Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-everything-in-the-universe-turns-more-complex-20250402/

by konradx • 1 year ago

149 96 1 year ago

quantamagazine.org

gomijacogeo• 1 year ago

99.9999999...% of 'everything' in the universe simply falls down a gravity gradient to be crushed into simple oblivion.

manmal• 1 year ago

Isn’t that actually also in favor of building up more complexity?

Gualdrapo• 1 year ago

I remember reading somewhere that maybe the purpose of life is to increase entropy in the universe. If that is true and we haven't found any sound evidence of life elsewhere, I don't know.

justinator• 1 year ago

It tracks, though "attaining a higher state of entropy" is just what Universes generally do it seems, given our n of 1 Universes we've started to evaluate.

Though, I'm not sure if life is the best at it, when compared to say a black hole. Some smart apes burning off fossil fuels seems pretty insignificant in comparison -- or even seeing what our own Sun does in a few seconds.

File that under, "The Earth will be fine in the long run, it's humans that are f'd" George Carlin pov. Maybe when we start building Death Stars (plural)

kmoser• 1 year ago

Where did you read this? "Purpose" is a very loaded word. If life has any purpose at all, it's to reproduce and propagate one's genes. Additional entropy just sounds like an inevitable side-effect of that.

firecall• 1 year ago

Agreed about purpose being a loaded term.

It's my, somewhat lazy, philosophical opinion, that there isn't any purpose and there doesn't need to be one.

I don't see why the universe would need a purpose for anything. Things are what they. Things changing state. Entropy.

I see reproduction as more of built in motivation to our system than a purpose as such. But that's semantics, and my purpose in life is not to argue about words! ;-)

justanotherjoe3• 1 year ago

Could be. Could also be that reproduction and propagation is the inevitable side effect of that, no? We cant dissipate energy when we're dead.

__MatrixMan__6• 1 year ago

"to reproduce and populate its genes" feels like a better fit for the purpose of an organism.

If you subscribe to the big bang theory (and the idea that the purpose of a system is what it does), then the universe's purpose is to walk a path from low entropy to high entropy. Of what use is life, in such an endeavor? Well, life tends to seek out bits of stuck energy (food/fuel) and release it (metabolism/economy)--moving the universe further along on its path.

This gives a sort of answer to the question: "why bother have live at all?" And so I think the entropy purpose makes sense--moreso than just having it just be a side effect. Nobody will ever be absolutely right or wrong about such things (purposes), but they're handy to have around sometimes.

kouru225• 1 year ago

Pretty sure this is what Schrodingers opinion is in his book “what is life?” But I haven’t read it. Maybe OP got it from that

mjan22640• 1 year ago

Reproduction is not really a purpose. What makes copies of itself, happens to persist.

__MatrixMan__6• 1 year ago

I have lost the book, but I think I read this in "What is Life? And Other Scientific Essays" by Erwin Schrödinger. If I recall, it was one of the "Other Scientific Essays."

nayuki• 1 year ago

I read somewhere that life is more efficient at dissipating energy and faster at increasing entropy than non-living physical/chemical phenomena. Citation needed.

MeteorMarc• 1 year ago

https://www.amazon.nl/Every-Life-Fire-Thermodynamics-Explain...

floatrock• 1 year ago

Right, it's less about the purpose of life (which implies a directive force) and more that a characteristic of life is it's an emergent complexity that finds more efficient ways of increasing entropy.

It gets a bit blurry when you start to substitute "life" for any "complex cosmological system" though...

robocat• 1 year ago

Surely you mean accelerate entropy.

I presume the end-state of entropy would be the same (excluding ways to escape the universe).

XorNot• 1 year ago

I mean purpose is assigning too much agency, but it's relatively easy to show cells are entropy pumps - they survive by producing a lot more entropy in their environment then is recovered from dying.

flanked-evergl2• 1 year ago

I think it was from Sean Caroll's book The Big Picture.

The statement is a category error, but that criticism distracts from the very valuable insight he does provide regarding entropy, life and complexity.

He did a series on minutephysics explaining it quite well, worth a watch. He does explain why complexity increases as entropy increases (with some additional qualification).

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoaVOjvkzQtyZF-2VpJrx...

tiborsaas• 1 year ago

We are only relatively recently have good enough tooling to even talk about discovering bio- and technosignatures in the atmosphere of exoplanets. I'm really hoping that we will find some undeniable evidence in my lifetime.

perrygeo• 1 year ago

POSIWID. Life on earth's primary "purpose" if observed from space would be to dissipate low-entropy solar radiation, using it to build temporary structures out of carbon.

It is puzzling why life isn't more common. Perhaps dissipative self-organizing structures are everywhere - stars, solar systems and galaxies themselves maintain their order by dissipating energy. They just don't look like "life" to us.

OgsyedIE• 1 year ago

I'm fairly sure this is already in the usual canon of statistical mechanics.

"When one compares a hotplate with and without a Benard cell apparatus on top, there is an overall increase in entropy as energy passes through the system as required by the second law, because the increase in entropy in the environment (at the heat sink) is greater than the decreases in entropy that come about by maintaining gradients within the Benard cell system."

gsf_emergency2• 1 year ago

The abstract heresy innuendo'd here seems to be about an increase in global (aka universal) "complexity"*

(Think: no heat death!)

Related to another heresy understated by qmag just this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43665831

In that case, qmag didn't (dare to?) shout loud enough that the para-particles are globally ?distinguishable..

That's like a very restricted version of TFA's claim though..

Another take on the issue:

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=762

*I don't want to say "entropy" because it's not clear to many folks, including experts, whether entropy is uh, "correlated" or "anticorrelated" with complexity.

raxxorraxor3• 1 year ago

"correlated" or "anticorrelated" with complexity.

Also the value of entropy has different signs in thermodynamics and computer science for example. Not helpful either...

DemocracyFTW22• 1 year ago

The law of increasing complexity holds at least for the software that I write, so yeah—plausible...

raxxorraxor3• 1 year ago

Software complexity can decrease though. Very, very unlikely, but there is the possibility of the 12 year old kid from the internet that does a better job than you despite your hard work and long professinal career.

DemocracyFTW22• 1 year ago

I'm absolutely positive that software complexity can decrease and in so far my post was not entirely serious. I have multiple instances at my hand where re-writing existing libraries with a better focus on simplicity, patterns better suited for the job, more stringent APIs and so on all contribute to produce new versions of software that are ~about as capable as the old version but internally much simpler. However I feel that when I just go on building on and on without tearing down entire edifices of code once in a while, software tends to become inscrutable, hard to maintain and hard to extend.

petre• 1 year ago

Douglas Adams was right all along then.

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

gsf_emergency_24• 1 year ago

Fancier but less humorous take by "experts" (including Goedel):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_collapse

fpoling2• 1 year ago

The thing that is often missed in debates about entropy and Universe is that the classical notion on entropy is not compatible with General Relativity. Richard Tolman almost 100 years ago proposed an extension that was compatible.

One of the consequences of that extension was a possibility of a cyclic universe. On expansion one sees that classically defined entropy increases but then it will decrease on contraction.

These days that work is pretty much forgotten, but still it showed that with GR heat dearth of the universe was not the only option.

mr_mitm• 1 year ago

Heat death was never the only option in GR. The field equations always allowed for a big crunch or a big rip.

fpoling2• 1 year ago

Yes, but that implies that in GR entropy or at least the value based on the classical definition can decrease.

So apparent increase in complexity can be attributed to gravity.

flanked-evergl2• 1 year ago

There is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology

If I had to bet money on it, I would say it's right, especially in light of things like this: https://phys.org/news/2025-03-ai-image-recognition-universe....

hliyan• 1 year ago

Tried reading the paper [1]. I understand the authors are academics, which is why I'm surprised the paper reads like a layman's attempt at a contributing to a "theory of everything", or at best, an inquiry written by a 18th century European philosopher of science.

- "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature" - what exactly is a "conceptual equivalence"? You mean models? Unifying disparate observations into models is basic science. Not sure why it is highlighted here as some important insight.

- "The laws of classical physics emerged as efforts to provide comprehensive, predictive explanations of phenomena in the macroscopic world" - followed by a laymen's listing of physical laws, then goes on to claim "conspicuously absent is a law of increasing “complexity.”"

- then a jumble of examples including gravitation, stellar evolution, mineral evolution and biological evolution

- this just feels like a slight generalization of evolution: "Systems of many interacting agents display an increase in diversity, distribution, and/or patterned behavior when numerous configurations of the system are subject to selective pressure."

At this point, I gave up.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310223120

bubblyworld• 1 year ago

I think speculative science always starts out as philosophy. This is as true now as it was in the 18th century. If you look at any thinker on the edge of human understanding you'll find something similar (e.g. I was reading Michael Levin's stuff on bioelectricity recently and it also has a heavy dose of philosophy).

I don't really have an issue with any of the points you raised - why do they bother you?

The interesting stuff is the discussion about "functional information" later in the paper, which is their proposed quantitative measure for understanding the evolution of complexity (although it seems like early stages for the theory).

It's "just" a slight generalisation of the ideas of evolution but it applies to nonbiological systems and they can make quantitative predictions. If it turns out to be true then (for me) that is a pretty radical discovery.

I'm looking forward to seeing what can be demonstrated experimentally (the quanta article suggests there is some evidence now, but I haven't yet dug into it).

haswell3• 1 year ago

I think speculative science always starts out as philosophy. This is as true now as it was in the 18th century.

Indeed, and Natural Philosophy was the precursor to what we now call Science.

I still think the old name better fit what we’re doing because it admits that the work is still a philosophical endeavor.

This is not to question the validity of what we now call science, but it’s common these days to believe in the ultimate supremacy of science as the answer to questions that are best explored both philosophically and scientifically, and because pure science still can’t answer important philosophical questions that that the entire scientific discipline rests upon.

ysofunny3• 1 year ago

I think speculative science always starts out as philosophy

or in my words: "the first approximation is poetic. the last one is mathematical"

from philosophy to hard-science and engineered tooling and other products (andor services)

similarly to

from poetry as dubious, cloudy, and vague ideas all the way to crystal clear, fixed and unmoving (dead) formalizations

cryptonector• 1 year ago

I don't really have an issue with any of the points you raised - why do they bother you?

Idk about GP, but bad science writing ("identification of conceptual equivalencies ...") does bother me. It's sloppy, and tends to hide possibly invalid shortcuts taken by the authors by being an impenetrable fog of words. That sort of thing is a very good indicator of bunk, and it tends to peg my BS meter. Which isn't to say that there is no place for that sort of language in a scientific paper, but that one should preface the use of it with an admission of hand-waving for some purpose.

raxxorraxor3• 1 year ago

I believe model and concept can be equivalent, not sure about the required formal terminology in English.

Complexity is probably most formally modeled in entroy in thermodynamics, although it behaves in the opposite direction that these ideas and oberservations suggest it should.

It still asks questions about the reason for this complexity and there is no scientific answer aside from "propably accidental complexity".

Science is curious so it probably shouldn't be dismissed by unmet formal requirements that aren't specified. "Layman" is unspecific, so what would your requirements be exactly?

coldtea• 1 year ago

- "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature" - what exactly is a "conceptual equivalence"? You mean models?

No, a model is not an "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena". It's a simplified representation of a system.

"identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature" could be called an analogy, an isomorphism, a unifying framework, etc.

Unifying disparate observations into models is basic science. Not sure why it is highlighted here as some important insight.

Perhaps because the most important insights are the most basic ones - it's upon those eveything else sits upon.

At this point, I gave up

If you can't bother beyond the abstract or 1st paragraph, or are perplexed that the abstract has a 10,000ft simplistic introduction into the basics, then it's better that you did :)

visarga• 1 year ago

I think you should try to get the intent instead of stumbling on surface level. The core idea is that recursion explains emergence.

A distributed system can still achieve centralized outcomes as a result of centralizing constraints acting on it. For example, matter under gravity forces leads to celestial bodies, particles under EM forces lead to stable chemical molecules, genes and species under the constraint of replication lead to evolution, language under constraint of usage leads to the evolution of culture, and brains under the constraint of serial action lead to centralized semantics and behavior. In neural nets we have the loss function as a centralizing constraint, moving weights towards achieving a certain functional outcome.

Ok, so what is the relation between centralizing constraints and recursion? Recursion is how distributed activity generates constraints. Every action becomes a future constraint. I think this approach shows great promise. We can link recursive incompressibility and undecidability to explanatory gaps. You can't know a recursive process unless you walk the full path of recursion, you have to be it to know it. There is no shorter description of a recursive process than its full history.

So what looks like constraints when seen top-down, looks like search seen bottom-up. Particles search for minimal energy, genes for survival, markets search for profit, and our actions for goal maximization. Search acts on all levels, but since constraints are emergent, search is also open-ended.

Mzxr• 1 year ago

Your comment reminded me of this article. It suggested that we experience time because the underlying processes of the universe are recursive. And since our computational capacity is limited, we as observers can only perceive the future by progressively unfolding it. If recursion explains emergence, could it follow that everything tends to grow more complex over time?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41782534

kdavis• 1 year ago

“The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it to collapse in deepest humiliation.” ― Arthur Eddington, New Pathways in Science

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK2• 1 year ago

Entropy is always increasing in a closed system, but locally it can decrease, if energy is supplied from the outside. Us evolving on Earth comes at the expense of increased entropy of the Sun.

ThrowawayTestr• 1 year ago

I read a theory that life in the universe might be favorable because we increase entropy so much.

mr_toad• 1 year ago

Entropy is always increasing in a closed system

Only if that system isn’t already in thermodynamic equilibrium. A closed system that reaches thermodynamic equilibrium has maximum entropy.

Why the universe as a whole didn’t start out in thermodynamic equilibrium, i.e doesn’t have maximum entropy is something we don’t understand.

EncomLab• 1 year ago

"Complexity" is a hugely problematic term when used in this way - remember that entropy and complexity are related, but they are not interchangeable. A complex system can have lower entropy than a simpler system, and conversely, a system can have high entropy but be relatively simple. By mingling these terms without specifying objective reference points, it all just comes out as word salad.

This paper just reads like an attempt at sounding smart while actually saying little.

pyfon2• 1 year ago

Yes indeed. As I understand it, entropy is about states that are more likely.

I wonder if it always increases though? Eventually there will be enough entropy that any change may cause it to reduce or oscillate? (At universe / reachable universe scale).

andrewflnr3• 1 year ago

Yes, we call that state "heat death". Note that the second law is actually that entropy never decreases; it's allowed to stay constant for certain interactions (for instance I'm pretty sure an elastic collision preserves entropy).

kergonath• 1 year ago

I wonder if it always increases though?

It always increases in an isolated system. That caveat is almost always missing in pop-sci level of discussions about entropy, but it is crucial.

Eventually there will be enough entropy that any change may cause it to reduce or oscillate?

Assuming that the universe is actually an isolated system, entropy will reach a maximum (it cannot oscillate). It is interesting to speculate, and of course our theories are imperfect and we are certainly missing something. In particular, the relationship between time and entropy is not straightforward. Very roughly: is the entropy a function of time, which we could define otherwise, or is time a consequence of entropy changes?

In the first case, we can suppose that if the universe reaches an entropy maximum we’d be far enough outside the conditions under which our theories work that we’d just have entropy decrease with time (i.e., the rule that entropy increases with time is only valid close to our usual conditions).

But in the second case, it would mean that the universe reached the end of time. It could evolve in any conceivable way (in terms of the fundamental laws of Physics), and the arrow of time would always point to the same moment. "What comes after?" Would be a question just as meaningless as "what came before the Big Bang?"

In any case, there are a lot of assumptions and uncertainty. The story does not do the subject any justice.

titzer2• 1 year ago

a system can have high entropy but be relatively simple.

Good examples of these are anything that Kolmogorov-compresses well. For example, by almost any measure the output of a pseudo random number generator has high entropy. Yet it has low information density (low complexity), as the program that generates the sequence, plus its state, is really small.

andrewflnr3• 1 year ago

I think a better example is just hot gas. Heat up a tube of gas, and its entropy will increase, with no effect on its complexity. Still not terribly compressible either though.

ysofunny3• 1 year ago

that is why the complex is distinct from the complicated

skywhopper• 1 year ago

I never trust the sense of new scientific ideas I get from popular press articles. But this comes across as highly questionable, “Intelligent Design” redux stuff. Sure there are some interesting points about information theory etc, but overall it sounds like a lot of scientists desperately cribbing concepts they don’t actually understand from other fields and misapplying them to oversimplified computer simulations someone who barely understands Python wrote 20 years ago, and assuming the simulation, which has built-in, accidentally hard-coded selection factors, is the same as reality.

Seriously, phrases like “selection for function”, unified theories of biology and physics, and big ideas about the second law of thermodynamics are major red flags.

grumple• 1 year ago

This seems to be in a similar vein to constructor theory / assembly theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory

skim_milk• 1 year ago

Bookworms are such a curious people, I love reading their pop-evo-psych-theory-of-everything articles and counting up all the occult references and hidden meanings. Waiting for a deep yellow sunset with royal blue skies to appear some day where they spill all the beans!

talles• 1 year ago

How does one measure complexity 'in the universe'?

idiotsecant• 1 year ago

Isn't that exactly what entropy is?

cess11• 1 year ago

"In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matter — living organisms. Instead, evolution is a special (and perhaps inevitable) case of a more general principle that governs the universe. According to this principle, entities are selected because they are richer in a kind of information that enables them to perform some kind of function."

Sounds like they're struggling to accept that the cosmos is not conscious and it doesn't design, and possibly confuse the fantasies we construct to, as it might be phenomenologically put, make sense of our environment, with the environment itself.

In ancient abrahamic cosmology it was proposed that the cosmos was designed, and first it was stone and water and so on, and then the biological matter was put in there, segmenting stone, hippopotamus and human into a kind of cosmological hierarchy of ethical and divine importance. Famous ancient greek philosophers imagined that there was another world shaping ours, geometrically purer and to people with a particular taste perceived as obviously more beautiful and holy.

Different strains of similar thinking survived in parts of the world for a long time, and had a renaissance due to european colonialism spreading it with a diverse set of tools.

One of the strongest views that followed is a cosmological dualism, the belief that there is something like soul or mind that is different from matter, usually paired with the belief that this is how truth enters the world and that truth is otherworldly, etherical.

Modern physics turned out to be absolutely brutal towards ideas like these. For a hundred years experiment upon experiment just smashed such segmentations and expectations against a growing mountain of experiential evidence. As of yet we have no evidence of the cosmos being governed by laws and selection, it just is what it is and the supposed laws are human interpretations, hopes and fantasies.

Protestant christianity is in an especially bad place due to this development, since it bets all it has on mental phenomena being more real than matter. Catholics and muslims can fall back on arguing that the divine is unknowable and that the effects of certain acts and traditions are socially beneficial, which sometimes puts them at odds with or makes them absolutely incompatible with worldly regimes of power. Protestant ideology on the other hand, can be fitted in with basically any regime, material conditions just aren't that important, ethically or otherwise.

Looking at the micro-perspectives we didn't find geometrical simplicity, instead we found weird, messy fields and almost-existences, putting all sorts of expectations about the foundations of the cosmos into question. Maybe it'll change, but at the moment there's no evidence for some grand principle or cosmic selector or whatever. One might argue something here about cosmic constants or the symmetry Dirac sussed out but that's still just pushing human experience into an algebra.

The expectation that life is somehow special is wrong. There is, as far as we can see, no difference in the quarks in a dog and those in a rock. The argument that 'DNA encodes more information' is childish, there are repetitive structures everywhere, like in the crystalline structures in a piece of rock. Protein sacks carrying their own emulation of a particular old ocean on a particular planet and flubbing around on land, carefully putting in salts and carbon and so on to keep it going, is neither more or less complex, neither more or less "information dense" in itself, than a photovoltaic panel pushing electrons to light up a screen.

There is a good book from the nineties on this topic, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine#The_End_of_Cert.... One should be very suspicious of people that talk about being cosmically selected, or about natural laws.

b450• 1 year ago

The authors here are claiming, as your quote states, that biological evolution is just one instance of a more general phenomenon. I'm not sure that's contrary to the views you're expressing. You wrote:

The expectation that life is somehow special is wrong. There is, as far as we can see, no difference in the quarks in a dog and those in a rock

But the authors' examples do include the "speciation" of minerals! As I read it, the authors describe:

- some initial set of physical states (organisms, minerals, whatever)

- these states create conditions for new states to emerge, which in turn open up new possibilities or "phase spaces", and so on

- these new phase spaces produce new ad hoc "functions", which are (inevitably, with time and the flow of energy) searched and acted upon by selective processes, driving this increase of "functional information".

I don't think it's saying that living things are more complex or information dense per se, but rather, that this cycle of search, selection, and bootstrapping of new functions is a law-like generality that can be observed outside of living systems.

I'm not endorsing this view! There do seem to be clear problems with it as a testable scientific hypothesis. But to my naive ear, all of this seems to play rather nicely with this fundamentally statistical (vs deterministic) picture of reality that Prigogine described, with the "arrow of time" manifesting not just in thermodynamics and these irreversible processes, but also in this diversification of functions.

mbfg• 1 year ago

so at heat death of the universe, things will be more complex? i think not. There is clearly a limit to complexity, where that is when that is we don't know.

fruktmix• 1 year ago

It is following the Fundamental theorem of software engineering, another level of indirection.

adrian_b• 1 year ago

Sentences like this, i.e. "everything turns more complex", must be formulated much more precisely in order to become true.

The article talks a lot about biological evolution, but in that case the only claim that is likely to be true is that the complexity of the entire biosphere increases continuously, unless a catastrophe resets the biosphere to a lower complexity.

If you look only at a small part of the biosphere, like one species of living beings, it is extremely frequent to see that it evolves to become simpler, not more complex, because a simpler structure is usually optimal for constant environmental conditions, the more complex structures are mainly beneficial for avoiding extinction when the environmental conditions change.

seydor• 1 year ago

Isn't that like saying that "some things take time"? Complexity also takes time to develop through a myriad probabilities. We even define complexity along the concept of things taking time or equivalent space/memory. As the authors say, functional information of physical systems is very difficult to quantify. Until then, this is another formulation of the anthropic principle , but with complexity instead of humanity.

kens• 1 year ago

Coincidentally, I'm reading Walker's book "Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence" on the same topic. (Walker is one of the researchers in the article.) Summary: I don't like the book. The book was motivating me to write an article "Books I don't like", but I'll comment here instead :-)

The book describes "Assembly Theory", a theory of how life can arise in the universe. The idea is that you can quantitatively measure the complexity of objects (especially chemicals) by the number of recursive steps to create them. (The molecule ATP is 21 for instance.) You need life to create anything over 15; the idea of life is it contains information that can create structures more complex than what can be created randomly. The important thing about life is that it isn't spontaneous, but forms an unbroken chain through time. Explaining how it started may require new physics.

If the above seems unclear, it's because it is unclear to me. The book doesn't do a good job of explaining things. It looks like a mass-market science book, but I found it very confusing. For instance, it's unclear where the number 21 for ATP comes from, although there's an analogy to LEGO. The book doesn't define things and goes into many, many tangents. The author is very, very enthusiastic about the ideas but reading the book is like looking at ideas through a cloud of vagueness.

The writing is also extremely quirky. Everyone is on a first-name basis, from Albert (Einstein) to Johnny (von Neumann) and Erwin (Schrödinger). One chapter is written in the second person, and "you" turn out to be "Albert." The book pushes the idea that physics is great and can solve everything, covering physics "greatest hits" from relativity and quantum mechanics to gravitational waves and the Higgs boson. (The underlying theme is: "Physics is great. This book is physics. Therefore, this book is great.") The book has a lot of discussion of how it is a new paradigm, Kuhn's paradigm shifts, how it will move astrobiology beyond the pre-paradigmatic phase and unify fields of research and so forth. It's not a crackpot book, but there are an uncomfortable number of crackpot red flags.

I'm not rejecting the idea of assembly theory. To be honest, after reading the book, I don't understand it well enough to say which parts seem good and which parts seem flawed. There seem to be interesting ideas struggling to get out but I'm not getting them. (I don't like to be negative about books, but there are a few that I regret reading and feel that I should warn people.)

roughly• 1 year ago

Walker gave a talk recently at Long Now on Assembly Theory that sounds like it did a better job of getting the point across:

https://longnow.org/ideas/informational-theory-life/

Viliam1234• 1 year ago

It's not a crackpot book, but there are an uncomfortable number of crackpot red flags.

How do you know it's not a crackpot book? All evidence you mentioned here seems to support that conclusion.

aradox66• 1 year ago

I felt similar reading that book. She seems very clear that she wants to develop paradigmatic physics, and wants Assembly Theory to be paradigmatic, but there's not a lot of meat on the bone.

andrewflnr3• 1 year ago

Amateur speculation, but informed by professionals: I think this tendency toward complexity is situational, not fundamental. Specifically, it's a product of this stage of the universe having lots of available energy. More complex structures are favored when/because they can consume more energy and increase entropy more effectively. The complexity will probably start fading when the hydrogen-fusion party dies. The second law will continue on its way.

titzer2• 1 year ago

This theory is absurd. They're unjustifiably generalizing from a single system--biological evolution on Earth[1]. There are literally no other places in our solar system even that are rapidly evolving to more complexity. Lots of dead rocks, hot and cold, and a bunch of boiling gas balls. Incidentally, none of these are turning into Cybertron. As it turns out, the chemistry that we know to be necessary for self-replicating things just doesn't work there. (Maybe there are other chemistries that will work, we don't know). So this specific chemistry and this specific set of conditions to kick off and indeed allow self-replication to continue are pretty damn important to understanding how it works.

A "new force of nature"? It's just so pretentious. Some interesting biases of a selection process driven by copious excess energy doesn't make for a new force of nature. Otherwise we'd be positing all kinds of absurdities that are not directly explained by particle physics are woo woo a new force of nature--fashion choices (hey, copy, select, mutate there too).

[1] And no, I don't think that the computer simulations of evolution they carry out are any additional evidence. So you made a computer program with a copy/select/mutate loop in it. Big deal. I can make a computer simulation about anything.

afpx• 1 year ago

Pretty cool. I often wondered if the universe was evolving similar to natural selection via a reinforcement learning process. Wave function collapses to the value that maximizes some objective function.

How would you test for it though? I've seen enough residual data from RL processes to almost see semblences of patterns that could be extracted and re-applied at a macro scale.

m3kw9• 1 year ago

Likely could be due to laws of math in this universe where more is always desired more then less.

Kungfuturtle• 1 year ago

This reminds me of Teilhard de Chardin's take on complexification, as laid out in his seminal book Le Phénomène humain. See e.g., this article[0] for a simple overview of the hypothesis. For further reading, I recommend the excellent new translation by Sarah Appleton-Weber, The Human Phenomenon[1].

[0] <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/%28SICI%2910...>

[1] <https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/...>

Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

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