Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (13 page)

For Maxwell these German physicists were seeing the mathematical equivalent of animals in the clouds—they saw them all right, but they weren’t really there. Mathematics, for example in Newton’s theory of gravity, which ultimately allowed the Earth to be reflected as faces in the visors of cosmonauts, can sometimes be spectacularly successful. But despite the power of math on its own, its application to physics is not a lock. Richard Feynman quipped that mathematics is to physics as masturbation is to lovemaking. (He also said physics is like sex: it gives results but that’s not why we do it.)

“You are a magician,” an admirer tells the ballet impresario in the 1948 film
The Red Shoes,
complimenting him for putting together a great show based on the Hans Christian Andersen fable on a shoestring budget in so little time.

“Ah, yes,” says Boris Lermontov, “but even for a magician to pull a rabbit from a hat, the
rab
bit must already be in the
hat.
” In the case of the road from time-reversible dynamics to the lived world of thermodynamic spreading, there doesn’t seem to be a way to get from there to here, where we always end up except in our mathematical abstractions, geometric projections, and imagined infinitudes.

ISABELLE STENGERS

Isabelle Stengers crosses the two cultures, scientific and human, the mechanical-reversible and the irreversible-real. A student and colleague of Ilya Prigogine, who won the Nobel Prize in physics for inroads in the problem Einstein abandoned, she and Prigogine wrote
Order out of Chaos,
a book that attempted to introduce temporal irreversibility into the heart of physics and that developed the very important notion of dissipative structures, real “live” (i.e., not computer programs) three-dimensional systems that appeared in energy flows. If they continued their access to energy and matter substrate, they could continue to grow, producing entropy and spreading energy. In Prigogine’s descriptions they were “far from equilibrium,” and the farther they evolved or diverged from an equilibrium state, the more sensitive to external conditions they became. Eventually, they could undergo bifurcations, separating to new, perhaps higher-energy meta-stable energy regimes.

I met Stengers briefly in passing twenty years ago, at the annual festival of Spoleto. I didn’t know anything about her except that she was a scientist. Spoleto, with its small, crooked cobbled streets and outlying fields of giant sunflowers showered by rays of Renaissance master light, is a beautiful, picturesque villa. My son was a toddler at the time, and a tricycle-possessing pixie with big blue glasses, the grandson of a fascist, was showing my son how to ride. My mother introduced me to Stengers as summer air wafted over the stone balcony. Not long after, Umberto Eco could be seen in the corner, smoking a cigar and surrounded by Italian reporters as if he were Marcello Mastroianni beleaguered by paparazzi in a Fellini movie. Eco had just published
Foucault’s Pendulum,
which was everywhere in the airports. And although we had just met her, Stengers suggested my son, Tonio, might want to spill some water on Eco.

As luck or Gaia would have it, a few years after meeting her I began working, at the behest of the Montana ecologist Eric Schneider, on popularizing the thermodynamics of complex systems—especially as applied to life, which was not Prigogine and Stengers’s focus. Two decades later I found myself at a small conference celebrating her philosophical work
Cosmopolitics: In Place of Both Absolutism and Tolerance.
I was invited by Eben Kirksey, it was put on by the Mellon Committee for Science Studies at the Graduate Center of CUNY, and my offering was “Time Tricks, or Lure of the Retrocausal: Isabelle Stengers’ Delicate Operations on the Body of Science.”

A week before the conference, I was reminded of the strange interweaving of the threads of our lives in the folding tapestry of time by an e-mail, which I forwarded to Stengers, reminding her also of our original meeting when she advocated that my son douse Eco. I also forwarded it to other experts in thermodynamics.

The e-mail was from a Dr. Graf in Germany.

“This April 17th,” it announced, in what could pass for a digital-age version of a broadside for a traveling medicine show, “Dr. Graf will be demonstrating his suitcase-sized gravity machine, a perpetual motion machine of the second kind.” Curious, because I knew the U.S. Patent Office no longer even accepted applications for perpetual motion machines, I fired an e-mail off to Frank L. Lambert. Lambert e-mailed me back to say that Dr. Graf was no mountebank. He had looked at Graf’s calculations, and his valise-sized gravity machine looked like it worked. It did collect energy from gravity. But it was impractical. Lambert calculated that it would require a tube of 90 trillion miles to produce enough energy to light one 100-watt lightbulb.

AROUND 1990 I started working with Schneider, who had already been studying the intersection between nonequilibrium thermodynamics and life for twenty years. This led in 2004 to the University of Chicago Press book
Into the Cool: Thermodynamics, Energy Flow, and Life.
It is a post-Prigoginian work. And it focuses on life, how characteristic patterns appear in and as organisms and ecosystems, on the specifics of life itself—which was not Prigogine’s focus, although some, such as the Austrian astrophysicist Erich Jantsch, who dedicated his book
The Self-Organizing Universe
to Prigogine, saw immediately a relationship between Prigogine’s work and James Lovelock’s description of Earth’s surface as physiological.

The most basic point is that life and the second law, entropy and complex systems, are in no way opposed to each other. Far from it. Natural complex systems cycle matter in regions of energy flow. These systems are not in thermodynamic equilibrium, but, living off of and leveling ambient gradients, they help foment equilibrium in their surroundings. Telic, energy-seeking, sensing life-forms belong to a larger class of dissipative structures. Rather than become less organized, these systems become more organized as energy flows through them. Schneider provides an alternate to Lambert’s modern definition of the second law. Schneider’s version is that nature abhors a gradient, a gradient being a measurable difference of temperature, pressure, chemical concentration, and so forth. Living systems are among the class of natural systems that actively reduce gradients as they maintain their internal organization, grow, and spread.

And here from another angle we can espy the deep roots of teleology, the telic protosemiotic that rules nature. Nature “doesn’t like” differences or concentrations of energy and will actively find ways to get rid of these differences or delocalize these concentrations. Convection cells called Bénard cells are hexagonal fluid flows. They are not less but more organized than simple conducting fluids and perform their natural task, reach their natural telos of energy dissipation, more effectively. Complex systems from autocatalytic chemical reactions similar to the precursors of life to cycling storm systems that rectify atmospheric pressure gradients have a naturalistic function, to delocalize energy. When they are finished with it, they are done, both with the tasks and with themselves—they disappear. Complex systems from Bénard cells to living organisms and ecosystems measurably increase rates and regimes of energy dissipation. Stengers confirmed this for me at the conference. Yes, it’s true, she said, complex systems produce more entropy, but your story is not my story.

I showed her my Maxwell demon trick. Three red cards, representing heat or fast-moving atoms, are mixed with three black cards, representing cold or slow-moving atoms. Focusing on the little angels on the back of Bicycle brand playing cards, I turned the symmetrical cards end for end. I then showed that, with no work being done, the cards had sorted themselves out back into a red and black state. The trick simulates moving from a “more probable” state to “less probable” state, one in which a gradient, here represented by red and black cards, is reestablished. In fact this is just a modern version of a classic card trick called “Oil and Water,” where red and black cards (oil and water), after being mixed, re-sort themselves.

It then turned out that Stengers, a fan of magic, was reading
Sleights of Mind,
a book on the application of magic tricks to cognitive psychology written by three psychologists. My belief is that, after my talk, when she said “I would rather listen to you than physicists” but “my story is not your story,” it was because her passionate project is to review the history of science, to see what it could have been and would have been and what, correlatively, it could still become. A kind of pixie, she, like Jacques Derrida, productively bothers many, if not all, received notions.

Nonetheless, she and Prigogine did not work directly on living systems, and to me one of the most exciting applications of their work is to organisms, which both unconsciously (physiologically) and consciously spend their days recognizing and degrading gradients. “It is true that they produce more entropy.” Stengers’s confirmation bears repeating: The “complex systems” such as your child and your mother and your dog and your cell phone—which seem
more
ordered,
more
organized, and which dazzle us with their elaborateness and agency, their intricacy and relative autonomy—are actively spreading energy into the environment. They are converting high-quality energy to low-quality energy at a pace faster than would be the case if they did not exist. Nonliving systems such as Bénard cells also measurably produce more entropy. They seem to occur because nature happens upon ways to efficiently get rid of preexisting gradients. Life is a splendid means of doing so and often has fun (e.g., eating) in the process. It is something nature likes to do, with or without life and with or without consciousness—though both life and consciousness seem to increase the efficiency, partaking of the “forness” in this natural tendency—to find and efficiently delocalize preexisting concentrated energy reserves. It does thus seem that, beyond any
particular
advantage of a bodily organ, life as a whole exists
for
something—to spread energy, to delocalize and deconcentrate it, a valuable ability connected to its metabolism and franchised by its genetic reproductive capacity.

I thus disagree with the biosemioticians (e.g., Thomas Sebeok and Jesper Hoffmeyer) who would say, quite liberally given the general climate, that the realm of life coincides with that of semiosis, meaning making.
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I think this is true and love Butler’s discussion of the dog looking at a door to go outside not as language (from French
langue,
“tongue”) but as “eyeage.” Yes, other organisms speak, not necessarily with their tongues, and we can sometimes “hear” them, not necessarily with our ears. But language is a material mediation. It takes time to convey a message; it requires intermediary parties. And behind discrete messages I would argue is an ur-message, a message that in our heart of hearts we both already know and know that we don’t want to know. At the limit that message is this: that we are among the tools nature is using to send it. Like the heat-curling tape in the old
Mission Impossible
TV series, which destroys itself after telling the spies their current mission, our ur-message is that we are to foment equilibrium and that we should destroy the message that tells us this message, getting lost in time and stories along the way. Here then, from a 1960s TV show, is a metaphor for the thermosemiotic ur-message. The secret desideratum of all living things, their “higher” message, which is also their “lower” message, and is itself beyond discrete meaning, is to reach equilibrium. This is our impossible mission.

TRIM’S HAT

“I live on Earth at present,” writes Bucky Fuller, “and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe.”
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In my view that is exactly correct: We have a natural function, fomenting equilibrium, although it is complicated by the fact that completion of this prosaic task would render the message complete and the message sender obsolete. Life’s solution thus is, as Schneider says, to relight the candle: reproduction continues the metabolic process of gradient reduction. Genetic replication (dependent on breaking the triply covalent bonds of nitrogen locked up as N2 in the atmosphere and integrating them into DNA) is part of an expanding 3.8-billion-year-old process that locates and uses—without necessarily using up—available energy. It is a natural process, not defying or violating anything. And complex, sensing systems seem to have a leg up in the ancient gradient-reduction game.

The natural unconscious tendency to spread energy, enabled and enhanced by a natural creation of nonliving—and ultimately living and uncontroversially “teleological” conscious complex systems—confers a broad purposiveness over nature. It is a bit of a disappointment, however, for those looking for an ultimate metaphysical or traditional Judeo-Christian purpose, for example, to do God’s will.

Tao
, “the way” in Chinese philosophy, advocates a less humanocentric and more thermodynamically resonant view, I think, a kind of principle of least action, a kind of advocacy of aligning oneself with natural flows, of which one is part but which take part without one in any event—a philosophy that reminds me of setting goals but then opening oneself up to a path of least resistance, a difficult–easy path, free of excess interpretation, which in turn reminds me of Charles Bukowski’s tombstone, which says, “Don’t Try.”