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by Richard C. Lewis
Foreword
If anyone were to ask me how I came up with the conceptual structure presented here_and nobody has asked me yet - I would have to echo Newton and say, "By thinking about it a lot." It has been years and years in gestation.
It all started with my thesis for Kensington University, in their mail-in doctorate program located in Pasadena, CA. I am grateful to them for the academic effort it generated in me (as a needed balance to other talents needed for my bread and butter work in publishing) which precluded any in-residence programs. I did get my doctorate and my thesis advisor - my third, as I had taken almost 10 years to submit my thesis - liked it enough to suggest reworking it as a book. This I was already doing and was grateful for the encouragement. I had recognized for years my talent for digesting scientific complexity into its basics for general consumption - and doing it well, I think. I am definitely one of those thinkers who expect truth, in its essentials, to be simple and elegant. I had toyed with the idea of writing a simple textbook of science - a simple outline of the whole scientific edifice. How to start such a project was, of course, the problem for years.
In my thesis I actually started at the top of the scientific hierarchy with evolution - a subject of long fascination for me. By the end of the thesis-gestation period I was attempting to connect biology with the concept of the orbital in quantum chemistry - a subject I was very familiar with as it was featured in my chemistry courses for my B.Sc. at Sussex University, UK.
Anyone comparing my thesis and this book will find a vast reworking - my mental processes are expressed by constant rewriting, reordering, starting from the beginning yet again. I cannot say it was a comfortable process - and I am grateful to those who helped make writing the "path of less resistance," such as the Whalers.
For trying to understand the essentials about the orbitals pushed me into the confusing morass of quantum physics. And I thrashed around in that for years - thinking about it and writing it and going back and writing it, a very iterative process. For if some new insight appeared at the bottom of the hierarchy its implications had to ripple up through the entire discussion. This happen a lot.
Well, here it is. Someone commented that Newton was lucky in that only one person had the opportunity to establish the 'system of the world,' - the simple and elegant outline of how the universe operates. I hope it is not hubris to offer this as a significantly different 'system of the world' that, while it will employ common-sense, readily-comprehensible concepts (at least in outline), they will not be the common-sense concepts usually associated with science and scientific thinking. While these concepts are implicit in the new physics, our perspective on them is novel and is sure to irritate almost everyone at first as the conceptual leap is considerable.
But on reflection - I hope it does not take too long - I think it will all make sense. For I am my worst critic and it now makes sense to me. Enjoy.
1. Science
The development of science is one of the more remarkable phenomena of the last four centuries, and its fruits have earned its practitioners a magisterial authority reserved for the revealers of mystical truth in earlier ages.
We shall start with the bedrock belief of all the sciences, a belief that can be considered the basic philosophical prerequisite for a discipline to be counted as a science. This is the belief that there is an objective reality 'out there' to be studied.
The objective reality for scientists - the realm of atoms, planets, cells, galaxies, brains, etc., etc. - corresponds to World One in Popper's profound philosophical dissection of reality into three realms.
The concepts and theories of science, on the other hand, belong to Popper's World Three, the realm of the mind. This World is what goes on inside each person, the thoughts, theories, concepts, plans, emotions, passions, etc.
The expression of scientific thoughts, plans and passions in the form of books, educational institutions, cyclotrons, conferences, etc., etc. all belong in Popper's World Two: the intersection, so to speak, of the two other Worlds. World Two is the expression of human thoughts, ideas, plans and passions in all that we see about us - buildings, washing machines, concerts, newspapers, dollar bills, interstates, etc. etc.etc.
One general way of interpreting this philosophical perspective is that human artifacts - which in terms of classical random chance-and-accident are highly unlikely aggregates of atoms - can only be comprehended if an internal influence is included in the discussion. The aspect of culture we call science, for example, can be thought of as scientific thoughts influencing what happens to scientific materials. The reason why we are introducing this philosophical perspective right at the start of the discussion is that, when we get towards the end, we will see that the same perspective has been established in quantum physics: that nature can only be comprehended if we include an internal aspect that influences the external aspect - the effect being that what material stuff does is highly unlikely in terms of the classical random chance-and-accident perspective.
As we shall see, this perspective is implicit in the way current physics - if not expressed in such terms - describes the objective reality of things such as the electron and photon.
Hierarchy of science
To those unacquainted with its inner workings, scientists can seem to be a part of a monolithic entity - with possibly-suspect motives, as attested to by the plethora of evil-scientist movie roles. To many workers in their various disciplines, however, science seems less a unified entity than a multitude of relatively independent disciplines: The statement "chemistry and biology are branches of physics" is not true. It is true that in chemistry and biology one does not encounter any new physical principles. But the systems on which the old principles act differ in such a drastic and qualitative way in the different fields that it is simply not useful to regard one as a branch of another.
Indeed the systems are so different that 'principles' of new kinds must be developed... For all this, however, the autonomy of each discipline to develop its own conceptual framework of emergent interactions is constrained by the pecking order in science: a scientist is free to construct any theory as long as it does not contradict what has been established at a more fundamental level.
So for example, while neurologists have great latitude to develop concepts to explain the phenomena they encounter, they are not free to contradict the principles established in evolution as the capacities of the brain were established by evolutionary processes. Similarly, an evolution theorist cannot contradict the principles of biology as evolution is the consequence of biological processes, the biologist cannot contradict the biochemistry, the biochemist the chemist, and the chemist the physicist. It is even more restrictive: a scientist who wishes to excel at a discipline needs, at the minimum, a good grounding in the discipline just below: the evolutionist must know his biology; the chemist his physics. Fortunately this is a one-way street: you do not need to know anything about the levels above: so a physicist can excel without knowing any biology, for instance.
For the life sciences, this hierarchy looks like this - similar ones can be constructed for the geological and astronomical sciences.
For example, the themes developed in the classical physics founded by Newton have appeared throughout the scientific structure - biology might not be a branch of physics, but physics is certainly at the foundations of biology.
Of course, one is philosophically free to drop the hierarchical constraints in constructing a theory of how the world works; but the construct will be something other than science as it is practiced today.
The classic historical example of this is the attempt to explain living systems by the introduction of a 'vital force' in one guise or another.
While there are many philosophical constructs that embrace this as an acceptable explanation, none of them are part of biology. In a nutshell, this is because particles, atoms and molecules can be understood without a vital force and, if electrons and quarks don't have it, neither do atoms and molecules, and neither do cells nor higher organisms.
Mathematics
The physicists have no one beneath them in the hierarchy to acknowledge, their only constraint is that their theoretical constructs should be mathematically sound or, better yet, elegant. To paraphrase a well-known stinging rejection of an aspirant's ideas: they are so mathematically ugly that they are not even wrong.
Just why this is so is not at all clear: "Opinions range from those who maintain that human beings have simply invented mathematics to fit the facts of experiment, to those who are convinced that there is a deep and meaningful significance behind nature's mathematical face." Whatever the rationale; all scientists aspire to put their disciplines on a firm mathematical foundation - to be a 'hard' science, rather than being vague and suggestive - to be labeled a 'soft' science.
Mathematics, of course, is much broader than just its descriptive role in science and can describe constructs that have no (apparent) consequence in nature. Mathematics is also self-contained; it has nothing more basic beneath it (except a faith in logic).
We will refer to such a hierarchical, consistent theoretical construct that attempts to explain the objective reality as a science system.
Two science systems
While all scientists accept this pecking order, there are currently two quite different physics to be found at the foundations of the scientific edifice.
The conceptual framework that physics created first, and the one that is used in the biological sciences, is described by many adjectives: Newtonian, classical, nineteenth-century, old-fashioned, etc.
The second conceptual framework to be created, the one physics currently embraces, is also multi-monikered: post-Newtonian, New Physics, quantum mechanics, twentieth-century, modern, etc.
The new physics is based on the theories and explanations of quantum physics which are very successful in such a wide range of circumstances - from the cosmology of the first microsecond of the Big Bang to the workings of transistors. The success of the new physics makes it unlikely that its concepts will be completely replaced by future theoretical developments. It is, of course, possible that they will suffer the same fate as the Newtonian concepts - and they were equally successful in their own day - when it emerged that they were artifacts of a much deeper and sophisticated reality.
So science, at the close of the twentieth century, is not just multi-disciplinary, it is a discipline with something of a split personality. In the hierarchy of physics, chemistry, biochemistry, biology and evolution, the switch-over from one science system to the other is to be found somewhere between physical and biological chemistry.
So, while the biology of our era is proud of its firm foundations in the 'hard' sciences (those amenable to mathematical rigor), the physics in which it is rooted is the classical physics of Darwin's day. "It is most ironic that today's perceived conjunction between physics and biology, so fervidly embraced by biology in the name of unification, so deeply entrenched in a philosophy of naive reductionism, should have come long past the time when the physical hypotheses on which it rests have been abandoned by the physicists." There is still, of course, the sense that science should be a unified structure: How does nature encompass and mold a billion galaxies, a billion, billion stars - and also the earth, teeming with exuberant life? New insights into how nature operates come from parallel advances in particle physics and in molecular biology, advances that make it possible to examine fundamental physical and biological processes side-by-side. The resulting stereoscopic view deep into the past reveals a previously hidden, unifying logic in nature: its paradigm for construction. This is the task of Book One of this work, to establish a basic paradigm, based on the new physics, that tells us something useful about biological and evolutionary processes. A useful paradigm would also be one that solves a paradox in quantum science and a paradox in the classical science system.
Quantum paradox
The basic paradox in quantum physics is that no one seems to have a clear idea of just what exactly it all means. in terms general enough to have meaning at the higher levels for, as we shall see, what the new physics is telling us about the world is not so obvious. If 'uncertainty' and 'wave/particle duality' are thought to be the key insights of the new physics, then their applicability to biology is obscure, to say the least. Also, much of modern physics is couched in terms of field theory where the fields, such as the electromagnetic field, are considered to be objectively real and the particles and forces are merely excitations in the fields. How do 'fields' help us comprehend biology? One of the reasons that biologists and evolutionists are not at all bothered on a day-to-day basis by the fact that the classical underpinnings of their worldview have been removed is that the aspects that seem to define the quantum world - such as uncertainty and wave/particle duality - seem to disappear somewhere between the size realm of electrons and baseballs. And, as living and evolving systems are much bigger than electrons and often larger than baseballs, it seems reasonable to expect that living systems have 'got over' in some sort of sense the inherent fuzziness and uncertainty of their basic constituents.
The quantum paradox is that the aspects of matter that have been established by the new physics seem to disappear as we move up the hierarchy and thus seem, for instance, to have no implications for the biological sciences. As a 'sneak preview' we assert that this paradox is easily solved when we ignore the superficial concepts of the new physics - such as 'uncertainty,' 'wave/particle duality,' 'field,' etc. - and focus in on the truly revolutionary concept implicit in the new physics with implications throughout the hierarchy of matter - that material systems can only be comprehended if we allow for their objective reality to be composed of an internal as well as an external extension.
Classical paradox
The paradox in classical science involves life - classical concepts lead us to expect that life is highly improbable, contradicting our findings that life must be highly probable.
In the classical science system, a construct as sophisticated as a living cell is highly unlikely. As Fred Hoyle put it, the emergence of living systems is about as likely in classical physics as a hurricane sweeping through a junk yard assembling a fully-functional jumbo jet from the bits and pieces scattered around there.
Just as the chance of junk colliding in just the right way to form a fuselage is small so, in classical physics, is the chance that atoms and molecules will congregate in just the right way to form cells, organelles, tissues, etc.
One of the greatest misgivings, for instance, about current theories of the emergence of life is its inherent improbability according to classical concepts of cause and effect. The random chance of even one specific protein being formed out of free amino-acids has a large negative exponent on the order of and the odds of proteins etc. coming together to randomly form a simple bacterium are on the order of .
Events with such odds against them could never be expected to happen in a universe that is about seconds old.
Whatever events occurred during evolutionary history, it is clear that such odds were never encountered at any step on the road from bacteria to man - certainly not a series of such improbable events: One can assume that life arose through an enormous number of small steps, almost each of which, given the conditions of the time, had a very high probability of happening a multiple-step process that relies on one improbable event's following another is sure to abort sooner or later. Another aspect of the same paradox is that Darwin, for all his great contribution in establishing the process of Natural Selection, did not solve the mystery of the Origin of Species: the links in the lineage of life.
So, while the single lineage of all life is an established fact, no current theory explains just what is that moves material up the hierarchy of material. Evolution, in some way, must break the 'normal' facts of reproduction and the lineage of living systems. This principle is that like begets like: the offspring of a bacteria is a bacteria and not a yeast, the offspring of a seaweed is a seaweed and not an oak; the offspring of a monkey is a monkey and not a human.
That this is actually the same paradox of the Origin of Life if we restate it: solutions of the basic constituents of life - amino acids, nucleotides, fatty acids and carbohydrates - do not precipitate out functioning bacteria or even a primitive triplet-code protein-synthesizing complex.
The paradox is that life seems to be highly likely! For the historical facts are that the highly sophisticated triplet code link between DNA sequence and protein activity - a process that involves billions of atoms in coordinated movement that rivals our most sophisticated manufacturing plants - must have been established on this earth only one to three million years after the molten earth had cooled enough for oceans to form. While this might seem a long period of time it serves only as an instant when contemplating such improbable occurrences as the random chance-and-accident assemblage of the triplet-code machinery.
Even worse for classically-based biology, evolution is also left to the agency of chance-and-accident. And evolution, unlike the origin of life, plays a central role in biology.
"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution," is a sentiment embraced by most biologists. The classical science system put such great emphasis on fighting off a teleological explanation of evolution - that there is a purpose and a plan behind the origin of species - that biologists have gone to the opposite extreme and adopted the concept that there is no underlying organizing factor to evolution: All scientists believe, of course, that the phenomena of Nature can be understood and that there are still many things that our science has yet to figure out - they would be foolish indeed to do 'research' if they didn't believe there was anything left to discover. So it is strange that, while no one is saying that electrons and protons behave in a totally random-chance-and-accident manner in the formation of simple atoms, many biologists are stating this to be the case for the much more complex rearrangement of the genetic molecules that occurs in the historical development of species, genera, etc., during evolution.
Biologists think it essential to avoid asserting anything vitalistic. The only way to do this is to deny any vestige of entailment in evolutionary processes at all. By doing so we turn evolution, and hence biology, into a collection of pure historical chronicles, like the tables of random numbers, or stock exchange quotations." The fact of evolution, of course, is no longer a point of debate. There is such clear and abundance evidence that all life is lineally connected that it can be accepted as an established fact. This lineage took its time developing: a few hundreds of million years or so after the molten Earth cooled off for basic bacteria-like organisms to develop from simple chemicals; another billion years or so for the development of complex cells; another billion for muticellular plants and animals to emerge; just a few tens-of-millions more for all the current diversity of living systems to be established; and the last half billion or so for the emergence of creatures aware enough to wonder about how it all happened.
While these periods of time seem vast on our scale of things, they are equally inadequate for the statistically-difficult tasks of randomly assembling a bacteria from the inorganic realm; assembling a functioning Jumbo Jet in the junk yard; or for monkeys to type the works of Shakespeare.
If many 'believers' have been guilty of ascribing what was beyond their comprehension to the Hand of God, so have many modern-day biologists been equally guilty of placing all power in the remarkably fortuitous Hand of Chance.
The problem with believing in the Goddess of Chance as the mover of evolution is that, at every level, it all seems so very, very unlikely.
This is the paradox at the heart of biology: while chance is declared to be the driving force of evolution, the probability of atoms and molecules bouncing around like billiard balls aggregating into proteins, genes, mitochondria and orangutans in current theory is essentially zero. Yet the evidence is that this is totally wrong - on a geological timescale of billions of years life is highly probable.
The root of biology's current problem with chance and accident is using concepts that apply to billiard balls instead of the accepted concepts in physics that describe real atoms and electrons.
The solution to this paradox again hinges on the implication in quantum physics that the internal extension to material systems must be taken into account for our theories to correspond to objective reality. The solution to 'jumbo-jet' paradox emerges quite simply for, as we shall see, the influence of this internal extension is on probability, an influence such that quantum probability is quite, quite different to classical random chance-and-accident.
Overview
The aim of this work is to isolate principles from quantum physics and chemistry that have general application throughout the sciences and that avoid the quantum and classical paradoxes just described.
These are some of the main principles we intend to establish - principles that are, at least to this author's satisfaction, implicit in the impeccable credentials of the new physics. We will illustrate the points with what modern physics has to say about the electron and the atom.
The objective reality of a system has an internal extension as well as an external extension. The internal extension of an electron is called its wavefunction.
The Laws of Nature - the 'rules' that govern matter - influence the internal extension of a system; they do not directly influence the external extension. All natural laws can be formulated as a 'Path of Least Resistance' - resistance being the consequence of the interactions a system participates in. In both classical and quantum physics, this rule is called the Principle of Least Action - though in classical physics, in contrast, this law is thought to apply to the external extension.
Internal
The internal extension of a system determines the probability that the system will follow a particular course of history - within the constraints of this probability, systems are autonomous. Most of modern physics is couched in terms of 'field equations' which deal with probability over all time and space. They can be usefully though of as describing probability fields.
The internal extension of a system can combine with the internal extension of another creating a composite internal extension. The overlapping of the internal extensions of an electron and proton creates a probability field with a very distinct form to it. This probability field is called an orbital in quantum chemistry. When a composite probability field has such a distinct form to it, we will refer to it as a formal.
External
The external extension of a system is a hierarchical construct of interacting subsystems. The form of the system is derived from a formal - the composite internal extension of all its interacting subsystems. The form of an atom is the form of the orbitals. Probability fields are often more 'real' in modern physics than matter is - empty orbitals are just as 'real' to a chemist as an inhabited one is.
Systems interact by exchanging their subsystems. This exchange is governed by a probability field derived from the internal extension of the subsystems. Interaction influences the course that a system follows and the consequence of this is that interacting systems explore the composite probability fields they create in history.
Origins
When systems, as a consequence of their exploration, take up a distinct form - or, equivalently, they discover a formal - they create a new, higher system in the hierarchy of matter. When a wandering electron and proton become suitable situated they rapidly take up the form of the orbital - a hydrogen atom is formed. We will refer to this process as matter capturing a formal in the structure of matter.
The origin of all non-living systems and the first origin of all living systems involves such a capture of form from a natural formal.
Living systems are distinguished by their ability to capture natural formals as information in the structure of nucleic acids, the genetic material that subsequently governs the origins of the descendants. Other than the first origin, the form of living systems is therefore independent of the natural formal.
The origin of a system is signaled by its emergent ability to interact with the subsystems that are coming together in the origin process. The origin of a hydrogen atom from a free electron and proton is signaled by the ability of the composite to couple with the electron as an atom in the valence interaction - an interaction that neither the electron or proton is capable of on its own.
Systems that have an origin in history are tested and filtered out by the process of natural selection. The origin of a system is contingent on its subsystems a) having an origin and b) surviving long enough to come to other subsystems in the origin process. Quantum insights place survival of the fittest occurring after origins and not in the causal role it plays in the classical perspective.
If all this seems highly philosophical I assure the reader that each point will be shown to implicit in the perspective that is firmly established in modern physics.
In the next three chapters we will deal with some basic things we want to
know about material systems: What are they? What do they do? and "Why do
they do it? Classical and quantum science actually agree about many things
and they both have the same answer to these three questions:
As we shall see, the agreement breaks down over questions like: where are the systems and subsystems? Why do systems exchange their subsystems? How do natural laws work, where do they apply themselves? But first the stuff that both science systems agree on.
Now, this was the draft version of the introduction into Lewis' book.
As soon as there is something more from him available in electronic
format,
you'll be able to know about it through our What's New? link.
See you soon!
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