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The Astonishing Power of Disequilibrium
A Tiny Bit Less Cold
The Astonishing Power of Disequilibrium
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Andy Fletcher, scientist and lecturer, said this:
“The universe arrived courtesy of big bang in the highest state of order, i.e. of thermodynamic equilibrium, that it would ever be in. The background temperature and density was perfect to one part in 100,000.”
But!
“That tiny imperfection, that tiny nudge of disorder, was the bit that expanded eventually into to the universe and ultimately to you and me being here. In the places where the temperature was a bit colder (by one part in 100,000), matter collected, matter that eventually clumped into gas clouds, which clumped into stars, which clumped into galaxies.”
Think about that. All you need is one part in100,000, one nanoscopic scoop of disequilibrium in the form of imperceptible cold, and voilà! Life. Without that bit, matter and antimatter would have swallowed each other up; and the “world” would have returned to nothing, waiting it out, again, for another big bang to “come along.”
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But there it was. Anomaly.
I love that we started that way. I love that our most, most, most ancient ancestor is an entity of difference. I love that life arose from a break from balance, a pinning of perfection, a snubbing of sameness. And I would argue that it is that feature of our nature that defines our intelligence. Not our brains, our intelligence. Our best thinking. Our shining of light Into murk, especially when murk is being peddled as light.
We could do with more stray bits of disequilibrium at the moment, I feel. Sameness seems to be smothering our senses, our probes, our courage even to search for the torch. Oh, you may say, please no, we have enough chaos. Ah, but chaos destroys equilibrium; it does not enhance it. I would argue, in fact, that disequilibrium is the answer to chaos. I would say, let us restore equilibrium sweet step by sweet step and then ask the disturbing questions, just enough to produce matter and get on with life.
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​Andy Fletcher: https://www.quora.com/Is-the-Universe-random-or-designed, http://www.lifeuniverseverything.org/
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Listen
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I had begun Neil Theise’s, Notes On Complexity 1. Everything was fine. Then I read this: “Robins on our building’s front lawn tilt their heads, listening for herds of earthworms passing through the ground beneath them.”
Robins. Listening for worms. Herds of them.
Really?
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I’ve watched a lot of robins scuttle, pause, tilt their heads, poke their beaks madly into the lawn, and very occasionally come up with a worm. I’ve assumed they were making wild guesses about where the worm would be. I’ve assumed that they were being patient or maybe determined, or were just programmed for a low success/failure ratio, and in order to survive had to be persistent, relying on luck and indefatigability.
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It never occurred to me they were listening.
Listening for worms.
I can’t get over it. Maybe you already knew this. Maybe you are wondering where I have been all these years. How does a reasonably intelligent, fairly well-read, science-loving person miss a key fact of nature like that?
Beats me. But honestly, it’s exciting. Don’t you think?
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1 Theise, Neil, Notes on Complexity, Spiegel and Grau, NY, 2023, p. 23
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Joyas Voladoras
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This gift from my friend Maryse transported me. I hope it does you, too:
From One Long River of Song
By Brian Doyle
Consider the hummingbird for a long moment.
A hummingbird’s heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird’s heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird’s heart is a lot of the hummingbird. “Joyas Voladoras” “flying jewels,” the first white explorers in the Americas called them; and the white people had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in summer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.
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Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backward. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be.
Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: the bearded helmetcrests, and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied starfrontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant’s fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.
Sometimes I manage to remember that joyous jewels like this are going on in our convulsive world right this very minute. They do not take into account what the darkest side of humanity is doing to anything, including to itself. Nature’s beauties just are, and that is that.
Thank goodness.
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Earth
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Probably a million people have said this, maybe a billion. But one universal human right is to think and say stuff again and again. So here is my version of this thought:
We are the earth.
We are not “of the earth.” We are the earth.
To get there you have to decide what earth is. Do trees, for example, grow out of the earth, or are they it? Do birds fly over the earth or are they it? Does the sun shine on the earth or is it it, too?
In front of me is the red rock colossus in the Sedona desert. That is the earth. Raised, reaching, then receding in calculated but incalculable flows. First sea bed, then land, then sea bed, then land. No witness because nothing to see, arriving now after trillions of nows, moving still so not arriving, seeping from today’s something to something else.
No stopping to change trains. No trains. Only a trackless passage to something else but not “to” because no stops.
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But our brains – also the earth but pretending to be of it – crave division, demand shards, hatched time bits, earth units. Not understanding unity at all.
We put our hands into the earth, we bless the earth with our hands, we press a micro holder of life into the earth with our hands, and we trust it will grow rather than that we will grow, but we are it, our hands are it, but we do not know how to know that.
And when after harvest we eat the grownup gestated protrusions that are the earth, we eat the earth. And because we are the earth, we eat our very selves.
That thought disgusts. It is a kind of demographic cannibalism. But only because we have chopped up reality/nature/earth/us so finely we think we feed on something distinctly not us, something outside of us. But there is no outside of us. There is only a whole whole.
This whole idea may seem undeserving of attention, something you would sit down and think about only after all other subjects and issues and streaks of colour on a million pallets were exhausted. I understand. Unity is disengaging. And writing about it is a fiction because words are bits and unity is not. Our brains cannot do unity.
So I will stop.
But maybe our brains can round up the bits and splash them onto our broken beaches, letting us drift as one, just for a bit.
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