Chapter 40 new second law

new second law If Langton's rhetoric was a little more toned than most scientific writing, it was by no means uncommon in Los Alamos' circle.Farmer is known for pioneering difficult scientific concepts in a high-profile manner.One of the most famous examples of this is a 1989 non-scientific lecture co-authored by Farmer and his wife, environmental lawyer Aletta Bailin, entitled: "Artificial Life: The Coming Evolution." .This was Farmer's speech at a UC seminar celebrating the sixtieth birthday of Marie Gell-Mann. "With the advent of artificial life, we may be the first beings capable of creating offspring of our own..." he wrote. "Our failure as creators will produce a cold, hostile creature, and our success will produce a creature of beauty and intelligence. A creature whose knowledge and wisdom will far exceed ours. When the future has A LIFE OF CONSCIOUSNESS Looking back at this age, it is likely that our most notable achievements lie not in ourselves, but in the life we ​​have created. Artificial life is our humanity's greatest potential creation."

Flowery rhetoric aside, Farmer really does see artificial life as an emerging science (the bulk of this "coming evolution" speech is made of not-so-hyperbolic assessments of the science's future).Naturally, he gave Langton's research equally serious support.After all, Farmer had brought Langton to Los Alamos in the first place.Despite his anxiety about Langton's long-delayed doctoral dissertation, he has no regrets about bringing Langton here.He said: "Chris (Lonton) is definitely worth it. People here like him, he has a real dream, he has aspirations in life, there are too few people like him. Chris hasn't learned how to improve. Productivity. But I think he has a vision, a real vision. I think he does a really good job of pursuing his ambitions, and he’s not afraid to tackle big, specific problems.”

Indeed, although Langdon happened to be five years his senior, Farmer was a mentor and friend who wholeheartedly supported Langdon. In 1987, when Farmer was one of only a handful of young scientists to be included in the Santa Fe Institute's inner circle, he persuaded Cowan to donate $5,000 to Langdon's symposium on artificial life.On Farmer's recommendation, Langton was invited to speak at a seminar at the Santa Fe Institute.Farmer also advocated that the institute's science committee recruit visiting scientists for the artificial life project, and he encouraged Langton to hold a series of artificial life seminars in Los Alamos and, occasionally, at the Santa Fe Institute.Perhaps most importantly, in 1987, when Farmer agreed to chair the new Complex Systems Group at the Center for Theoretical Research in Los Alamos, he listed Artificial Life, Machine Learning, and Dynamical Systems Theory as the group's three main areas of research direction.

Farmer was not a natural administrative figure.He was thirty-five, a tall, lanky New Mexican with a ponytail like a graduate student, a T-shirt, and a "Question Authority!" kind of thing.Hectic administrative work was a pain in the ass, and having to write proposals and begging for research grants from "those fools in Washington" was another pain.But Farmer was gifted both in securing research grants and in generating intellectual enthusiasm.He initially distinguished himself in the field of mathematical forecasting, and still spends most of his time at the forefront of research in the field, working to find ways to predict the future behavior of random and chaotic systems, including the stock market, which is very much expected to be able to predict. Future systems make predictions.He allocated most of the group's research funding for "general functions" to Langton and members of the artificial life research group, leaving his own nonlinear prediction research project and other research projects to support themselves. "Predictive research can bring real benefits, and I can guarantee that investors will get a return within a year, while artificial life research takes a long time to produce results. In the current investment environment, artificial life is almost impossible to research Funding. I saw this very clearly when a foundation funding my predictive research called me to ask about a proposal they had received for artificial life research. Judging by their attitude , they see artificial life as a flying saucer, or astrology or something. They are very upset to see my name on the list of referees for the artificial life project.”

In the long run, Farmer's current situation is less ideal than he imagined.He really loves predictive research work very much, but he is trapped in predictive research and administrative affairs, and he doesn't have much time to spend on artificial life research.But more than any other work, artificial life struck a chord with him.Artificial life, he says, takes you to the deep questions of emergence and self-organization that have been on his mind. "I started thinking about self-organization in nature when I was in middle school," said Farmer, "albeit vaguely at first, because of reading science fiction." He especially remembers Isaac Asmov. Asimov's The Final Question.In that story, future humans consult the cosmic supercomputer on how to abolish the second law of thermodynamics.Namely: the inexorable tendency of all things in the universe to cool, decay, and perish as atoms randomize themselves.How, they ask, can the ever-increasing entropy be reversed? (Entropy is what physicists call disorder at the molecular level.) Then, long after humans died and the planet cooled, cosmic supercomputers finally figured out how to accomplish this feat.It proclaimed, "Let the light shine!" and a new, low-entropy universe was born.

Farmer was only fourteen years old when he read Asmov's book, and the story then brought him the question: He asked himself if entropy had been increasing, if randomization and disorder at the atomic level were irresistible, so why is the universe still able to form stars, clouds and trees?Why does matter always tend, on a large scale, to become more and more organized, while on a smaller scale, more and more disintegrated?Why hasn't the universe disintegrated into some invisible moisture for so long?Farmer said: "Frankly, the interest in these problems is one of the driving forces that drove me to become a physicist." Bill Wootters (Bill Wootters, physicist William Wootters, now Massachusetts Williams College) and I used to sit on the grass after physics classes at Stanford and talk about these issues for long periods of time, with all sorts of ideas racing through our heads. I didn't find out until years later that there were other people I have also been thinking about these issues, and there have been data and literature records in this regard-Norbert Wiener in cybernetics, Ilya Prigokin in self-organization, Hermann Haken of Collaborative Reflection Research." In fact, he says, the same problem is underlying the work of Herbert Spencer.In the 1860s, the British philosopher Spencer put forward the phrase "survival of the fittest", which promoted the popularization of Darwin's theory.In fact, Spencer only saw Darwin's theory of evolution as a special case of the grand force driving the spontaneous origin of the structure of the universe.

At the time, Farmer said, many people were mulling these questions alone.But at the time he was very confused. "I don't see a specific discipline that pushes these thoughts. Biologists are not working on these problems, they are busy figuring out which protein works with which, and ignore the general laws. In my opinion, physics Scientists don't seem to be working on it either. That's one of the reasons why I turned to chaos theory." James Gleick has an entire chapter on Farmer and their turn to chaos theory in his bestseller Chaos: Farmer and his lifelong friend Norman Packard in the late 1970s at Cal Santa How, as graduate students in physics at Cruz, became fascinated by the phenomenon of roulette; how calculating the trajectory of a rolling ball as it spins gave them a keen sense of the subtleties of the initial situation in a physical system Changes can lead to dramatic changes in the end result; how they and two other graduate students, Robert Shaw and James Crutchfield, came to realize that the emerging theory of "chaos" , that is, more broadly known as "dynamical systems theory," describes precisely this sensitive dependence on initial conditions; how the four of them aspired to work in this field and have since become known as the "dynamical systems group" famous.

"But I soon got tired of chaos theory," Farmer said. "I thought, 'So what?' Chaos has been explored at its most fundamental level, the theory of the discipline is so clear that there are no exciting new discoveries at the frontiers of research." Also, chaos theory itself is not very deep.He explains to you a great deal about how some simple rules of behavior can generate surprisingly complex dynamics.But aside from all these beautiful fractal pictures, chaos theory actually has a hard time explaining the systems of life, or the fundamental laws of evolution.It fails to explain how these systems, starting from random nothing, self-assemble into complex wholes.Most importantly, it fails to answer Farmer's old question, namely, that the universe is in a never-ending process of forming order and structure.

Somehow, Farmer decided, there was a whole new understanding of it that hadn't been exhausted.This is why he collaborated with Kaufman and Packard on the autocatalytic group and the origin of life, and fully supported Langdon's research on artificial life.Farmer, like many in Los Alamos and Santa Fe, felt a certain understanding.The answer, the melody, the law is hovering outside the door. "I belong to a school of thought that believes that life and organization are like entropy increasing, never ending. It's just that there are no rules for the formation of life and organization. Life is a reflection of a broader phenomenon which, I believe, runs counter to the second law of thermodynamics, which describes the tendency of matter to self-organize and which predicts the organization of the universe. laws of general character."

Farmer had no idea what this new second law would look like. "If we knew, we'd know how to spot the law. It's just speculation at the moment, a sort of intuition you get when you step back and pat your head in thought." In fact, he doesn't Know if it will be one rule, or several rules.What he does know, however, is that there have been many recent discoveries in this direction, such as emergence, adaptation, and the edge of chaos, which can at least outline the outlines of this hypothetical new second law.