May 19, 2023 04:27 PM
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/surpri...-disorder/
EXCERPT (Denis Noble): . . . It may seem paradoxical to suggest that Nature’s ordering principle encompasses a symmetry between order and… well precisely disorder. Virtually all 19th-century scientists, and most 20th-century scientists, would have recoiled in horror at such an idea. But what we found as the talks were drafted was that each form of the language of symmetry revealed a new aspect of the order–disorder principle.
In my own field of genetics, for example, I have been able to demonstrate that rather than disorder being passively experienced by living organisms, they harness that randomness and use it as a tool with which they can generate many possible solutions to environmental challenges. I presented a paper on this subject at The Royal Society in 2016, but at the time I didn’t see it as a symmetry issue. More recently, however, I have come to understand why this process happens: it places the harnessing of disorder as part of a deeper symmetry process by which order and disorder interrelate.
If symmetry has no deeper cause than itself, then the cosmos has been structured in the only way possible.
Empirical evidence for the symmetry between order and disorder is hiding in plain sight all around us. In 1999, the Danish physicist Per Bak suggested to a group of neuroscientists that the brain works on the same fundamental principles as a sand-pile.
Imagine an hourglass. Grain after grain, sand falls from the top of the hourglass to the bottom. The pile of sand at the bottom of the hourglass becomes increasingly unstable, and at any moment a single grain of sand might cause a small avalanche. When this happens, the base of the sand-pile widens, which increases its overall stability, after which the process repeats itself. Bak observed that the sand-pile maintains order by means of these random and unpredictable avalanches, which is an example of disorder being “harnessed” by the sand-pile as a means of maintaining order. In other words, there is a fundamental interdependence between them.
It has been demonstrated that this model can be applied to a wide variety of different phenomena, from financial markets and traffic flows to earthquakes, black holes, and the distribution of galaxies in the universe... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT (Denis Noble): . . . It may seem paradoxical to suggest that Nature’s ordering principle encompasses a symmetry between order and… well precisely disorder. Virtually all 19th-century scientists, and most 20th-century scientists, would have recoiled in horror at such an idea. But what we found as the talks were drafted was that each form of the language of symmetry revealed a new aspect of the order–disorder principle.
In my own field of genetics, for example, I have been able to demonstrate that rather than disorder being passively experienced by living organisms, they harness that randomness and use it as a tool with which they can generate many possible solutions to environmental challenges. I presented a paper on this subject at The Royal Society in 2016, but at the time I didn’t see it as a symmetry issue. More recently, however, I have come to understand why this process happens: it places the harnessing of disorder as part of a deeper symmetry process by which order and disorder interrelate.
If symmetry has no deeper cause than itself, then the cosmos has been structured in the only way possible.
Empirical evidence for the symmetry between order and disorder is hiding in plain sight all around us. In 1999, the Danish physicist Per Bak suggested to a group of neuroscientists that the brain works on the same fundamental principles as a sand-pile.
Imagine an hourglass. Grain after grain, sand falls from the top of the hourglass to the bottom. The pile of sand at the bottom of the hourglass becomes increasingly unstable, and at any moment a single grain of sand might cause a small avalanche. When this happens, the base of the sand-pile widens, which increases its overall stability, after which the process repeats itself. Bak observed that the sand-pile maintains order by means of these random and unpredictable avalanches, which is an example of disorder being “harnessed” by the sand-pile as a means of maintaining order. In other words, there is a fundamental interdependence between them.
It has been demonstrated that this model can be applied to a wide variety of different phenomena, from financial markets and traffic flows to earthquakes, black holes, and the distribution of galaxies in the universe... (MORE - missing details)
