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Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex
- konradx 1y ago[flagged]
- tbossanova 1y agoWe love you konradx
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gomijacogeo 1y ago99.9999999...% of 'everything' in the universe simply falls down a gravity gradient to be crushed into simple oblivion.
- manmal 1y agoIsn’t that actually also in favor of building up more complexity?
- Gualdrapo 1y agoI 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 1y agoIt 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 1y agoWhere 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.
- justanotherjoe 1y agoCould be. Could also be that reproduction and propagation is the inevitable side effect of that, no? We cant dissipate energy when we're dead.
- guerrilla 1y agoRather a way to accomplish that. Life reproducing in order to accelerate the generation of entropy, in other words.
- firecall 1y agoAgreed 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! ;-)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- __MatrixMan__ 1y 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.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y agoI 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 1y agoI read somewhere that life is more efficient at dissipating energy and faster at increasing entropy than non-living physical/chemical phenomena. Citation needed.
- MeteorMarc 1y agohttps://www.amazon.nl/Every-Life-Fire-Thermodynamics-Explains/dp/1541699017 https://www.amazon.nl/Every-Life-Fire-Thermodynamics-Explain...
- floatrock 1y agoRight, 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 1y agoSurely you mean accelerate entropy. I presume the end-state of entropy would be the same (excluding ways to escape the universe).
- XorNot 1y agoI 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-evergl 1y agoI 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-2VpJrxPz7bxK_p1Dd2 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoaVOjvkzQtyZF-2VpJrx...
- tiborsaas 1y agoWe 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 1y agoPOSIWID. 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 1y agoI'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_emergency 1y agoThe 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 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 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.
- raxxorraxor 1y ago> "correlated" or "anticorrelated" with complexity. Also the value of entropy has different signs in thermodynamics and computer science for example. Not helpful either...
- gsf_emergency 1y agoIt's because thermo count states and CS use probabilities.. strange swap, I know, pple assume the opposite..
- DemocracyFTW2 1y agoThe law of increasing complexity holds at least for the software that I write, so yeah—plausible...
- raxxorraxor 1y agoSoftware 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.
- DemocracyFTW2 1y agoI'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 1y agoDouglas 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_2 1y agoFancier but less humorous take by "experts" (including Goedel): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_collapse
- lianlianlian 1y ago[dead]
- ajgvnva 1y ago[dead]
- lianlianlian 1y ago[dead]
- fpoling 1y agoThe 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 1y agoHeat death was never the only option in GR. The field equations always allowed for a big crunch or a big rip.
- fpoling 1y agoYes, 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.
- gsf_emergency_2 1y agoSean Carroll today's go-to person for GR has been working at popularizing these ideas (for more than 10 years(!)) https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.6903 https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.6903 >For example, our universe lacked complex structures at the Big Bang and will also lack them after black holes evaporate and particles are dispersed. See my comment below for link to Scott's preview.
- flanked-evergl 1y agoThere is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology 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.html https://phys.org/news/2025-03-ai-image-recognition-universe....
- hliyan 1y agoTried 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 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310223120
- bubblyworld 1y agoI 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).
- haswell 1y ago
- kdavis 1y 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
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 1y agoEntropy 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 1y agoI read a theory that life in the universe might be favorable because we increase entropy so much.
- pyfon 1y agoLife in the universe is pretty unfavourable! A rare thing indeed. Where it has evolved I think it is less about entropy and more about the nature of the matter - atoms, molecules. Particularly carbon and water. And the way they can replicate themselves through chemistry. That had to obey entropy but is not driven by it. Light scattering off the atmosphere will do the entropy trick well enough!
- dr_dshiv 1y ago> A rare thing indeed We can hardly know that, can we? Water and carbon are abundant.
- mr_toad 1y 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 1y 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.
- pyfon 1y agoYes 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).
- andrewflnr 1y agoYes, 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 1y 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- skywhopper 1y agoI 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 1y agoThis seems to be in a similar vein to constructor theory / assembly theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory
- skim_milk 1y agoBookworms 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 1y agoHow does one measure complexity 'in the universe'?
- idiotsecant 1y agoIsn't that exactly what entropy is?
- cess11 1y 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_Certainty 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.
- mbfg 1y agoso 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 1y agoIt is following the Fundamental theorem of software engineering, another level of indirection.
- adrian_b 1y agoSentences 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 1y agoIsn'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.
- dfilppi 1y ago[dead]
- kens 1y agoCoincidentally, 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 1y agoWalker 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/ https://longnow.org/ideas/informational-theory-life/
- andrewflnr 1y agoAmateur 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.
- titzer 1y agoThis 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 1y agoPretty 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 1y agoLikely could be due to laws of math in this universe where more is always desired more then less.
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- Kungfuturtle 1y agoThis 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%291099-0526%28199703/04%292%3A4%3C7%3A%3AAID-CPLX2%3E3.0.CO%3B2-D https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/%28SICI%2910...> [1] <https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781902210292 https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/...>