from Hacker News

A New Physics Theory of Life

by epenn on 12/15/14, 4:06 AM with 94 comments

  • by jamesblonde on 12/15/14, 1:43 PM

    My biggest issue with Jeremey England is that he's basically rehashing Ilya Prigogine's ideas. Read Prigogine's books "order out of chaos", " Exploring complexity: An introduction" (best one), and less so "The End of Certainty". Prigogine won the Nobel prize for his "discovery" of dissipative structures, and he was a driving force in the ideas behind complexity theory. Wolfram's early work was full of references to Prigogine, but then Wolfram decided to write him out of history. As did England above. Progigine was derided for his ideas: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/prigo... I think the ideas are great, but we have some work to do.
  • by throwaway39201 on 12/15/14, 7:32 AM

    I didn't particularly like the article since I couldn't really tell what the research was about from it, but I'm enjoying listening to Jeremy England's (the guy behind the theory the article discusses) talk that it links to [1]. Until at least 19-20 minutes in it's presented simply enough that a 10 year old could easily follow along with it, then gets into technical stuff that is kind of going in one ear and out the other for me (as somebody who hasn't studied physics beyond a college survey course level).

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e91D5UAz-f4

  • by dr_zoidberg on 12/15/14, 12:25 PM

    Seeing that nobody has mentioned him, Ilya Prigogine worked on similar ideas quite a lot before this. Order out of chaos, equilibrium and non-equilibrium structures, and the emergence of structures in nature are some of the topics he covered.

    Nowadays he's mostly forgotten, but its interesting to take the time to read his works, specially because it was (and still is) different from the main/stablished ideas in physics.

  • by razzaj on 12/15/14, 8:35 AM

    It is fascinating how much more information is in the article's comments section. In fact, I found many of the comments much more informative than the article itself. I recommend going through those to build a more informed opinion about the theory being discussed.
  • by JonnieCache on 12/15/14, 11:54 AM

    Darwinian survival is so often co-opted for political ends: generations of bad people have used it to rationalise their guilt.

    If this model of dissipation supersedes it, I wonder what political effects it will have? What will the dawkins of dissipation persuade/permit us to believe about ourselves?

  • by zkhalique on 12/15/14, 5:15 AM

    I remember reading this before and thinking, if this is so obvious how come life doesn't exist on any other planets we know of?
  • by cromwellian on 12/15/14, 9:22 AM

    There was a similar application of thermodynamics some time ago to the problem of intelligent behavior/artificial intelligence

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT8ZqChv8P0

  • by andywood on 12/15/14, 6:34 AM

    As a whole, I think the article finally provides a fair amount of specificness, but I was initially struck by how much space is devoted up front to "he-said she-said". It reminded me of celebrity gossip, sportscasting, and punditry.
  • by Animats on 12/15/14, 7:10 AM

    It's definitely sensationalized. But the concept that life-type compounds are in some sense thermodynamically downhill from random molecules is worth looking at. It's testable, which beats most of what comes out of physics today.
  • by mike_ivanov on 12/15/14, 4:01 PM

  • by comboy on 12/19/14, 5:08 PM

    >“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.

    Makes me think even more about Fermi paradox.

  • by JoeAltmaier on 12/19/14, 5:12 PM

    I've always thought that the rules of physics demand order. You take a box of magnets at random, shake it up. You get stacks of magnets. Physics + energy == order.
  • by mathattack on 12/15/14, 6:38 PM

    Is it dangerous when Physicists get too far out of their element?

    Physicists promoted some dangerous ideas in Economics, but good ideas in Chemistry. Where does Biology fit in that mix?

  • by carapace on 12/15/14, 5:26 PM

  • by deniszgonjanin on 12/15/14, 3:44 PM

    Life is merely the Universe's answer to entropy
  • by Xcelerate on 12/15/14, 5:12 AM

    It's a little disappointing to see so many articles like this voted to the front page recently. These articles aren't exactly pseudoscience per se (and indeed they are normally the work of someone at MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc.), but at the same time they're still kind of outlandish. The articles are all along the lines of "What if the universe is [random idea here]?" and then some kind of weird computer simulation or physical analogue (water drop experiment) is done that supposedly backs the idea up in a way that typically doesn't convince me very well.

    For instance, I feel like I could ask "What if the universe is really a network of time bundles?" and then I make up a definition of "time bundle", generate a bunch of fractals, and then loosely say "hey, that looks like a galaxy". It just isn't very good science to me. It reminds me of that history channel show "Ancient Aliens" where they keep asking "What if?" Yeah, so maybe one of those 8,000 theories is actually true, but it's just not all that satisfying.

    I prefer traditional science articles: observation or hypothesis, followed by direct experiment, followed by conclusion. This type of science makes up 99% of research today (read any scientific journal), and in my opinion is much more intellectually interesting. It's like everybody in the media focuses on the one article on beer carbonation in Physical Review Letters and ignores the other stuff. Why don't I see many articles on HN about cellular networks, or fuel cell polymers, or organic photovoltaics? These topics are exciting too.