You may be familiar with the “arrow of time,” but did you know there could be a second one?
Dr. Robert Hazen, a scientist at Carnegie Science’s Earth and Planetary Laboratory in Washington, D.C., thinks a single arrow of time might be too limiting. A second arrow, which he calls “the law of increasing functional information”, takes evolution into account. Specifically, Hazen explains that evolution appears to incorporate not only time, but also function and purpose.
Let’s take a coffee mug for example: it works best for holding your coffee, but it could also double as a paperweight, and it wouldn’t work as a screwdriver at all. Hazen explains that it appears that the universe uses a similar way of evolving not only biology, but also other complex systems throughout the cosmos.
This idea suggests that as the universe ages and expands, it becomes increasingly organized and functional, which is almost the opposite of theories surrounding increasing cosmological disorder. Hazen suggests that these two “arrows” – one of entropy and the other of organized information – could very well be parallel to each other. If true, this theory could be revolutionary in how we perceive time, evolution, and the very fabric of reality.
Robert Hazen: I have to make a confession here. I have to be honest. We could be wrong. We could be spectacularly wrong. But it’s also possible that science is missing a deeper truth about the cosmos. We have about ten laws of nature, only one of which currently has an arrow of time. This is the second law of thermodynamics, the increase in entropy is disorder; it’s decadence.
We all age. We are all gonna die. But the second law does not explain why things change; why life emerges from non-life. You look around and see flowers blooming, trees blooming, and birds singing. It seems that all of these things go against the idea of disorder. In fact, it is a kind of ordering of nature.
So let me tell you what we think: we think there’s a missing law, a second arrow of time that describes this increase in order, and we think it has to do with an increase in information. So there are two possibilities. We could just be wrong. We could be terribly, even dramatically, wrong. But I think if we’re wrong, we’re wrong in a very interesting way. And I think if we’re right, that’s profoundly important.
My name is Bob Hazen. I am a scientist at Carnegie Science’s Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington, DC. I do mineralogy and astrobiology. I like science. We believe that for some reason a second arrow of time is missing. And this arrow has to do with an increase in information, an increase in order, an increase in structure which goes hand in hand with the arrow of increasing disorder and increasing chaos, entropy.
At the heart of everything we’ve been thinking about, in terms of the missing law, is evolution. When I say the word “evolution,” we immediately think of Darwin, but this idea of selection goes well beyond Darwin and life. This applies to the evolution of atoms. This applies to the evolution of minerals. This applies to the evolution of planets, atmospheres and oceans. Evolution, which we view as an increase in the diversity, configuration, and complexity of systems over time.
So the question is, “Well, what is evolution?” » Evolution is simply selection for function. And this applies to any type of system. Now in life you select organisms that can survive long enough to be able to reproduce and have offspring that will pass on their characteristics. That’s what Darwin said, and it’s a very important example of functional selection. But, in the mineral world, we select organizations, assemblies, structures of atoms which persist, which can last billions of years even in new environments.
They don’t break down. They don’t dissolve. They do not alter. It’s very analogous to biological evolution, but it’s different in the details. We think that a law is missing: it is a law of evolution. And if there is a law, it must be quantitative. It must have a metric. You have to be able to measure something. And what we’ve focused on is a fascinating concept about information, but not just information in general, something called “functional information.”
Let me see if I can explain this to you because it took me a while to figure it out myself. Imagine a system, an evolving system that has the potential to form a large number of different configurations. Let’s say it’s atoms to make minerals, and you have dozens of different elements forming minerals, and they can organize themselves in different ways. And 99.99999999 (I can go on)% of these configurations will not work. They will collapse. They will never form. A tiny fraction makes up a stable mineral, and you end up with a few stable minerals and a lot of rejects.
Now all you have to do is think about this fraction. If it’s a stable possibility out of a hundred trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, then you can represent that fraction as information. And because it’s a very small fraction, you need a lot of information to do this: it’s functional information. Evolution is simply an increase in functional information because as you select better and better results, you select more and more stable minerals. You select living things that can swim. They can fly. They can see.
You need more information and each step of the evolutionary ladder leads you to increasing functional information. So our law, our missing law, the second arrow of time is called the “Law of Increasing Functional Information.” And it is the parallel arrow of time that we think is there and that we want to understand. The idea of increasing functional information has a very profound implication. Think about the functional information of a coffee cup; you may have one right now.
You have a bunch of atoms, and those atoms could be in billions of billions of billions of different configurations, but only a tiny fraction of those configurations can hold a cup of coffee. Now think of a coffee mug as a paperweight. I know you used a coffee mug as a paperweight. We’ve all done it, and it’s pretty good at it, but you can make a better paperweight. And a coffee mug makes a terrible screwdriver. So think about this: we are saying that the coffee cup has value as a coffee cup. It has some value as a paperweight, but it has no value as a screwdriver – it’s contextual.
This is why the second arrow of time is difficult for science, because it indicates that there is something in the natural world that is not absolute. It’s contextual. It depends on your goal. It depends on your role. If this is true, what we are saying is that there is something in the Universe that increases order, complexity, and this does not happen randomly. It is a selection for function. And if so, if you select a function, that means there almost seems to be – can I use the word “objective?” »
Do minerals have any use? Do atmospheres have a purpose? Does life have a purpose? To me, there is something real there, and the old way of thinking about a single arrow of time no longer feels true to me.