Random Musing 22: Why T=0 is the proverbial fly in the primordial soup of existence
The Big Bang theory can talk about time T> 0 but can’t explain the events at T= 0, in the same way, the start of life at T = 0 is beyond the grasp of science at present.
Nonsensical Nemo’s Note: This musing is more from Pater Dutta and less from filus. I am just trying to replicate what he said so you get what I went through in boarding school when he would send me letters about the fourth dimension to a a nine-year-old. I jest. As far as the parent lottery goes, I lucked out big time.
As I’ve written before: “When I was a lonely adolescent in boarding school, I would often look forward to my father’s letters. They were a sign of normalcy, a gallimaufry of words that would immediately transport me from the hurly-burly of school – a live re-enactment of The Lord of the Flies – to home. And he would write to my adolescent self about everything from Einstein’s 1905 annus mirabilis papers and how they changed the way we perceive the universe to non-seeded Goran Ivanisevic’s thrilling victory over Patrick Rafter at Wimbledon.”
Pater Dutta just finished reading Dan Brown’s Origin again, and it struck him that despite everything science has created – giant metal tubes that can fly us to different parts of the world or splitting an atom to channel one’s inner Lord K or developing a global communication system that allows us to fight with random strangers – it hasn’t comprehensively answered the question about how life began.
The current theory is that somehow the self-replicating complex amino acid-based compounds emerged from the primordial soup of water and chemicals thanks to a serendipitous lightning strike.
However, just like the Big Bang theory can talk about time T> 0 but can’t explain the events at T= 0, in the same way, the start of life at T = 0 is beyond the grasp of science at present. Thereby, T = 0 is the proverbial fly in the primordial soup.
Even if we take sentience out of the picture – the moment when even a microbe could choose between two degrees of freedom – how did cells organise into life forms?
That goes against the basic law of nature, better known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the total entropy of a system either increases or remains constant in any spontaneous process: it never decreases. Thereby, cells organising into life form – creating order from disorder – directly opposes the law of entropy, which states nature’s law is dissipating order to disorder, i.e., all things will always fall apart.
In 2014, 31-year-old Jeremy England of MIT proposed an exciting theory that explains the emergence of life. The emergence of life doesn’t violate entropy, and thermodynamics had no way to explain it (A fictionalised version of this theory appears in Origin).
England’s theory is that the fundamental goal of nature is to spread energy, much like the raison d’etre of communism is to spread equality by ridding the world of wealth.
Wherever nature finds a concentration of energy, it takes steps to dissipate that energy.
A tornado is nature’s way of dispelling concentrated high pressure by converting it to a rotational force that exhausts itself.
A snowflake’s multifaceted structure reflects sunlight chaotically in all directions to disperse the sun’s energy.
Plants absorb intense energy from the sun to grow - photosynthesis is a very effective entropy machine, it dissolves the sun's energy to increase entropy all around.
To promote disorder, nature often needs to create order first: as the primary goal of nature is to spread energy. Thus, nature creates life – pockets of order – to satisfy its primary goal to spread energy, and in no way, does this violate the Law of Entropy as, in the end, disorder increases.
In Chaos (published in 1997), James Gleick inherently but not explicitly endorses the theory propounded by England in an entirely different context when he quotes climate scientist Edward Lorenz who said: "... dissipation is an agent of order…" (Incidentally, England calls his theory dissipation-driven adaptation").
Now the bedrock of Western philosophy is the mind-body duality that originated from Rene Descartes: cogito, ergo sum (the philosophical antithesis of Aham Brahmasmi).
Western science follows the same logic. While Descartes stopped at the mind (thought), neuroscience further expanded the idea to include intelligence and consciousness.
There are tools to study the workings of neural networks in the brain, which, as one often likes pointing out, is such a remarkable organ that it’s the only one to name itself.
Matter-energy and space-time, along with being excellent names for Infinity Stones, are the fundamental entities science and scientists use to investigate nature. Therefore, consciousness must be explained using these fundamentals, but so far, they have failed to do so.
David Chalmer, an Australian neuroscientist, and philosopher, calls it "the hard problem of consciousness.”
So, what now? Will we ever know how things changed at T=0?
In Test cricket, when a batsman gets out before the wee hours of the daybreak, you send a night watchman to avoid losing another wicket. Similarly, philosophy usually has to play the night watchman’s role till science comes up with an answer. Basically, metaphysics has to lay the groundwork for physics.
Here’s what we have so far to explain that moment. The first is that consciousness is itself fundamental like matter-energy – it exists and pervades all nature on its own – it is called – Panpsychism.
Another view called Promissory Materialism, coined by intolerance expert Karl Popper, says that materialists are sustained by the faith that science will redeem all promises. Science, not Christ, is their redeemer. They reason that about 100 years ago, we couldn't explain life, but now we understand life at a molecular level. Perhaps, in 50 or more years, we will be able to explain consciousness too.
The third view is that while matter is fundamental, it’s also elusive.
In the beginning, we only had atoms, then we found electrons, protons, nuclei, and quarks, followed by the particle zoo – enough elementary particles to astonish Sherlock Holmes – and now we have superstrings and their vibrations in ten dimensions. The more we try to look at the matter, the more elusive it becomes. Perhaps, we should say that it actually is a “hard problem of matter” as well as the “hard problem of consciousness”.
Since we’ve no explanation as to how the Big Bang behaved at singularity – the uncertainty principle makes it clear that nothing can be measured exactly, and all known laws of science can work only after the expiry of what is called Planck’s Time, a point of time T > 0. We know nothing of the point of singularity, the beginning of the Big Bang. In the same way, science says life began from the primordial soup, but can't pinpoint how and when it began (when time =0).
Therefore, T=0 remains the original problem, the proverbial fly in the primordial soup and the Big Bang. But perhaps it’s wiser for us to leave it alone. Maybe it’s the only question that needs to be answered, and once we do, we will meet the same fate as the universe in Arthur C Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God.
Edited by Alekhya Boora.
Ah, good to read this at the beginning of the 2024 time slot... The pitter-patter of pater on the Nemo platter... Good, good... Or as the Indian head-nod goes, who knows?