Evo Devo Universe and Information Philosopher, October 2, 2025
In my
September 4 talk in Siena for Georgi's Complexity Science group and the
September 12 Evo Devo Scholar's Talk, I described
Laplace's intelligent demon and
Seth Lloyd's universe as a computer. They both view the information in the universe as a
conserved constant.
We also discussed
Lord Kelvin and
Herman Helmholtz's prediction of a universe
heat death.
Then I described my work following
Arthur Stanley Eddington and
David Layzer.
I showed how the expansion of the universe avoids the second law of thermodynamics and creates information structures from elementary particles to stars like our Sun and planet Earth with its
biosphere.
I adapted the diagrams in Layzer’s 1989 book
Cosmogenesis to create this picture of his growth of information in the universe.
Between the
actual entropy and the
maximum possible entropy you can see there's plenty of room for galaxies, stars, and planets to form.
The expansion of space creates new
possible locations in phase-space, producing pockets of negative entropy. When an
actual information structure forms
locally, it will not be stable unless it radiates away positive entropy to satisfy the second law
globally.
I call this the
cosmic creation process.
This is a
two-stage or
two-step process, first
indeterministic (random) possibilities, followed by an
adequately determined (not
pre-determined!) choice or selection.
This is exactly how
Claude Shannon's theory of the communication of information works, showing the intimate connection between negative entropy and information!
Information philosophy proposes four such processes, all driven by random possibilities.
-
For Shannon, there must be multiple possible messages. If there is only one possible message, no information is communicated.
- For the universe, without newly created phase-space possibilities, the universe would be closed and suffer a "heat death"!
- Ernst Mayr called Darwinian evolution a two-step process. Without chance variations, there would be no new species.
- For the two-stage model of human free will, without the mind producing random new thoughts, there would be no free actions.
The universe began with primeval quarks, gluons, electron, and photons. In the first few minutes after the origin, the
cosmic creation process produced the earliest information structures, protons and neutrons. 380,000 years later, the ionized plasma cooled to the surface temperature of the Sun and allowed those protons and electrons to form atoms, making the universe transparent. That allowed us today to see back in time to the cosmic microwave background.
Galaxies, stars, and planets began to form about 400 million years after the origin.
The Sun, a population I star, formed only about 4.5 billion years ago, along with its planets, and
life emerged rather quickly about a half-billion years later.
We discussed how
Erwin Schrödinger famously argued that
life “feeds on negative entropy.”
Schrödinger’s source for negative entropy was our Sun. With the bright Sun as a heat source and the dark night sky as a heat sink, the Earth is a thermodynamic engine.
But Schrödinger
didn't know how the Sun (and all the stars) came to be such a source of negative entropy. That Eddington, Layzer, and I have explained.
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