Science moving on
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| Description: | This lecture argues that present-day physics is limited through its faiiure to take account of the role played by the complicated organisation characteristic of life (transcript available). |
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| Created: | 2019-06-13 21:58 | ||
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| Collection: | Brian Josephson's lecture collection | ||
| Publisher: | University of Cambridge | ||
| Copyright: | Professor Brian Josephson | ||
| Language: | eng (English) | ||
| Keywords: | unifying physics and biology; coordination dynamics; law without law; biosemiotics; | ||
| Credits: |
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| Abstract: | The official position in science is that physics and chemistry are supposed to be able to explain life, but accurate specification would be needed for this, and that would need to take into account the subtleties of the organisation of life, now being studied in detail by biologists and others. Difficulties concerning the characterisation of observation in quantum mechanics may be a consequence of ignoring such subtleties which appear, among other things, to underlie remarkable phenomena such as the capabilities of human language. A synthesis of the approaches adopted by physicists and biologists, with their very different preferred modes of description and analysis, may resolve such difficulties, for example using detailed models to clarify Wheeler's speculation that physical laws may be the outcome of a process of observer-participancy. Such investigations may foster a new era in science.
Useful references: Kelso on coordination dynamics, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278715656_Coordination_Dynamics Hoffmeyer on 'semiotic scaffolding', https:/jhoffmeyer.dk/One/scientific-writings/semiotic-scaffolding.pdf Wheeler's 'Law without Law', https://what-buddha-said.net/library/pdfs/wheeler_law_without_law.pdf In response to questions (not included in this recording), it was noted that rather trying to unite gravity with the other forces mathematically, this approach would view these two types of force as the outcome of two distinct mechanisms to be understood separately. This lecture was given as part of the 2019 Cambridge Festival of Inner Light organised by Brahma Kumaris. |
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Transcript
Transcript:
Transcript of talk, edited in the interests of clarity.
First of all I would like to thank Brahma Kumaris for giving me this chance to talk about my current ideas. If you want to know more, go to my home page and you'll see a link to a paper [https://doi.org/10.1007/s41470-019-00049-w] that has been published recently. I'm working on more things but this is where we are at the moment.
My main point is that physics doesn't really understand life, and by taking proper account of life we will be able to take a big step forward, just as happened when quantum theory took over from classical physics. I hope to be able to demonstrate to you that this is something plausible. First of all the situation as we have it at the moment: quantum physics is what’s supposed to be fundamental; it’s a theory that gradually developed about a hundred years ago, and the idea is that it can explain everything; for example it does explain chemistry nicely — you can predict the properties of molecules, and the idea is we can understand life as well in this way — life is largely chemistry: special molecules which behave in particular ways that explain life. I’m now going to explain why that is wrong, and why in fact life really should come at the bottom of the chain [as in a slide showing how one kind of phenomenon is explained by a more fundamental one], so that once we understand life properly, that will explain quantum physics.
The analogy used, when one says chemistry etc. can explain life the way electronic circuitry is explainable in terms of its components, presumes a precise specification. With a circuit, if you know exactly what the components are and how they behave, and what the connections are, you can predict how the circuit will behave and design a circuit. The trouble is that life isn’t equivalent to that. Life is very variable, we can’t specify it exactly; we can say what the molecules are but to be able to do the physics we need to know the precise state of each molecule and the relationships between them all, so the anology doesn’t work. Furthermore, there’s so much variation between one example, say one cat and another, that you can’t fit things to a general formula, which is what physicists like to do. So the idea of explaining life in terms of quantum physics is a little bit suspect.
How does biology work, if not via equations? Biologists seem to manage very well without doing the kind of complicated calculations that physicists do, and they way they are able to do it is by developing a specialised language. They describe things in their own way: explore and discover things and name them. A familiar example is DNA. DNA is something one knows about in general: it differs from one person to another; the DNA is not exactly the same. But still there are general principles: two strands of DNA involved in a replication process, transcription involving amino acids, etc. There are a whole lot of things you can do in biology, just using language in this way, without needing precise calculation. Physicists like mathematical language, whereas biologists invent their own language to fit what they discover. It’s a two cultures type of situation, with physicists and biologists having little contact with each other, as in the two cultures of C P Snow (in this connection, physicists explain only bits of the organism but not how the whole organism works — if you put the parts of an organism together randomly you’d not get a working organism in general). So there’s something about life that is different from what physicists deal with.
You might say, this doesn’t really matter: physicists study matter and biologists study life, and that’s irrelevant to physics. But perhaps that isn’t really the case, perhaps biologists know something that physicists don’t. The extra thing, as I’ll explain in a moment, is that there’s a special kind of organisation in biological systems which is different from the kind of organisation physicists know about, organisation like that of crystals, magnets, superconductors, but that’s a simpler kind of organisation than what you get with life. So life is beyond what physicists know about.
Still, you might say that that doesn’t really matter, physics is still OK, but there’s one situation where physics is not OK, something that causes a lot of problems. You have one equation, like the Schrödinger equation, that describes how things go when they are not being observed, but when they are being observed something happens called collapse which has a different equation. This is all rather mysterious; there’s a great deal of argument as to how you might deal with this. So you could say, for a start, observation might be the thing where biologists have things to say as this is something that organisms in particular do, which goes along with the idea of there being something extra in biology.
People have taken this up in various ways. There are a number of pieces of theory, and what is needed now is to put everything together, as by putting things together you can come up with many new ideas. One idea I’d like to mention in particular, as it’s connected with observation, is that of a famous physicist called John Archibald Wheeler, who wrote an article entitled ‘Law without Law’. His argument was as follows: an individual observation, such as when you measure the position of a particle, produces wave function collapse. Perhaps if you have lots of observations like this going on, that might have a dramatic effect, just as with a piece of cloth, where you perform many simple operations upon a thread and end up with a structured cloth. He thought in the same way nature observing things might be producing the kind of things that we know of in physics, bringing laws into existence [quote: ‘if the views we are exploring here are correct, one principle, observer-participancy suffices to build everything]. But he didn’t have a clue as to how this could happen, it was just an idea.
In accord with the ‘two cultures’, Wheeler didn’t know much about biology, but biologists have been busy working on all these things, like observation. There have been various ideas which I’ll briefly mention, which have come out from theoretical biology. First, back to the nineteenth century, there’s the idea of meaning, referred to as the study of biosemiotics in the context of life. Meaning involves signs, which refer to other things, and in between there’s the process of interpretation. Peirce studied this in detail and biosemioticians have taken this up and asked how this applies to biology. With a particular skill, certain things are meaningful: when you are learning a skill there are particular things that are relevant to the skill. Overall, there is an organisation like a flowchart, corresponding to a strategy. There are also strategies for things like learning a language, or learning to walk, and the idea of supportive scaffolding has been invoked in this context. Scaffolding focusses activity; thus instead of looking all around generally your attention is focussed on particular things, the things that are important for becoming good at something.
Another thing that seems very important is the idea of coordination, a concept that has been developed by people such as Scott Kelso. Here a skilled action is produced by coordinating together component activities. This is different from the bonding together by forces that physicists know about. Take for example a flock of birds: birds don’t fly together because there’s a force pulling them together, but because each bird is informed of the position of the others (that is what is significant in this context), and responds appropriately. This is again something that is special to life.
To continue about coordination, a nice illustration of the emergence of coordination is that of language. For a start, language bonds people together in that they can do things together through communicating with each other using language. Also interesting is the way that in language processing you have many coordinated processes. This is more than just an idea; this working together has been successfully modelled in a computer simulation by Winograd. We can also say that language is a means for ‘fabricating form’, in line with Wheeler’s ideas.
What we have to do now is put the ideas such as those I’ve talked about together, get experts working on them, and then will emerge this new branch of physics. Creativity by some entity, as hypothesised in religion, may ultimately come in as well. We have only a general picture at the moment, but that’s how new sciences usually start, with something simple, then people work out more and more detail, and that will be the new direction for science.
First of all I would like to thank Brahma Kumaris for giving me this chance to talk about my current ideas. If you want to know more, go to my home page and you'll see a link to a paper [https://doi.org/10.1007/s41470-019-00049-w] that has been published recently. I'm working on more things but this is where we are at the moment.
My main point is that physics doesn't really understand life, and by taking proper account of life we will be able to take a big step forward, just as happened when quantum theory took over from classical physics. I hope to be able to demonstrate to you that this is something plausible. First of all the situation as we have it at the moment: quantum physics is what’s supposed to be fundamental; it’s a theory that gradually developed about a hundred years ago, and the idea is that it can explain everything; for example it does explain chemistry nicely — you can predict the properties of molecules, and the idea is we can understand life as well in this way — life is largely chemistry: special molecules which behave in particular ways that explain life. I’m now going to explain why that is wrong, and why in fact life really should come at the bottom of the chain [as in a slide showing how one kind of phenomenon is explained by a more fundamental one], so that once we understand life properly, that will explain quantum physics.
The analogy used, when one says chemistry etc. can explain life the way electronic circuitry is explainable in terms of its components, presumes a precise specification. With a circuit, if you know exactly what the components are and how they behave, and what the connections are, you can predict how the circuit will behave and design a circuit. The trouble is that life isn’t equivalent to that. Life is very variable, we can’t specify it exactly; we can say what the molecules are but to be able to do the physics we need to know the precise state of each molecule and the relationships between them all, so the anology doesn’t work. Furthermore, there’s so much variation between one example, say one cat and another, that you can’t fit things to a general formula, which is what physicists like to do. So the idea of explaining life in terms of quantum physics is a little bit suspect.
How does biology work, if not via equations? Biologists seem to manage very well without doing the kind of complicated calculations that physicists do, and they way they are able to do it is by developing a specialised language. They describe things in their own way: explore and discover things and name them. A familiar example is DNA. DNA is something one knows about in general: it differs from one person to another; the DNA is not exactly the same. But still there are general principles: two strands of DNA involved in a replication process, transcription involving amino acids, etc. There are a whole lot of things you can do in biology, just using language in this way, without needing precise calculation. Physicists like mathematical language, whereas biologists invent their own language to fit what they discover. It’s a two cultures type of situation, with physicists and biologists having little contact with each other, as in the two cultures of C P Snow (in this connection, physicists explain only bits of the organism but not how the whole organism works — if you put the parts of an organism together randomly you’d not get a working organism in general). So there’s something about life that is different from what physicists deal with.
You might say, this doesn’t really matter: physicists study matter and biologists study life, and that’s irrelevant to physics. But perhaps that isn’t really the case, perhaps biologists know something that physicists don’t. The extra thing, as I’ll explain in a moment, is that there’s a special kind of organisation in biological systems which is different from the kind of organisation physicists know about, organisation like that of crystals, magnets, superconductors, but that’s a simpler kind of organisation than what you get with life. So life is beyond what physicists know about.
Still, you might say that that doesn’t really matter, physics is still OK, but there’s one situation where physics is not OK, something that causes a lot of problems. You have one equation, like the Schrödinger equation, that describes how things go when they are not being observed, but when they are being observed something happens called collapse which has a different equation. This is all rather mysterious; there’s a great deal of argument as to how you might deal with this. So you could say, for a start, observation might be the thing where biologists have things to say as this is something that organisms in particular do, which goes along with the idea of there being something extra in biology.
People have taken this up in various ways. There are a number of pieces of theory, and what is needed now is to put everything together, as by putting things together you can come up with many new ideas. One idea I’d like to mention in particular, as it’s connected with observation, is that of a famous physicist called John Archibald Wheeler, who wrote an article entitled ‘Law without Law’. His argument was as follows: an individual observation, such as when you measure the position of a particle, produces wave function collapse. Perhaps if you have lots of observations like this going on, that might have a dramatic effect, just as with a piece of cloth, where you perform many simple operations upon a thread and end up with a structured cloth. He thought in the same way nature observing things might be producing the kind of things that we know of in physics, bringing laws into existence [quote: ‘if the views we are exploring here are correct, one principle, observer-participancy suffices to build everything]. But he didn’t have a clue as to how this could happen, it was just an idea.
In accord with the ‘two cultures’, Wheeler didn’t know much about biology, but biologists have been busy working on all these things, like observation. There have been various ideas which I’ll briefly mention, which have come out from theoretical biology. First, back to the nineteenth century, there’s the idea of meaning, referred to as the study of biosemiotics in the context of life. Meaning involves signs, which refer to other things, and in between there’s the process of interpretation. Peirce studied this in detail and biosemioticians have taken this up and asked how this applies to biology. With a particular skill, certain things are meaningful: when you are learning a skill there are particular things that are relevant to the skill. Overall, there is an organisation like a flowchart, corresponding to a strategy. There are also strategies for things like learning a language, or learning to walk, and the idea of supportive scaffolding has been invoked in this context. Scaffolding focusses activity; thus instead of looking all around generally your attention is focussed on particular things, the things that are important for becoming good at something.
Another thing that seems very important is the idea of coordination, a concept that has been developed by people such as Scott Kelso. Here a skilled action is produced by coordinating together component activities. This is different from the bonding together by forces that physicists know about. Take for example a flock of birds: birds don’t fly together because there’s a force pulling them together, but because each bird is informed of the position of the others (that is what is significant in this context), and responds appropriately. This is again something that is special to life.
To continue about coordination, a nice illustration of the emergence of coordination is that of language. For a start, language bonds people together in that they can do things together through communicating with each other using language. Also interesting is the way that in language processing you have many coordinated processes. This is more than just an idea; this working together has been successfully modelled in a computer simulation by Winograd. We can also say that language is a means for ‘fabricating form’, in line with Wheeler’s ideas.
What we have to do now is put the ideas such as those I’ve talked about together, get experts working on them, and then will emerge this new branch of physics. Creativity by some entity, as hypothesised in religion, may ultimately come in as well. We have only a general picture at the moment, but that’s how new sciences usually start, with something simple, then people work out more and more detail, and that will be the new direction for science.