"Life is something that happens on the edge"

This post contains some additional notes and comments to my review of The Copernicus Complex by Caleb Scharf, which is published here.

I suggested the Telegraph use this photograph with the review because it's striking, of course, but also because the archaea growing in the Silex Spring live at the edge. For significance of that, see below.

Here is an attempt at humour that, wisely, did not make the final edit:

One of my favourite books is The Pooh Perplex. One of my least favourite viruses is Herpes Simplex. So I was intrigued when I first heard the title of this book. What on Earth (or beyond it), I wondered, could be The Copernicus Complex? 

Copernicus...was wrong.   Among the things that he (and indeed Kepler and Newton) did not know is that, far from being fixed, the Sun itself is moving through space at about 200 kilometres per second, completing a rotation of the galactic centre once every 240  million years or so.

... small differences...can turn out to make all the difference.   Before the edit the second paragraph continued:

 Nature is subtle and “little” things can be clues to much bigger mysteries. And in time even the Kepler's laws of planetary motion (and the laws of motion and gravitation which Isaac Newton developed towards the end of the same century) have proven to be only approximations. An anomaly in the orbit of Mercury supported Einstein's general theory of relativity (1916), which challenged basic assumptions in all physics to date. Further, in the last couple of decades unprecedented computing power has enabled researchers to show that even apparently well-established elliptical paths can actually be far from fixed. In the long run seemingly small perturbations can, and often do, cause planets to careen off course into their host stars or each other or go whizzing off into deep space.

Copernican principle... Anthropic principle...   Contrasting takes  appear in This Will Make You Smarter. P Z Myers recommends the mediocrity principle, and Samel Abbessman the Copnerican principle. But Marcelo Gleiser thinks we are unique. On the 'special' side, Alan Lightman observes:

With the recent work of the Kepler spacecraft, searching for planets favorable for life, we can estimate that only about one millionth of one billionth of 1 percent of the material of the visible universe exists in living form. From a cosmic perspective, we and all life are the exception to the rule.

and Jim Holt argues that:

living in a generic reality that's mediocre, there are nasty bits and nice bits and we could make the nice bits bigger and the nasty bits smaller and that gives us a kind of purpose in life.

Much to enjoy on the way including things like this. Scharf notes the language of orbital dynamics:

Resonances, precessions, librations, osculating elements, apsidal alignments, arguments of pericenter, harmonics, secular perturbations and always the mention of chaos.

I really did enjoy this book but there were moments when I felt it could be shorter with no loss of quality.  For example, do we really need another explanation of Bayes's theorem just to be told that it is ill-advised to draw conclusions when you have a sample size of one?  Perhaps I have just read too much popular science.

Earthlike planets in the Goldilocks zone...are a small minority ...albeit a minority that contains billions!

the cosmo-chaotic principle  this idea is the heart of the book, and I would have liked to have got there sooner and read more about it including, for example, an expansion of this:

Several people who are studying the biological universe have suggested we adopt this way of conceptualizing life, as a phenomenon hovering on the bring of disorder. Michael Storrie-Lombardi – life is something that happens on the edge, wherever that edge appears...life is a collection of phenomena at the boundary between order and chaos. Across that interface we can imagine there is something akin to a voltage difference. Except this biological gradient is multidimensional, an intersection of available energy, order and disorder, and time.

But perhaps that's the next book or paper...

Among books I recommend for further reading are Five Billion Years of Solitude by Lee Billings,  The Edge of Infinity by David Deutsch and Weird Life by David Toomey.

Image: A wandering stone in Death Valley. Dennis Flaherty/Alamy via Nature.  Stones like this move about for about one minute in every million.

Solitude

Online in The Guardian today: a review of Five Billion Years of Solitude by Lee Billings. Here are some notes and links, and my original ending.

Astronomers have mapped the clouds on a planet 1,000 light years away. See here.

Some indications of what is going on in Gregory Laughlin's head can be found here and here.

Since the book was published Sara Seager has received a MacArthur award.

A question facing all of us...Like many who reflect on the prospects for life in the universe, Billings turns back towards Earth with a heightened sense of how marvelous life on this planet is, and how worthy of attention and care.  Perhaps this turn needs a name if it doesn't already have one.  It is not the opposite of a Copernican turn (in which, discovering the Earth to be just a small planet orbiting a star rather than the centre of the universe we "downgrade" its importance) but a necessary transformation or extension of it.

David Grinspoon writes that we need to search for planetary intelligence, not intelligent life.

an interview last year available here.

See also this Barely Imagined Beings post from earlier in the year.

David Deutsch stresses that...our ignorance is still infinite. Deutsch also suggests that this means there will never be an end of new frontiers. Paul Gilster has written No scientific era has has succeeded in imagining its successor...We have no analogues in our experience for what advanced [interstellar] cultures might create.

My review originally ended like this:

...Mr Palomar returns from his reverie to the normal run of life only to find that he is as vulnerable to muddle, hesitation, blunders and anguish as ever before. Better, and maybe more attainable than it seems, is the state Thoreau experienced when he wrote “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is...I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.”

A poet whose name translates from Chinese as Summit-Gate didn't even need words. Taking refuge from the madness and grief of her times in a small house on windy ridge line, she would collect dry leaves every autumn, selecting them for their delightful and evocative shapes, and store them in special boxes on bookshelves in her library. After she had filled all the shelves, Summit-Gate would wait for the first snowfall and then release the leaves, one at a time, to tumble, skid and scratch across the snow before soaring into emptiness.

The nothing that is

Recent measurements... suggest that the universe as a whole has zero energy, zero charge, and zero angular momentum. How is this possible? All energy due to matter (which is positive) is canceled by an equal amount of gravitational energy (which is negative). There are equal amounts of positive and negative charge, and we cannot create one without creating the other. Zero angular momentum means that the universe has no net spin. The universe, then, is a whole lot of nothing: yin and yang that cancel each other out. Locally, in our own neighborhood, we seem to have lots of stuff: matter, charges, motion, entropy, and uncertainty. But globally, none of these exist, never have and never will.

-- from The Rise of the Uncertain by Vlatko Vedral at Nautilus

Real time

The idea that nature consists fundamentally of atoms with immutable properties moving through unchanging space, guided by timeless laws, underlies a metaphysical view in which time is absent or diminished. This view has been the basis for centuries of progress in science, but its usefulness for fundamental physics and cosmology has come to an end due to its inability to answer key questions such as what chose the laws of nature or why the universe is so asymmetric in time. Some people have confused the reliance on timeless laws with science itself, but this is wrong.

A new scientific world view is emerging based on the principles that time is real, laws evolve and irreversibility is fundamental. It is already clear this view has the capacity to explain – in ways that are testable by experiment – basic facts about our universe that otherwise appear to be inexplicable.

-- Lee Smolin

Potentially infinite

An astonishing concept has entered mainstream cosmological thought: physical reality could be hugely more extensive than the patch of space and time traditionally called “the universe”. We've learnt that we live in a solar system that is just one planetary system among billions, in one galaxy among billions. But there are signs that a further Copernican demotion confronts us. The entire panorama that astronomers can observe could be a tiny part of the aftermath of our Big Bang, which is itself just one band amount a potentially infinite ensemble. In this grander perspective, what we've traditionally called the laws of nature may be no more than parochial bylaws – local manifestations of “bedrock” laws that must be sought at a still deeper level.

-- Martin Rees

M57 - the Ring Nebula

It's very hard to imagine all the crazy things that things really are like

Dark materials

...any hopes that the nature of [dark matter] would be quickly revealed by these first detections have been utterly dashed. The trouble is that dark matter appears to be different things to different detectors. It appears heavier in one detector than another; it appears more ready to interact in one experiment than another. In the most extreme case, it shows up in one instrument but not in another - even when both are made of identical material and are sitting virtually next door in the same underground lab...

-- from Dark matter mysteries

A hitchhiker's guide to the multiverse

Different theories spin off very different kinds of multiverses. Our current standard theory of how the universe came to be, for example, predicts an infinite expanse of other universes, including an infinite number in which duplicates of you are reading this sentence and wondering if those other versions of you really exist. Meanwhile, string theory, which hoped to derive the particles, forces and constants of our universe from fundamental principles, instead discovered a wilderness of 10^500 universes fundamentally different from ours. Even quantum mechanics implies that our universe is a single snowflake in a blizzard of parallel universes.

-- from The Ultimate Guide to the Multiverse.

The whole shebang

Many

This is perplexing but fascinating:

If observers are an integral part of the cosmic formula, then it may not matter how many universes exist - just how many a single observer can tell apart. If the observer is a person, that depends on how many bits of information the brain can process. "Based on the number of synapses in a typical brain, a human observer can register 10 ^16," says Linde. That means humans can differentiate 10^10^16 universes, which is much more manageable than the 10^10^10,000,000 Linde and Vanchurin found to start with.

See also a report on Quantum to Cosmos.

"a holographic universe is blurry"

No one... is yet claiming that GEO600 has found evidence that we live in a holographic universe. It is far too soon to say. "There could still be a mundane source of the noise," [Craig] Hogan admits.

-- from Our world may be a giant hologram

Cosmic 'bow shocks'

'Runaway stars carve eerie cosmic sculptures':

A tiny drop

Spinning water droplets that behave like black holes look (to my untrained eye at least) like an example of how the very small may join to the very large. As a drop spins, it progresses through what seem to be almost Platonic shapes, starting with triangle, square and pentagon -- presumably reaching circle at the highest speeds.

Ghost heart, Boltzmann brain

The heart has 3 billion cells that beat in synchronization to pump more than 7,500 litres of blood each day through 100,000 miles of blood vessels.

News reports of the successful creation of a beating heart using substrate and new cells (e.g. here, here and here) communicate what needs to be said effectively enough, but miss something intriguing and complicated -- a kind of Cheshire cat in reverse -- with regard to the ghostly scaffold used in the experiment (as shown in the image above from Nature's news piece) .

Perhaps there is a connection to be made -- in a touchy-feely poetical non-space that might not be as useless as many people will immediately rush to say it is -- between this and debate about Boltzmann brains as described by Dennis Overbye (Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?):

Rather than simply going to black like “The Sopranos” conclusion, however, the cosmic horizon would glow, emitting a feeble spray of elementary particles and radiation, with a temperature of a fraction of a billionth of a degree, courtesy of quantum uncertainty. That radiation bath will be subject to random fluctuations just like Boltzmann’s eternal universe, however, and every once in a very long, long time, one of those fluctuations would be big enough to recreate the Big Bang. In the fullness of time this process could lead to the endless series of recurring universes.

Oops

Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may have reduced the life-expectancy of the universe.

-- Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, as quoted in New Scientist, 22 Nov. Thanks to the quantum Zeno effect - or so it's argued.

One more cup of coffee

A Jesuit at the Osservatorio compares the cosmos to a cappuccino, and it just gets better and better.

For no particular reason...

...a photo of a Martian sunset taken by Spirit at Gusev crater, May 19, 2005.

Actually there is a reason. I was listening to the The Cosmic Ocean, a two part radio series about water and life in the universe presented by Leo Enright (and originally broadcast in 2004). Enright makes quite a nice jump from red ochre handprints in Lascaux some 17,000 years ago to the bumping imprint of a space craft on the dusty red Martian surface today.

The programmes helped bring into focus for me that one can think about life in three parts: 1) the life that is 'already here' on Earth [and so much of which we are destroying]; 2) the life that humans may or may not create this century through synthetic biology etc; and 3) the life that is, or may be, 'already there' in space.

Thinking, too, about maps and dreams, imagination and discovery, from Martin Behaim's Erdapfel to Giovanni Schiaparelli's first map of Mars and beyond.

'Unreasonable effectiveness'

Ultimately, why should we believe the mathematical universe hypothesis? Perhaps the most compelling objection is that it feels counter-intuitive and disturbing. I personally dismiss this as a failure to appreciate Darwinian evolution. Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic trajectories of flying rocks. Darwin's theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we look beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down.

We have repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support it: our intuition breaks down at high speeds, where time slows down; on small scales, where particles can be in two places at once; and at high temperatures, where colliding particles change identity. To me, an electron colliding with a positron and turning into a Z-boson feels about as intuitive as two colliding cars turning into a cruise ship. The point is that if we dismiss seemingly weird theories out of hand, we risk dismissing the correct theory of everything, whatever it may be.

-- from Mathematical cosmos: Reality by numbers by Max Tegmark.

'Cosmic Forgetfulness'

Assumptions (or prejudice) will remain necessary for knowing the precise state of the Universe, which cannot be fully justified within science itself.

-- What happened before the Big Bang? by Martin Bojowald (reported for non-specialists here).

Multiverse wonders

As a relative dummy, I've greatly enjoyed re-reading by Max Tegmark's essay for Scientific American on parallel universes:

The scientific theories of parallel universes...form a four-level hierarchy, in which universes become progressively more different from ours. They might have different initial conditions (Level I); different physical constants and particles (Level II) or different phyical laws (Level IV). It is ironic that Level III [quantum many worlds] is the one that has drawn the most fire in the past decades, because it is the only one that adds no qualitatively new types of universes.

...Should you believe in parallel universes? The principal arguments against them are that they are wasteful and that they are weird. The first argument is that multiverse theories are vulnerable to Occam's razor because the postulate the existence of other worlds which we can never observe.

...But an entire ensemble is often much simpler than one of its members. (This principle can be stated more formally using the notion of algorithmic information content)...Similarly, the set of all solutions to Einstein's field equations is simpler than a specific solution.

...A common feature of all four multiverse levels is that the simplest and arguably most elegant theory involves parallel universes by default.