Lee Smolin’s answer to this year’s Edge Question: ‘What is Your Dangerous Idea’ is my favorite, touching on something I’ve been thinking and reading about for the last year.
Seeing Darwin in the light of Einstein; seeing Einstein in the light of Darwin
1. All systems leak – so they are fuzzy and relative.
No system is fully open, or it ceases to be a separate ‘system’ and no system is fully closed, or it cannot be observed. Yet most science looks at or approximates closed systems. Just as the motion of objects depends on a frame of reference, I suspect the notion of how systems interact, how entropy flows between them, requires sensitive measurement to provide predictions , since all systems will tend to interact at a fine boundary between chaotoc and stable conditions, over time. Because of the required accuracy, these measurements will be dependent on something analogous to a ‘frame of reference’ since at some level, on the one hand, clear boundaries between systems are impossible and on the other any ‘observing’ system will only be able to perceive boundaries relative to itself.
2. All systems interact over time, and there may be emergent patterns in these interactions creating defined periodic cycles as with living or growing things.
If this is so, why should biological theories of evolution apply only to biological systems of systems made by living things, such as economics? What I mean by this is that evolutionary ideas apply to iterative systems that teeter on the edge of chaos (i.e. crystals presumably only evolve very very slowly) – but what if all interactions between systems tended to become iterative. Only recently has science begun to look quantitatively at the rules governing iterations between systems as over time. i.e. algorithms rather than formulae. I suspect that any all encompassing theory of evolution applies to any set of interacting systems (living or non living)
My dangerous idea is that Darwinism can be expressed in terms of physics, in terms of patterns in entropy flow between systems and more specifically in terms of a new and relativistic look at thermodynamics.
I suspect there may be a relativinstic view of thermodynamics and that a fourth law of thermodynamics may include an extended idea of natural selection, defined in terms of the physics of interactions between systems, where all linked systems tend to become either linked, or ‘iterative’ over time.