Dr Peter Verheyen, DMD from Sola Society & Academy, Vienna University, explains the intriguing areas of information and entropy, plus infotropy, life and time
Information, entropy, life, and time are somehow closely connected.
Among many other issues, Carlo Rovelli is trying to figure out the nature of time. ‘We have a classical world and a fundamental world, and on a fundamental level, time doesn’t exist’. (1) To him, time appears when a quantum state collapses into a classical reality. Paul Davies ‘Wave function collapse is projection into a single concrete reality’. (2)
To Carlo Rovelli, the fact that the collapse and outcome is not repeatable, these facts/happenings create time.
The nature of time
The very first life needed a notion or awareness of the environment to survive, with the creation of a primitive reality and of time.
From cyanobacteria, which showed up 2.4 billion years ago, we know they had a biological clock back then. Before sunset, their biochemical machinery/ metabolism, entropy-driven, starts to produce the molecules necessary to make their photosynthesis as efficient as possible once the sun arises.
1.8 billion years ago, the Earth had returned again into an ice bal. The cyanobacteria caused mass extinction: by releasing their aggressive and toxic oxygen in the atmosphere and the oceans, almost all life became extinct, and the oxygen broke down the methane in the atmosphere; its effect is well known. The Earth became a tough place for living organisms. But thanks to this scarcity, life and evolution had to take it up to a notch. And a unique, wonderful accident happened. An archaeon swallowed a bacterium and, in the meantime, evolved and adapted to use oxygen as an energy source.
Eukaryotes and more
This combined organism, Feca, the first eukaryotic common ancestor, managed to survive. All eukaryotic multicellular life afterwards, has this single primitive cell as its mother, including humans. The bacterium inside the archaeon became its mitochondrion, capable of using oxygen as an energy source and, at the same time, helping the archaea to get rid of its aggressive oxygen. Mitochondria have their own DNA, and also, in human cells, always the DNA of the mother. Archaeon DNA resembles more to human DNA than to bacterial DNA. Through mitochondria, energy factories of the eukaryotes, life could enter a new phase in evolution, a multicellular complex life.
The creation of that single eukaryote turned up only once and had cosmological implications.
Eukaryotic, multicellular life and growing complexity, needed an ever-improved agenda. Growing complexity urged for an ever-better organization. Organization is planning. Planning involves time and getting the actions done in the right sequence: the necessary biological clock, ever evolutionary improving.
Oak trees restart their metabolism when the temperature increases. Beech trees, when days grow longer.
The human biological clock is extremely complex: complex brain activity guiding the regulating hormones.
A sense of (Earth) time
All living creatures on Earth had/have a sense of (Earth) time, as all living creatures had/have an expiration date. The expiration date is a perfect invention of life: constantly renewing with beneficial errors creates the highest chances of survival and improvement. Continuous adaptations to ever-changing environments, yielding evolution.
Huwe Prince says ‘If physics tells us that time doesn’t exists on a fundamental level, perhaps we can only understand time if we connect physics with cognitive science’. (3)
A happening, what-where-when. The brain makes a logical story out of it and creates an illusion of time. When you are having fun, time flies. Time flies, when you are having fun.
A lot of what-where-when means a lot of information and our brain is occupied; it needs and consumes information. A lack of it, and our brain gets bored. Must wait for something the brain excites, makes it crazy, desires.
What is time?
Time is not a basic property of the Universe, but it entered the classical world together with entropy and life. Our time is arbitrary, based on a 1/86,400ste of an Earth rotation, which also can be regarded as facts/ happenings in a regulated sequence. When there were aliens out there, we were not able to date them as they could not understand our notion of time. Something, as a second, doesn’t exist in the Universe; it is an ‘Earth life invention,’ and the Universe doesn’t need it.
The more precise we try to make ‘our’ clocks, the more energy they consume, the higher their entropy, and the arrow of time, running only in one direction. In space, we can move (more or less) freely in three dimensions. Entropy and ‘our’ time lock us up in an eternal present, allowing us only to move from past to future.
References
- Rovelli,C. La Realtà non é comme a appare. La struttura elementara della case. Raffaello Cortino Editore, 2014.
- Sci 2021,3(4), 35; https://doi.org/10.3390/sci3040035
- Bpi 2023, Vol 2(6); DOI:https://doi.org/10.9734/bpi/cppsr/v3/6388E
