Fundamentals for the Anthropocene

Jack Pearce

• Publisher: Sciendo Migration
• Print ISBN: 9783110567304
• eBook ISBN: 9783110567557
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Probability & Statistics

This book seeks to bridge the gap between leading edge scholarship about the nature of the physical, tangible Universe and the nature of the life process on Earth on the one hand, and on the other hand challenges facing human society as to the current revolution in energy sources, national and international levels of political and economic organization, and humanity's impacts upon the global ecosystem which have given rise to the depiction of a new era in earthlife termed the "anthropocene".The author's public career included responsibilities for economic policy formulation and implementation at the United States Department of Justice, the United States Agency for International Development, and a White House Office of Consumer Affairs. This provided an elevated overview of many current economic and political issues.
These responsibilities stimulated a multi-decade exploration of leading academics' insights into the relational structuring of the Universe, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, complexity in the universe, and the structure of the life process. This book applies such fundamental insights to the question whether humanity will succeed or fail in its ambitious but uncertain quest.

1 The Visible Universe Starts With – Believe It or Not – Correlation

The purpose of the initial chapters in this book is to depict the visible, tangible universe³ as systems of relationships, given their substance by correlations among the elements within them. Each of such systems encounters, in external relations, a combination of randomness and correlations. Each distinguishable system is given its “meaning” by its interactions with other relational systems. All evolve against a background of randomness, over universal time, or process, to date.

This conceptual structure reaches down to the quantum mechanics level. Key features of the evolution of the Universe at what we call the “macroscopic” levels are rooted there, and manifested throughout the ordering of the Universe.

Keeping these things in mind simplifies a number of issues encountered in our attempts to understand and explain the Universe.

This “relational” view of the Universe requires us to identify how relationships arise, and are operative. This involves coming to grips with the concept of “correlation”, and how correlation builds ordered states, or complexes of relationships.

Let us then focus of “correlation”, and what it means in the Universe.

At the outset, we are not focusing here on the commonly used statistical means of sorting out what factors seem to be related to each other in an often complex field of “variables”, or factors. I attempt to direct your attention to physical relationships --physical connections between systems, as distinguished from random impingements of one system upon another -- for example, planets revolving around suns, the crowding of atoms within suns, the crowding of nucleons within an atom, and the like. We are talking about situations in which one element (be it an atom, a molecule, a planet, or any other physical, tangible phenomenon) has a reduction in “degrees of freedom” vis a vis another phenomenon, or system, such that one can say there is a “relationship”, or non-randomness, as between them.

In doing so, let us start with our native, inbuilt perceptions, and then probe underneath them.

So let us look in two directions for the underlying nature of order in this universe as we natively experience it. Our ancestors have done so for millennia. Now we use hard-won tools of observation and equally hard-won concepts. But, instinctively, and necessarily, to position ourselves in this Universe, we still look in these two directions.

When we have done this, let us strip away the imaginings of the past and the multitude of terminologies of more recent times to see underlying themes of organization.

One direction is the vast, awesome panoply of the visible⁴ universe around us – the “heavens”, the “stars”, and the relationships between them. The other direction is the “elements” – the bits which relate together to make up, as we see it, all tangible⁵ reality, including the stars, our planets, ourselves.

Over millennia heretofore, in our cognitive infancy, we projected on the heavens patterns familiar to our everyday lives – dippers, animals, idealizations like “Gods”. The catalogue of imaginings is too various to itemize, and too fanciful and too disorganized to have value.

Recently, in a rush in centuries-time, keen observers and clear thinkers have created a picture of a vast hierarchy of structure and motion.

We picture planets moving around stars; stars grouped together, moving, as it appears to us, in slow, vast swirls around swirl-centers. We call these star swirls galaxies. Galaxies – at least some 100 billion of them in the observable universe, and intimations of a great deal more -- form galaxy clusters, journeying, as it appears to us, through a void. Even more, we now discern “super clusters”, each containing thousands of galaxies, stretching many hundreds of millions of light years across space. These super clusters are arranged in filament or sheet-like structures, between which there are gigantic voids of seemingly empty space.

How shall we interpret such artifact-augmented perceptions?

Let us do a thought experiment, linking this vast picture with the elements in it. Let us stretch, in a peculiar way, our imaginations to think about a “universe” which could not exist, the better to understand what the “universe” is which does exist.

Let us imagine, let us say, a universe of atoms, not clumped in stars, or planets, but in a vast, loose gas. (We could imagine all the various atomic “elements” which now exist to be in this gaseous state – though, if we paused to think about it -- those elements which are built up of many nucleons would not exist were there only a random mass of hydrogen atoms with no structure and no coordinated directionality. So let us start with hydrogen atoms.)

The first realization which occurs -- to me, at least -- is that in this random-gas universe, “we” – the observers -- would not exist.

Stop for a moment. We, or Observers like us, consist of intricately coordinated systems, made up of a number of different types of atoms. We are not randomized gas. Further, we process information – i.e. organized, non-random impingements -- from our surroundings. So the all-gas, all-random universe has no foundation for us. There is no “observer” as we think of observers.

To sharpen the point, let us suppose we, or Observers of some “organized” sort, like us in this way, do exist. Perhaps they are somehow projected into the frame, let us say from an organized universe – even though of course this makes no sense in the random “universe”

What would we, the Intruding Observers, see, or sense?

Nothing. Only perhaps some sense of heat (agitation of the elements of our system) from high levels of kinetic effects upon elements of our systems, or cold (a lowering of internal activity pattern resultant across our internal systems from loss of radiation and lack of impacts upon us resultant from low levels of impingement and perhaps low relative velocities of the elements of the gas) from the “void”.⁶

There would be no differentiations, no shapes, no points of light, no swirls, nothing discernible.

Thus the Intruding Observer -- which, remember, would have no foundation for existence -- would also have no structure, as to tangible elements, to perceive.

What is the core point of this ultra-simple, back to basics, exercise?

One can abstract from this thought experiment one simple, central, unavoidable realization. What we, or any observer, or organized element or set of elements in this Universe, “see” (or register, or process, or depict, or mirror, or represent) is the correlations of the elements – of the atoms in whatever is outside us.

In probabilistic terms, this means that if one element of ‘matter’ which obeys the “Pauli exclusion principle” and thus has a “place to stand”, so to speak, excluding other fermionic matter from its “state”, is registered by such an correlated Observer (and by extrapolation presumed in a given structure) another will (with high probability) also be registered. Such “matter” would have to clump and cling together -- to be correlated, in the sense of if one, then another -- for us to sense them.

The suns are just big clumps of atoms. The planets as well. The galaxies are just big swirls of sun clumps (with a lot of loose gas intermixed). And so forth up the hierarchy.

So, in architectural terms, what we see as the “Universe” is just correlations, the co- relations, “relationship”, patterns of coordination. Non-randomness, if you will.

Now let us reverse directions and go from the vast to the infinitesimal. Let us go down to the billions of components which make up our own existence–pattern. Let us go down to the “atoms” which, as far as we know, were first imagined some two millennia or so ago, but which were definitely established in the lexicon of science only within the last two centuries. Let us go to the ur-atom, the hydrogen atom, the single quark-swirl, as we now vaguely imagine it -- the proton, the hadron.

We have discovered over the last two centuries that the early-discovered 92 “elements” – or distinguishable “atoms” – are basically just hadrons, or nucleons, squished together. In common language – or in terms of correlations -- all the “elements” are just different versions of correlated groups of nucleons.

All respectable mainstream treatments of structures made up of atoms necessarily reflect this view. This assumption is so common, so basic, that the astonishing simplicity of the matter tends to drift to the edge of consciousness. This view functions in the realm of assumptions, rather than consciously occupying the center of our conceptions.

To repeat, to drag the attention to the central issue, for present purposes, all the “elements” are concatenations, aggregates, clumping’s -- that is, correlations, and systems of relationships -- of nucleons.⁷

The mashed together nucleons are, as we now see it, formed within stars. These aggregations occur in what might be called a form of “phase transition”, under great pressure and heat. Each atom-aggregate is a fearfully tight coordination of the hadron elements, encapsulating energies which are very high when we measure them in our relatively loosely bound, larger aggregates of molecules. We have recently, however. seen these fearful energies unleashed when we learned how to split up, or disassemble, or break apart, very large atoms, such as uranium and thorium.

And thus in the simple matter of correlating nucleons into clumps -- differing in numbers and ways of interacting -- is formed the building blocks on which the vast, complex, astonishing elaboration of further differentiated relational structures occur. And those occurrences are, again, as to us the visible, tangible Universe -- the stuff we have to shove and be shoved by, because each hadron and each combination of hadrons has its own place to stand.

As we now conceive it, the relationships between “atoms”, whether simple hydrogen atoms or differentiated groups of nucleons, are mediated at close range through “electron shells”. There are regularities in the way the electron shells are formed, and in how they engage with other atom-aggregates. These regularities form the basis of the table of elements, used extensively in chemistry.

But before we plunge into the intricacies built into chemistry and other fields of study, let us look again at the fundamental pattern involved. The aggregation of nucleons, or hadrons, into 92+ differentiated, distinct atomic concatenations forms the basis for the vast ensemble of combinations which can be formed of these elements. Given that you have over 92 types of atoms which can be combined in different ways, you have an enormous combinatorial field available. However, we need to note that the actualization of this combinatorial field is subject to energy invariances, and to probabilities. We can use notation systems to state vast numbers of combinations of 92 “elements”. But the realizations of those combinations are bounded by the physical constraints involved in creating ‘relationships’, and the probabilistic – I am next going to state -- hierarchical way in which they can be actualized.

And then you can get to combinations of these combinations of elements. This is where the Universe really does its stuff. It builds groups of groups. In this differentiated groupings of nuclear structures, and then differentiated groupings of groupings, is realized the richness and complexity of the Universe.

For most of this book, we will proceed from this point upwards, so to speak. But we can go deeper even than the atom, into the realm of quantum mechanics. There is a reward for doing so.

There, at the “quantum mechanics” level, instead of describing “particles”, and using ideas of positions and momenta of identified objects relative to each other, physicists have conceptualized a “wave function” which can be spread over a region, and which can have states “superposed”.

Here our physicists speak in terms of a “density matrix” used to calculate the probabilities of occurrences of defined states, and “measurements” thereof. In this realm, our human physical intuitions as to shape and position seem inapplicable.

This has seemed to most of us to be alien territory. (Indeed, even the term “territory” may get fuzzy.) But theoreticians keep probing it.

In the last decades of the 20^th and first decade of the 21st centuries, theoreticians have created a body of ideas called “relational quantum mechanics”. This field was stimulated in large measure by a seminal article by Carlo Rovelli (1996).

This body of thinking puts in central focus the following: (a) all systems are “quantum systems”, (b) quantum systems “measure” each other by physical interaction, and (c) the physical interactions, which result in “entanglement”, occur by means of reduction in degrees of freedom, and hence correlation.

The term “relational” in the description of the field appears to arise from the perception that the relation of quantum systems to each other is at the core of the operation of such systems. Focusing on the relations between quantum systems – at bottom the correlations between them – helps us decipher what has been so puzzling to us about them.

That is among the contributions of Rovelli and his colleagues. The step which I take, and suggest to you, is to recognize and conceptually to build upon the proposit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Visible Universe Starts With – Believe It or Not – Correlation
• 2 Correlation=Differentiation=Order
• 3 Some Basic Characteristics of this Ordering Process as Thus Conceived
• 4 Hierarchy and Emergence Theories
• 5 Causation
• 6 The Arrow of Time
• 7 Complexity
• 8 Life
• 9 Energy
• 10 Globalization (Make It or Break It)
• 11 Ethics, Thermodynamics, and The Anthropocene
• Appendix A: Note on Ontology and Epistemology
• Appendix B: A Selection of Human Social Conventions Which Favor Cooperative, and Thus Correlated, or Coordinated, Behavior
• Appendix C: Quantitative Wikis For Energy Supply and Distribution Modeling
• References
• Index
• Back Cover