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Mailing List complex-science@necsi.org Message #3277 | |
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| [Michael Clarke] > This is something tht came out of discussions with John Mikes a few > months ago. We were talking about the life cycle of the universe > and observed that both the initial state (all the energy in a > single spot) and the final state (and even distribution of energy > over a large area) were both far less complex scenarios than the > current universe (a rather lumpy energy distribution). > I was holding that the initial state of the universe was highly > disordered (a high energy density state - lots of difference) > and that the end of the universe was a highly ordered state (low > energy density - very few differences). Putting the two together > we found that they were not incompatible. [John McCrone] The story needs to include gravity - the force that drags on the Big Bang dispersion of energy/matter to make the Universe a complex place. So from the moment of the Big Bang, the Universe is being very evenly pulled towards two equilibrium fates - the great collapse back wanted by gravity and the cold dark death wanted by entropy. Because the "amount" of matter and the gravity are so well balanced, our Universe is indeed poised on the knife-edge of chaos that produces the greatest amount of self-organisation. Several important questions arise. First, is there any real net difference in information or order with these two opposing tendencies? With a cold heat death, very little information is needed to specify the kinetic energy of a particle (all particles same temperature) but lots of information needed to specify its location (the particle could be anywhere in a spread out Universe). With a black hole recollapse of matter due to gravity, little information would be needed to specify location of a particle (all matter in a single place) but lots needed to specify kinetic energy (temperature range approaches infinity). Of course, the initial conditions of the Big Bang would be the same as at collapse - maximally ordered in respect to location, maximally disordered in respect to temperature. So there seems an overall conservation of information in which complexity in the form of bios arises as localised consumers of information gradients. Bios internalises information to become (temporarily) autonomous complex structure. The total information budget of the Universe seems to balance - the information due to gravity (the negentropy gradient) appears to exactly cancel the information due to energy (the entropy gradient). The fly in the ointment is how the Universe was ever "released" in the first place. Gravity wants to concentrate all matter and so the Big Bang has to start with a brief blip of anti-gravity - a repulsive force - to inflate spacetime. There is an initial asymmetry that allows the Universe to get started and have its general "average" gradient which results from two opposing tendencies - collapsing gravity dragging on dispersing matter to produce fractal, dissipative, self-organising form. Cheers ------------------------------------------------------------ from John McCrone check out my consciousness web site http://www.btinternet.com/~neuronaut/ neuroscience, human evolution, Libet's half second, Vygotsky and more... |
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