There are bacterial mats (colonies of bacteria) that exist today that are almost identical to the earliest known fossils c. 3bn years old. It would appear that evolution builds on top of existing organisms leaving a trail of some of our earliest ancestors in a hierarchical ecology with some niches which never change. Is this just accident, i.e. some survive some also don’t. If not, why?

Fractals show that iterative maps of objects of a particular dimension can result in a dimension that is fractional. This seems to be real rather than analogy. Why are physics models, such as string theory, based upon whole numbers of dimensions?

Wheeler’s famously simple statement: “Matter tells space how to curve. Space tells matter how to move” explains the symmetry of geometry and the resulting forces of nature. In other words the forces of nature could be seen to generate space/time itself. What if there were only one entity (dimension) curled in such a way as to approximate but never reach other dimensions much as a Peano curve is a one dimensional object that can map out a 2 dimensional one? To avoid this being tautological this is like saying that the Peano curve doesn’t map within 2 dimensional space, rather that it creates an approximate reality for two dimensional space based upon rules operating on a 1 dimensional line in an abstract notion of space (maybe something akin to phase space, complex plane).

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There is an enormous amount of diversity in military aircraft vs commercial airliners. In some sense this is obvious, since the design requirements are far more varied.

Treating a design landscape as being analogous to a fitness landscape for species (in fact man made items are part of the extended phenotype, so they may be no different to the diversity in sea shells or more accurately, birds nests (need to re-read the idea of extended phenotype) then the military aircraft set suggests that in a ‘red queen’ situation, or an arms race then perhaps there is not only do the fitness peaks increase, but the diversity of species also increases.

The cost of this fitness and diversity increase is that the system is pushed further from equilibrium. Again, the military vs civilian analogy helps explain this situation intuitively – civilian aircraft operate in a largely safe, unchanging environment.

The question I have is that Stuart Kauffman has the idea that systems naturally self configure to maximize the ‘adjacent possible’. The adjacent possible (number of new design refinements that could be made) in an arms race situation is surely larger, and therefore contradicts this notion.

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Is Time Multidimensional?

If you looked edge on at a random path (based upon choosing a random neighbor) in a single layer of transparent cubes, where each cube becomes opaque when chosen, the path is likely to appear to have a particular direction. The higher the dimension of the grid of cubes, the more statistically likely for the direction to not appear to reverse when looked at ‘edge on’.

Could the 2nd law be a result of time being multidimensional but perceived as one dimensional?