V'Ger and a New Physics Theory of Life

[Cryogenic]

I haven't posted here in many moons, but I've been lurking and recently rediscovered my addiction to all things Trek -- well, the movies, especially... and TMP most of all. Some time ago, I encountered a stunning new theory on the origins of life, and I'd like to share it and tie it into TMP. I'll begin with an excerpt from the movie:

SPOCK: They discovered its simple 20th Century programming: collect all data possible.

DECKER: Learn all that is learnable. Return that information to its creator.

SPOCK: Precisely, Mister Decker. The machines interpreted it literally. They built this entire vessel so that Voyager could actually fulfil its programming.

KIRK: And on its journey back... it amassed so much knowledge... it achieved consciousness itself.

Okay, so "consciousness itself" is a seriously hefty topic, but a beautiful new theory (or glorified hypothesis) emerged in 2014, by MIT physicist Jeremy England. His theory postulates that the emergence and development of life can be understood as a basic matter of physics -- chiefly: the second law of thermodynamics. A bit of reading here:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/

At the heart of England’s idea is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the “arrow of time.” Hot things cool down, gas diffuses through air, eggs scramble but never spontaneously unscramble; in short, energy tends to disperse or spread out as time progresses. Entropy is a measure of this tendency, quantifying how dispersed the energy is among the particles in a system, and how diffuse those particles are throughout space. It increases as a simple matter of probability: There are more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be concentrated. Thus, as particles in a system move around and interact, they will, through sheer chance, tend to adopt configurations in which the energy is spread out. Eventually, the system arrives at a state of maximum entropy called “thermodynamic equilibrium,” in which energy is uniformly distributed. A cup of coffee and the room it sits in become the same temperature, for example. As long as the cup and the room are left alone, this process is irreversible. The coffee never spontaneously heats up again because the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against so much of the room’s energy randomly concentrating in its atoms.

Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or “closed” system, an “open” system can keep its entropy low — that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms — by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings. In his influential 1944 monograph “What Is Life?” the eminent quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that this is what living things must do. A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.

I recommend reading the article for a coherent explanation (I've left out a good chunk out), but basically:

The chemistry of the primordial soup, random mutations, geography, catastrophic events and countless other factors have contributed to the fine details of Earth’s diverse flora and fauna. But according to England’s theory, the underlying principle driving the whole process is dissipation-driven adaptation of matter.

This principle would apply to inanimate matter as well. “It is very tempting to speculate about what phenomena in nature we can now fit under this big tent of dissipation-driven adaptive organization,” England said. “Many examples could just be right under our nose, but because we haven’t been looking for them we haven’t noticed them.”

Although England's theory is speculative and unproven, the article explains that his theory, in part, builds on the work of Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine, among others, who won a Nobel Prize in 1977 and did a lot of work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility. (I note, approvingly, that this formal recognition was given to Prigogine around the time that TMP was upgraded to a full-blown feature film production).

The article also offers some powerful examples of self-replication in nature that occurs independently of biochemistry, including snowflakes, sand dunes, and turbulent vortices -- driven by condensation, wind, and viscous drag, respectively.

Unfortunately, while the term "snowflake" has taken on a derogatory context online in recent years, snowflakes themselves are beautiful happenings within nature, and the one supplied as visual annotation in the article has a striking hexagonal structure -- which palpably brought TMP to mind, given the film's peculiarly strong emphasis on hexagons (e.g., the steps on Vulcan, the bridge of assembled blocks leading to the V'Ger plaza), and the numbers 3, 6, 9, and 12.

It seems like England is really onto something here. If matter has a kind of in-built tendency to arrange itself into more complex structures, in order to more effectively manage and dissipate heat, then life may be inevitable in a cosmos as vast as ours -- especially given all the organic molecules we know to exist on asteroids, comets, moons, and planets, and within molecular clouds, circumstellar envelopes, and the interstellar medium. It just seems like such a remarkable insight into the workings of nature, helping to shed serious light on (and in many ways solve) the riddle of abiogenesis. Tremendously exciting. Darwin found the origin of life much too overwhelming and abstract to deal with; but we've learned a bit more since Darwin, and this guy may have advanced us into a new paradigm (though competing theories remain viable).

Beyond that (and while it may seem petty by comparison), I see a strong resonance with TMP and its central "antagonist" V'Ger. The first film (which I remain so entranced by) deals very explicitly with the themes of life and creation; and the profound notion that there is a transcendent dimension to consciousness within (and without) the majestic scope of the universe. No other Star Trek movie is so elevated in its comportment or its concerns. And now this theory has come along and added a whole extra dimension to my enjoyment of the film (and made me realise, yet again, that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was a man really ahead of his time). I hope there are some TMP fans here who might also find it fascinating and similarly edifying.

 

[publiusr]

I’ve often wanted a return to V’ger.
It’s background, it’s future. It is really Hilbert’s hotel, with stories in each of its rooms

 

[StarCruiser]

This one absolutely belongs in the Science and Tech section - and deserves to be...

 

[Cryogenic]

This one absolutely belongs in the Science and Tech section - and deserves to be...

Thank you! I was a bit conflicted about where to put it, but I admit: I did really want to have it in the "movies" section, because I saw it as expounding on the beauty/depth/intelligence of TMP. I maybe didn't do enough to frame it that way. That said, if the mods think it is better in that other section, that's fine. It's a heck of a theory, isn't it?

 

[StarCruiser]

I don't think it's a "Theory" - I suspect it's a fact. It just makes too much sense.

In classic Science-speak, it's "Elegant".

 

[Maurice]

I don't think it's a "Theory" - I suspect it's a fact. It just makes too much sense.

In classic Science-speak, it's "Elegant".

In science speak a "theory" is as good as it gets. The term "fact" isn't used. And until this work is peer reviewed it's just one guy's theoretical model.

 

[Cryogenic]

I don't think it's a "Theory" - I suspect it's a fact. It just makes too much sense.

In classic Science-speak, it's "Elegant".

I like your enthusiasm. But in addition to what Maurice just said, something being elegant and something being true, in science, aren't the same thing. You can't derive truth from elegance alone. However, as I said in my opening post, I suspect the guy is really onto something. Since the original article, new evidence appeared in support of his theoretical model (based on computer simulations) a few years ago:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-theory-of-life-20170726/

But as Maurice emphasised, without proper peer review based on solid evidence, all England has is a nice theoretical model. One scientist isn't too impressed (from the article):

Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard who supervised England’s undergraduate research, sharply emphasized the divide between his former student’s work and questions in biology. “He started his scientific career in my lab and I really know how capable he is,” Shakhnovich said, but “Jeremy’s work represents potentially interesting exercises in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics of simple abstract systems.” Any claims that it has to do with biology or the origins of life, he added, are “pure and shameless speculations.”

The very next paragraph qualifies the above criticism with England's acknowledgement and defence:

Even if England is on the right track about the physics, biologists want more particulars — such as a theory of what the primitive “protocells” were that evolved into the first living cells, and how the genetic code arose. England completely agrees that his findings are mute on such topics. “In the short term, I’m not saying this tells me a lot about what’s going in a biological system, nor even claiming that this is necessarily telling us where life as we know it came from,” he said. Both questions are “a fraught mess” based on “fragmentary evidence,” that, he said, “I am inclined to steer clear of for now.” He is rather suggesting that in the tool kit of the first life- or proto-life-forms, “maybe there’s more that you can get for free, and then you can optimize it using the Darwinian mechanism.”

Thus, it remains a plausible explanatory framework, but one that needs more research in multiple fields before it can be accepted as empirically valid.

 

[dupersuper]

I’ve often wanted a return to V’ger.
It’s background, it’s future. It is really Hilbert’s hotel, with stories in each of its rooms

There's a story in the recent IDW Star Trek anthology series Waypoint that shows the new V'ger/Decker/Ilia merged being running into Q and getting the lowdown on being a cosmic being.