacterial Cell Cycle ¤ (2009, 1 hour).
In this lecture, Dr. Shapiro “examines the functions required to reproduce and maintain life in the simple bacterial cell by using a systems engineering approach that defines the control circuitry integrated in time and space”. Her lab has found that the mechanisms described in the lecture are not subject to gross thermodynamic control. She notes that “In fact what I’ve shown you is that there is a forward biased circuitry that drives cell cycle progression, and the progression through the cell cycle is paced in a ratchet-like fashion, so that you have gates moving forward and opening allowing you to go from one state to another”. (Don’t tell ET about this, she’s not a big fan of such mechanistic views 😉 And lastly, Dr. Shapiro notes in response to an audience question, “Is it going to be a logical progression? Sure. It’s not stochastic events […].”
And as always, thank you, Kate, for providing us with this forum
for discussing some of the leading questions that we as a species
are considering, here at the beginning of the third millennium.
Duh? I thought I stumbled into sci.engr.complicated by mistake there for a bit.
Oh wait, I get it, you’re trying to keep me busy for the next week so I don’t have time to post inane comments. Nice try!
No, it’s sci.life.is.information 😉 Listen to me, PiperPaul, if you do nothing else with the above, watch The Molecular Visualizations of DNA video, full-screen. It’s only seven minutes. Trust me, sir, I’m not about to post all the above without thinking very carefully about serving the regular readers of SDA, which as we know from archival data includes a plurality of technically minded folks like yourself. Then, after watching that, you can decide whether or not to watch Lucy’s most excellent lecture.
And also, thanks to Tenebris for the Dillenschneider and Lutz article.
My view of the insistence that that Devilish Demon, which is an Intermediary between Generalized Knowledge and Actual Information, differentiates between X and y (hot and cold), and that this action requires work energy..errs in its definition of work energy. The Demon operates in a different mode of space and time than X and Y. And furthermore, it has access to the compressed energy of Generalized Knowledge.
So, the ‘cost’ of ‘erasing one bit of information’ does not exceed the entropy reduction achieved by the Demon..because it’s a different morphological ‘form’ of mass/energy used by the demon in this process. So, getting rid of the memory of the information bit doesn’t require an equal amount of energy to its production.
And it’s most certainly ‘not observable in macrosystems’, which, as actual information bits, operate in a mode of space and time quite different from the mode of space and time in which knowledge operates.
And – since I’m quite sure this is all bafflegab to any but the rabid information dorks…I’ll leave it at that.
And I’ll go look at the molecular visualizations. Thanks vitruvius, for these postings. Delightful.
So, to state that
Agreed, ET. Folks may be arguing the morphology of forward and back when someone comes along an morphologizes sideways, at which point of course all hell breaks loose 😉 Anyway, on to the DNA/RNA machines then, eh what?
oh and by the way, I very much like Shapiro’s ‘forward biased circuitry’. Never mind her mechanical description; the point is that the system has anticipatory capabilities and can ‘visualize’ what should be done, morphologically, next and next and…
The smallest possible closed system is the whole universe. Other “closed systems” are just systems where the interaction with the rest of the universe is small enough to be conveniently ignored. At the atomic level this is not the case.
Brilliantly stated, Swift. And since the whole
universe is infinite in space and time, wait…
ouch, ouch, hey, stop hitting me, Tenebris 😉
Any more of this snobbish crap and I’m out of here to look for something enjoyable AND understandable.
My apologies, BCer. I’m sure you can find something more to your style here.
Actually BCer it is understandable once you jump over the wall of nomenclature; which is just specialized talk for sounding reasonably intelligent.
But if you drill down deeper, there is submolecular, atomic,subatomic and lastly the ‘particle zoo’.
Then of course one introduces the quantum states into cellular structures and all hell breaks loose. This gives rise to sentient life outside the mechanistic model; which drives the anti free will people completely bonkers.
Then you’ve got a debate on!
Dr Shapiro appears to have a nice cellular structure from her photo. Ah beauty and brains…
Cheers
Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
BCer- since when is debate about information and knowledge and how it operates in our universe definable as ‘snobbery’ and ‘crap’?
It sounds to me that YOU are the snob, insisting on talking only about issues that YOU understand or that YOU are interested in. And that if YOU don’t find it enjoyable then no-one else has the right to do so. Quite the snob, aren’t you.
You know, every time I watch that Molecular Visualizations of DNA video, I’m blown away by the annotation to the effect that every second, in each of our bodies, those little molecular- scale machines crank out 100 trillion molecules of haemoglobin. That is just so cool, man.
Hans: Thank you for the enlightenment although I really feel sheepish after being scolded by both Vit and ET to the effect that I am somewhat lacking in intelligence and should get with the program or f-off….or words to that effect.
My fear, of course, was that they were about to expound on them there Aussie quantum entanglement things.
No but seriously, BCer, I mean, that means I’m making
8,460 quadrillion molecules of haemoglobin per day.
Oy, suddenly I feel tired, already.
watch The Molecular Visualizations of DNA video
How can we be sure that this is not just some staged, fancy-pants computer simulation? It’s not as if we haven’t seen this type of manipulation before. [cough]Climate Change modeling[cough]
And don’t forget landing on the moon, too, PiperPaul.
But seriously, my understanding is that this stuff is
not fraudulent. Your mileage may, as they say, vary.
Vitruvius and Kate
There is a very simple way to visualise how Brownian ratchet overcomes Second Law of Thermodynamics. Imagine a box with one wall of it made into a very gradual slope (set at 60 deg from vertical).
On the surface of that slope (inside surface of the box) we will have great number of horizontal riges (in cross section these ridges will resemble ratchet facing upward).
We fill that box with dry grains of sand and set it on top of mechanical or ultrasonic vibrator.
In no time at all grains of sand will march up the slope and spill out of the box.
Analogy is very simple; grains of sand are your molecules in living system, mechanical vibration is random (Brownian)heat vibration of the molecules that are processed, ratchet shaped slope is your living organism and gravity is your equivalent of Second Law of Thermodynamics.
There is no mystery here and things do not have to be made more complicated then they really are.
Cheers,
Vit, I don’t doubt that you do, nor do I think you’re snobbish about your intellect. Perhaps though, bits of brilliance should be spread out over time and not just smooshed together into one giant post that xrefs other SDA posts.
I used to have the time for this sort of intellectual pursuit but since you referred to rollerskating and Michael Jackson the other day I’ve been YouTubing ‘Thriller’ non-stop. It’s actually a pretty decent B-grade mini horror movie.
Always look forward to your insightful comments.
Paul 138
Ahh, but the problem is, Paul, that to the degree that I spread it out over time, then so do I author multiple main-page entries at SDA; and SDA is not my blog. I’ve been experimenting with moving the DLDIS out into a Saturday Afternoon Special, and so far, at least, Kate hasn’t gotten mad at me 😉 But I wouldn’t want to make it more regular than that, so sometimes you might get two or three links related to the running DLDIS topics all in one, um, show.
BCer- no-one said a word or even implied anything about your intelligence. What I specifically said was that you were the snob, because you considered that the only issues worth discussing were ones that you were interested in and knew something about. Anything else, according to you, is ‘crap’ (your words).
Now, back to the issue. What is interesting is that this experiment suggests that there are different morphologies of information. There’s the short term macro units which bump into each other and dissipate energy, both kinetic and thermodynamic.
And there’s another morphology, organized..not as individual units..but just as real..which is compressed general information, operating in a different mode of space and time than the macro units.
Maxwell’s Demon is an intermediary agent or process that mediates between short-term informational units and long term general knowledge patterns.
The only way that this could happen is that first, we’d have to acknowledge that information operates in a variety of ways: short term and long term. And in different formats: discrete units and general codes or rules or patterns.
Such processes as DNA, RNA etc shows a long term informational pattern..expressed within an individual organism.
And second, we’d have to explore how the two basic types of reality; short term and long term, particular and general, interact with each other. Maxwell’s Demon isn’t a sufficient answer!
Maxwell’s Demon isn’t a sufficient answer? I should have guessed?
Ok, Ok, vitruvius.
Now, let’s get rid of Maxwell’s Demon. Chuck him out completely.
You are left with two basic realities of mass morphology: short term in time and in local space; and long term in time and non-local space. The thing to consider is that they are not comparable in morphology/form. It isn’t that one ‘lasts longer’ and can be found in China and the US.
It’s that one form, the general pattern/code is actually not immediately accessible to us, who exist consciously at least, in local time and space. Yet it is real.
So, how do the two types of reality interact? It’s the stuff of bibles, myths..and science fiction…never mind physics. And that Demon.
after all, even concluding that two basic types of mass/information exist..is something rejected by many classical physicsts.
But it does suggest that morphological reality is triadic. There has to be a basic rule. And the individual expression of that rule. (Cowness and an actual single cow). And some kind of mediation between the two.
I always used to ask my students..isn’t it amazing that all that grass..turns into a cow. I got blank looks from quite a few. ah well.
Of course, you, vitruvius, would probably be also quite interested in that cow/sheep/goat’s milk turning into a cheese. But that’s not the same thing!
This is fascinating. I don’t understand much of it, but I am working on it.
Thanks you big brains.
Nice break from the usual rancor.
Be that as it may, ET, the biochemistry of cheese is very closely related to the mechanisms discussed by Dr. Shapiro in her lecture this afternoon, what with all that lactolysis, proteolysis, and lipolysis goin’ on in living cheese.
Wow! I have always suspected that the true basis of religion, the true basis of faith is the belief that somehow the second law of thermodynamics is somehow, someway, just wrong. Mohammad was running a con, I simply cannot relate to Jesus, you cannot cut deals with Yahweh no how well you study the Law, Suffering is a result of desire, OK….but overturning the 2nd law! – that I can relate to.
Thank you, Vitruvius – God, Whatever, bless you.
Hey, whatever, you’re welcome.
Always with the cheese.
cottus: Certainly you CAN “cut deals with Yahweh”… just DO NOT TRY TO F*&% HIM OVER!
Think of Him as an omniscient Tony Soprano.
momar
as you move along, familiarity (of terms and language used) will be your best friend:-)))))
t’is what I need to work on, as being a dyslexic ain’t easy!!
Always with the cheese. Excellent, and thank you, Black Mamba 😉
Vitruvius, I just signed onto SDA for today, and I’m touched that my exchange with you is still at the forefront of your thoughts, although it seems you have forgotten acknowledging that you “may not be” a master of thermodynamics, and are again leading poor souls like cottus (9:54pm) astray. Forget the big words and definitions of macroscopic and microscopic systems. The bottom line is what Van Wylen and Sonntag noted in their university level textbook that we both reviewed and which led to your self-effacing acknowledgement. Again, all of the study and work of these two renowned scientists and engineers led them to conclude that entropy (the second law of thermodynamics) points to a creator.
To suggest otherwise is speculation, not science.
It’d be fair to point out to others reading this thread that I also noted to you a quote from an advanced graduate level thermodynamics textbook by Coull and Stuart, in which they note that entropy relates to all human experience. In other words, it relates to everything that we can know. Again, what we can know is science. What we cannot is speculation or metaphysics.
The rampant speculation you exhibit is demonstrated by your continuing reliance on Mark Haw’s essay for justification of your position. The key to understanding that essay is contained in the paragraph you’ve quoted a number of times – “It may be…”. That, my good friend, is an attempt to overcome the reality of scientific investigation with some wishful thinking worthy of Star Trek.
Speculate all you want, Vitruvius, but do so in a science fiction book or religion course, not in the study of true science. True science points to a Creator, and it is a wise person who will reflect on the ramifications of that reality to what he thinks of life and human purpose.
As you wish, Rick: you know true science, I do not ~ me,
I’m just thinking out loud, here at the SDA LNR DLDIS.
Thank YOU, Vitruvius. Just watched “The Molecular Vizualizations of DNA”. Um… WOW.
Will watch again a few more times when I’m completely sober.
p.s. In Anglo/Canadian, shouldn’t that be Vitruvious? Not that I… just askin’.
I died over 2,000 years ago: we’re not changin’ the spellin’ now.
Vit, ET:
This of course leads back to Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the study of sub molecular structure led circuitously to the Sermon on the Mount being interpreted as:
“Blessed are the cheese makers.
No, no what He really meant was blessed are all those involved in the dairy industry.”
I believe that calls for some Gouda with tonight’s homemade salsa sauce, now that Maxwell’s Demon is roasting comfortably.
Cheers
Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
Yeah but the neat thing, Hans, is that down in the belly of metaphysics are these ridiculously large number of molecules pretending to be vegetable and animal life; fungus, yeast, and cheese, and we eat them there molecules, and then produce life ourself, which I just have to keep coming back to celebrating. Because otherwise, if you leave it up to blogs in general, you’re not going to find a whole lot of celebrating of life. Mostly, you’re going to find people complaining about life’s little problems, such as death.
Vitruvius, reading your post created a strong deja-vu sensation of sitting with some fellow grad students in a bar 35 years ago discussing this very question. This was around the same time that non-equilibrium thermodynamics was coming out which dealt with just this seeming inability of life to exist given the second law of thermodynamics. The classic demonstration of non-equilibrium thermodynamics was the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction and as soon as I read about it I scrounged the necessary chemicals in the space of a few hours (easy to do when you’re at a university) and spent all night staring at the chemical waves being produced in a petri dish and the incredibly neat interference patterns that they produced. I hadn’t thought about this in years and will see if I can set up the reaction again and this time I can actually make a movie of it. These chemical waves can actually transport small pieces of paper as can be seen at: http://www.chem.scphys.kyoto-u.ac.jp/nonnonWWW/BZtransport/one_wave.mpg
For those of us who deal with meat machines on a daily basis, the notion of dissipative systems comes very easily and no biologist ever has any concerns about the second law of thermodynamics being violated by what they see. The individuals who were concerned about 2nd law violations 35 years ago were some chemistry grad students and their weltanschauung was quite a bit less complicated than what I dealt with as a neurophysiologist. They were as blown away by the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction as I was.
What surprised me about the molecular visualizations of DNA movie is how little new there has been in this regard in the past 35 years. I haven’t taken a molecular biology course in probably 30 years and yet I didn’t see anything that didn’t fit with how I imagined the process of DNA replication to work back then. This movie is neat, but somewhat dated as it doesn’t look at how introns are chopped out of an RNA transcript and some of the neat autocatalytic properties of RNA. I remember arguing with my molecular biology profs in 1973 that protein coding must be in chunks (exons and introns) as this is the only way that one could account for the ability of intertidal organisms to create enzymes which functioned in such a large range of environments. The theory back then assumed that eukaryotic DNA was identical to prokaryotic DNA in which each protein was coded by a linear chunk of DNA.
While I do appreciate the intellectual stimulation of your posts like this one, Vitruvius, it would be nice to have links to a web page with the information rather than an mpeg of a lecture on the topic. I’ve always found that human speech has far too low data transmission rate and find that I can read through the transcript of a 1 hour lecture in 5-10 minutes. It was for that reason that I rarely attended lectures in university and just hung out at the library reading. I realize that there are some people who are hooked on a lecture format of knowledge transmission but a link to the lecture material would be appreciated.
“Mostly, you’re going to find people complaining about life’s little problems, such as death.”
Seems to be a common complaint, which is more accurately described as dysfunctional molecular disassociation.
But you should always look on the bright side…
Cheers
Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
ET, I’ve seen that argument someplace before, where the daemon is restrained by the “work” of exchanging information. Its quite a good argument. Can you remember whose it is, because I can’t. I saw it in Scientific American or some such a few years ago.
phantom – I’m not sure of which paper or argument you are referring to. The basic function of Maxwell’s Demon is to ensure that asymmetry rather than symmetry exists.
If we had symmetry of energy, the planet would be one big bowl of jello. But we have asymmetry, which enables both ‘tokens of mass’ or individual units to exist, as well as ‘types of mass’ or general templates that govern those individual expressions.
Now, if you set up some agency (that Demon) that ensures this asymmetry, you will of course want to know from where he gets his operating orders, never mind his energy to carry out those orders. Who or what, runs the show, so to speak?
Asymmetry of types of mass or information is becoming more accepted; that is, it isn’t ‘turtles all the way down’..and reductionism is losing its theoretical weight. There do indeed seem to be different forms of mass and processing in the world, each embedded within the other.
But what causes each type of mass, which some of us see as types of information, to exist? And how do they interact, without each losing its integrity? We still don’t know – and my suggestion is only that we must assume that the separation is due to physical properties.
That is, time and space are not identical in each realm. There are really different modes of time, and each mode organizes mass/information in a different manner. Same with space – different modes of space. So, if you organize mass/information in one mode of time and space and another..in a different mode of time and space..you don’t need that testy Maxwell’s Demon to sit on his chair and keep the two realms separate. They each exist in different modes of time and space, and so, they CAN’T blend. Impossible.
This, however, then creates another problem. How do these two separate realms interact – and interact they absolutely must do. This has been the ‘meat’ of philosophical, never mind physical, arguments for millenia.
True science points to a Creator
Rick, existence implies a creative force.
Any attempt to define the nature and purpose,
if there be one, of that force, is pure speculation.
Existence does not imply a creative force.
I strongly second the statement of Vitruvius.
Existence does NOT imply a creative force. Nor does it require one. Spatial measurements of energy to mass; temporal measurements of energy to mass – understanding those measurements as the transformation of uninformed energy to in-formed mass…that’s all that’s needed.
Of course, where do the measurements come from? How do they arise? At first, by mere randomness of interaction, which then turn into habitual interactions that function as rules, which then set the stage for the constraints and greater information masses of more complex organisms.
No Overseer required; the system self-organizes itself as one massive informational process.
ET said
“””That is, time and space are not identical in each realm. There are really different modes of time, and each mode organizes mass/information in a different manner. Same with space – different modes of space. So, if you organize mass/information in one mode of time and space and another..in a different mode of time and space..you don’t need that testy Maxwell’s Demon to sit on his chair and keep the two realms separate. They each exist in different modes of time and space, and so, they CAN’T blend. Impossible.
“””””
interesting thought, as space/time was the very thing that came to mind as I was rolling the “grass to cow” statement. Your “take” here is some what different to mine but no less interesting
I think an interesting thought here is the Bose/ Einstein condensate and were the information would “go” at absolute zero, do we lose it, odoes it transform, or does it shift to a different time/space existance???
It does indeed imply a creative force.
[Remainder of comment deleted ~ Gratuitous insult ~ Vitruvius]
I find it very interesting, Loki, that the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction spirals look just like the patterns produced by some cyclic cellular automata. Somewhere, Wolfram is chuckling.
True science only requires that the scientific method be followed. Science
belongs to epistemology, not to metaphysics. Creativity doesn’t enter into it.
Spatial measurements of energy to mass; temporal measurements of energy to mass
But whence comes energy, and whence comes mass.
Your speculations are a leap from the epistemological to the metaphysical.
Energy and mass are properties of information. Information is. Sample problem: how does the earth know it has to orbit the sun in order to not violate the laws of physics? Answer: gravity tells the earth what to do. Gravity, like everthing else, is information about how information informates. That’s my recursion termination condition, whether Tenebris likes it or not 😉
hmm. Gravity is a relation of asymmetry.
X, the earth, has to have mass such that it is distinct from Y, the sun, which also has mass, and these two masses, by virtue first of their being separate from each other, are in a relation with each other. This relation is measured and measurable; it is information; it isn’t a random relation.
Information is..measurements of relations. A first interaction may be random but it can become habitual in which case it sets up constraints on further interactions and exists as a rule.
GYM – information, when it moves into a different spatiotemporal mode isn’t lost; it is transformed into a different organization of mass. Generalized information exists as organized patterns of interaction, while particular information exists as organized particles of mass.
ET
thanx, will ponder on that, and I’m certain more questions will arise:-))))
but actually, I’m in need of some reading (books)
and as to your statement on gravity being information, this was the very problem I had with S Hawking’s postulate of the 70T’s concerning singularities, “that no mass (energy) or information escaped a singularity”
you folks have now peeked my interest:-))))