I’m not wild about the fiction of Dan (Da Vinci Code) Brown, but I usually read it anyway: what Brown lacks in style, he makes up for in his taste for selecting truly interesting subjects and themes.
In his novel Origin (2017), he has topped himself. His theme is the existence of God, and his subject is physics.
Cutting-edge physics, it turns out: in a plot that places his popular character Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbologist, in the middle of a deadly brouhaha over a scientific discovery that demonstrates definitively the redundancy of God in the origination of life, Brown showcases an actual scientific discovery, and even trots out a fictionalized version of its discoverer to present the concept to the reader.
The discovery is called dissipation-driven adaptation – and like most great scientific concepts, it is surprisingly simple.
The challenge of physics in recent years has been to bridge the gap between our current understanding of life, which is pretty deep at this point, and our understanding of entropy, which is likewise pretty deep. There is no certain bridge between the two: how does physics account for the increasing order we observe in biochemistry, where extremely sophisticated molecules underlie even more sophisticated cell structures, etc., in a universe where the relentless bludgeon of entropy seems to exist solely to break such structures apart?
Harvard biophysicist Jeremy England and his team have produced an answer: dissipation-driven adaptation. It proposes a single addition to the model of the universe we’ve already teased out, which is built on self-replicating molecules, adaptive organisms, and the second law of thermodynamics: that matter exists to spread energy.
That’s it. That’s all there is to it: matter, both living and non-living, tends to distribute energy, and by whatever means possible. Nature, Jeremy England has demonstrated, has produced countless mechanisms for achieving this energy distribution, from photosynthesis to patterns in snowflakes. England goes on to point out that molecules combine to achieve this end as efficiently as possible, and that there are no exceptions: all matter, living or not, operates in this manner – every material object, every material system constantly spreads energy, environment permitting. And every such system will, when conditions change, shift in the direction of spreading energy. England has basically created an alternative interpretation of entropy. Within this new interpretation, what we think of as “life” - increasing order in a universe that eschews order – is just another material system optimizing within its host environment to spread energy. Even reproduction, which seems on its face to be miraculous, is just another optimization of energy-spreading (in Brown’s book, the given example is a forest, compared to a tree).
In the book, England’s discovery is shown to be not just an unproven idea, but a verified scientific truth – and represents the closure of the final gap in the God story, rendering Him/Her now completely unnecessary (though England, a practicing Orthodox Jew, eschews any such notion).
In the real world, England’s idea remains unproven – it is still very new, and much work remains, though England and his team have published several important papers. But its implications – some of which England et al have yet to confront - are easily explored.
We can consider, for instance, that the point of England’s discovery is not so much to build a bridge between life and non-life – between order and chaos – as to nest life (order) within a larger system (chaos) as part of that system, rather than as an exception to it... to eliminate, conceptually, the perceived incompatibility that separates the two domains. In England’s narrative (in the book), pockets of “order” spring into existence to service “chaos” - to push entropy forward. But if we’re nesting domains there, we can nest domains that are even broader. Let’s consider matter and energy.
We tend to think of them as separate, though we have managed to learn that the two are constantly interacting – all matter contains energy, and energy (per Einstein) condenses into matter (though “condense” is a too-convenient, possibly misleading term here). We can say (again, per Einstein), “Matter is condensed energy” and be accurate, for matter is in essence a form of energy.
All matter was once energy; under certain conditions that emerged from the Big Bang, some energy became matter – it could not continue to hold its original state. The underlying principle of the universe, then, is that it contains energy and used-to-be-energy, and the used-to-be-energy behaves in such a way as to service energy – to keep the Big Bang moving.
England’s idea, then, is that in a universe that is filled with lots of matter and even more energy, the matter that exists amidst the energy is trying to spread – redistribute – any energy that comes its way.
The next step might be this: matter isn’t just constantly spreading energy; matter is trying to be energy – it is constantly striving to return to its original state, pushing back against environments that make this difficult.
The spreading of energy we observe, not just in living mechanisms but in non-living ones, inexorably contributes to entropy. That is, in fact our working definition of the word. In spreading energy, in flowing in the direction of constant collapse, the matter of the universe is trying to move closer to its original state - in the end, to return there altogether.
The end result of this, dramatically framed as “The Heat Death of the Universe”, is the logical conclusion of entropy – a state of the universe wherein no free thermodynamic energy remains to support entropic processes. All the energy exchanges that are possible will have been completed, and the universe will achieve perfect uniformity.
In this framing, “order” and “chaos” reverse roles: the universe’s end goal – the completion of its labors – represents its perfect order, while those processes that have interrupted it (resulting in the creation of matter – random intrusions and disruptions in its process) are the actual chaos. We see it the other way around, because our existence is a consequence of one of those interruptions. But regardless of one’s vantage point, it remains clear that humankind (and all the surrounding life) do indeed contribute ceaselessly to the England agenda – every aspect of our existence, from having babies to cooking dinner to peeing, reduces to the distribution of energy... ...and, in the end, becoming energy, as entropy sweeps our molecules apart and outward, in the direction of their original state.
Robert Langdon notes in the book that the symbol for entropy looks like the Big Bang, and that sunlight-on-stone, a beautiful feature of a cathedral he visits, inspires a unifying awe – and we are finally left to wonder where God ended up in all of this.
England may demur here, but Brown is clear: if dissipation-driven adaptation is real, then God’s last gap is gone; He will inevitably now leave the world stage, once and for all. But as He does so, we might indulge a final, wistful observation: He functioned according to theoretical expectations, redistributing human life and agency energetically (for better or worse) for thousands of years. We can take ironic solace in realizing that we’ll have no trouble continuing to do so, even in His absence.
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