This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
The average white band with pickup the pieces.
That's all we have in the end, pieces.
That's all we have in the beginning too.
The subatomic particles that form atoms, the atoms that form molecules,
the molecules that form elements, entities, and organisms.
The star systems that form galaxies, and the black holes that devour them eventually.
It's all in the pieces and no one knows whether there's a hole to which they belong
or whether the material world is just parts outside of parts, outside of parts.
Practice X-appatus as medieval scholasticism used to define matter.
Thank you.
[Music]
Barrowing from Alan Lightman, the credo of the scientific view of the world can be stated as follows.
The universe is made of matter and nothing more.
It is governed exclusively by a small number of fundamental forces and laws,
and all composite things in the world, including humans and stars,
eventually disintegrate and return to their component parts.
Now even though the phenomenologist in me objects to nothing but philosophies,
I can live with the idea that the universe is made of matter and nothing more.
Matter after all isn't what it used to be.
We're starting to understand that matter can in fact think and feel,
that under some conditions it can self-transcend, and that spirit is a rare,
maybe the rarest form of sublimated matter.
So if matter indeed contains the potentiality of spirit,
if it can glint or glow in someone's eye, and if it can even ask what matter itself is,
as my guest and I will be doing shortly, then yes I'm happy to call myself a materialist,
in the most scopious sense of the term.
There's a word you haven't heard me use before on entitled opinions,
scopious, having a wide scope, spacious, first known use, 1599,
in Thomas Middleton's Microcynecon.
I quote, "streams ER barred their course swelled with more rage and far more greater force,
until their full stuffed gorge of passage makes into the wide maws of more scopious lakes."
Scopious indeed is our theme today. I'm joined by Stanford Graduate Brian Chong to discuss
some of the more basic laws of the material world above all those of thermodynamics.
Brian received his Bachelor of Science with a degree in applied and computational mathematics
here at Stanford. He then went on to receive a Master's degree in material science,
also from Stanford, and I'm delighted he's here today to help us think through some
fundamental aspects of what we call matter. Brian, welcome to entitled opinions.
Thank you Robert, the pleasure is entirely mine to be here.
So Brian, I mentioned earlier that matter is not what it used to be, meaning that our conceptions
of it, of matter, and of the laws that govern it have changed quite a bit in the past few centuries.
Why don't we start with the basic question like what are some of the significant transformations
in our understanding since the 1700s? Well, thank you. In many ways the 1700s and the 1800s were
very special time in science and our understanding of matter. It was a time when, after the discovery
of Newton's laws and the invention of many types of scientific apparatus that was able to describe
the expansion of air and heat. Many of the thinkers in Europe started to move towards a very
deterministic and mechanistic view of the universe of a clockwork universe where all of motion
is mediated through fluids and cogs and rods and all of these very fixed and rigid mechanisms.
And that is the deterministic universe of the 18th and 19th centuries, while the universe of our
current conception is one that's a bit more dynamical, more probabilistic. And because these
phenomena are probabilistic, we think of these universal phenomena in terms of statistics. What
is statistics? It is the science of treating probabilistic phenomena when something is not
deterministic. When you don't know what is going to happen in the future, the art of predicting
that and the art of predicting the distribution of outcomes is statistics. And because our
conception of matter is now very much dynamical and probabilistic, statistics is the tool with which
we rely on in order to come up with the ways that we describe matter. And a very good example of
that would be from the evolution of our understanding of heat in the 18th and 19th centuries,
people thought of heat as a sort of fluid in, if it was, it would mean like a substance.
It's indeed an actual fluidic substance like a liquid. When it was producing combustion, they
called it floriston, and when it's being transferred from a hot to cold object, they called it
caloric and it's called the caloric theory of heat. We now know that in material objects,
these things are not actual liquids. Anyway, we think of heat instead as the kinetic energy of
particles. It is the average speed at which particles move about if it's in it. These would be
subatomic particles. No, these are atoms and molecules. So if it's in a gas, they would be moving
about in space. And if they're in a solid, they usually just vibrating really quickly. And the speed
of this movement and vibration is what we call heat. There's no fluid to mediate the transfer of heat
at all. And when you have a particle that moves really quickly, and that's a, they are really hot,
if your particles move very slowly, they're really cold. And a transfer of heat from a hot object to
cold object is nothing more than a really fast moving particle knocking against slow moving particles
and transferring some of their speed. So famously, second law of thermodynamics, we'll get into it
more in detail later. Heat can only go from a hot to cold. Why can't they go from cold to hot?
It can. So James Clerk Maxwell, who was a very famous physicist, described how the second law
of thermodynamics is a statistical law. It's not a purely mathematical one. It can be violated when it's,
you have very small collection of particles and on very, like, local areas. But when you have a lot
of particles has a whole, the law is violated because of the law of large numbers. And this law is
defined as, well, there's different formulations of it. And I know of it as the law of entropy,
but maybe you can give a more formal definition of the second law of thermodynamics. We're going
to speak a lot about that. Sure. And there are many different ways of formulating that this second law
of thermodynamics. And one of the earliest ones is from Sadif Garneau. He actually thought of heat
in terms of the caloric theory. He thought of heat as a fluid, but he was able to come up with the
second law of thermodynamics by thinking of what an ideal engine looked like, an ideal engine that's
powered by no more than a difference in temperature between a hot object and cold object. And the first
earliest statement of the second law is that there exists a maximally efficient engine. Another
system. It means that you, there's only a maximum amount of work that you can get from a different
in temperature. So engines derive from differences in temperature. You have a hot thing and a cold
thing and then you try to derive work by this difference. You don't have to think of it in terms of
heat. You can think of it in terms of say a fountain or a dam where a turbine is being driven by
something as a very high water level versus something as a very low water level. And a difference is what
drives turbines and same with heat as well. So given two different water levels in terms of heat,
there's only a maximum amount of work that you can derive from it.
So why not call this energy rather than the transfers from hot to colders? That's how we understand
energy. Well, energy is something, well, we have to go back to the first law for that as well.
Energy is something that cannot be created and destroyed. And that's the first law of thermodynamics.
That's right. Conservation of energy. That's right. And the second law is about how the form,
it's governs the forms that this energy can take. Your turning heat energy into movement
energy or work energy. That is a transfer or transformation of energy. But it's a difference in
terms of you're not really creating energy along this way. So it'll be incorrect to say that
you're creating energy from an engine. Yeah, well, that's a very subtle distinction that I will
have to keep in mind because I think that if you put coal into the steam engine, you are
generating energy or what you're allowing for the second law of thermodynamics to do its thing,
I guess you would put it that way, right? I'll say that you are putting the chemical energy of coal
inside a engine. And that's the whole thing. You're transforming that chemical energy into
heat and then the heat into work energy. Okay, so, so, Brian, between the 16, 17,
1800s and now the real shift in thinking is that we've gone from a mechanical deterministic
view of matter to one where now matter is composed of particles. That's right. Small bits.
And heat, for example, is the speed at which these particles interact. That's right.
The faster the hotter the slower the colder. That's right. And therefore, we need a statistical
understanding of matter rather than let's say a mechanical one because at the quantum level or at
the molecular atomic level, it's only a huge amount of particles that will give patterns of order
that then can be measured only statistically rather than exactly. So, there are two things to think
about here right now. The first is the law of large numbers. This is a statistical law that governs
when you have a lot of things versus very few things. And the law is things tend to the expected value,
the more you have of them. So, if you flip two coins, the expected value of the number of heads you
get is one. But if you flip just any two coins, you might get both tails or both heads. But if you
flip this coin, these pair of coins many trillions of times, the final expected value from many of
these flips will be one. So, is that what's called equilibrium in the final analysis?
That is not an equilibrium. The second thing I have to talk about because when I say that
heat is the average speed of particles, a hot object can have very slow particles as well as very
fast particles. So, these slow particles are considered cold but how can cold particles exist in a
hot object? It's because particles form a distribution of cold and hot particles inside a single body.
And usually if it's sort of an ideal gas, this distribution is known as a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution.
And very often you encounter these sort of distributions and statistics as well because these
distributions basically tell you how you, if you have something that is probabilistic,
what is the probability of finding it in a cold as a cold particle or a hot particle? And the
distribution describes that probability. And the main theorists of this new kind of statistical
understanding of matter would, I mean you mentioned the Maxwell, you've told me about the Maxwell-Boltzmann
distribution. So, Boltzmann is another figure here. I mentioned Boltzmann and I think one way to
illustrate this distribution would be to think of one of Boltzmann's own thought experiments.
Boltzmann in particular, the theory called H theory. And to think of how a Maxwell-Boltzmann
distribution of particles of slow and fast particles can arise naturally, just think of a box of particles
with even speeds. Imagine you have lots of particles on a box, they all trapped inside and they all
have the same speed. This is actually very unnatural. It has very low entropy and a system
obstacle to a place where fire entropy, wise that the case. Because when you have two particles of
even speeds hitting on each other, one will speed up and one will slow down. And eventually,
as faster particles are more likely to hit other particles, while the slow particles are less likely
to hit other particles. And so at some point, the rate at which fast particles get slowed down by
hitting another particle and the rate at which slow particles speed up by being hit by another
particle becomes even and that's an equilibrium. That is what is called a fine balance. And once
this condition is reached, you realize that a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of particles emerges
where there's a lot of slow particles and some really, really fast particles. But then when they
even are and they reach equilibrium, that's almost like a death. It means that nothing happens anymore.
It's still a dynamical system. That's why I still describe it as a dynamical system. Particles
are still slowing down and speeding up all the time is just that the proportion of them
will forever remain the same if they're in our particles in that box unless something from outside
the box intervenes. Right. So here we're talking about closed systems. That's right. Okay.
Does this theory of particles and their constant, you call it speed, you say their motion and
interaction, their relations? Does this theory proceed the quantum mechanics, the thinking of
quantum mechanics? Because it seems like quantum mechanics is also predicated upon very much of the
same notion of a dynamical systems where you have probabilistic knowledge of where, for example,
electron will be and so forth. But it sounds to me like the laws of thermodynamics are
independent of quantum mechanics. Very much so. These sorts of things are entirely of a statistical
description. And in some ways, it's even more fundamental than a quantum mechanical one.
If you go to a physicist and tell them that you have observed something, something that breaks
the standard model of quantum mechanics, they might believe you. If you go to them and say,
I found something that violates the second law of thermodynamics, they'll laugh you out of the
the room, because it's that fundamental. So if matter were to be in the same conception as
Epicurus, where they would just rigid balls or rigid objects rather than a quantum mechanical
system, they will still behave in the same way and they will still reach the same equilibrium,
just entirely from this statistical principle of how this distribution can arise from the
fine balance. What about irreversible ability? Because the second law of thermodynamics is very
famously associated with the concept of things that are irreversible. And we were reading Carlow
Ruhveli, the quantum theorist who has written some really magnificent books, especially for
people like me who don't follow the equations. But he has a book called The Order of Time,
in which he claims that the only law in the universe, which can account for the fact that time
moves from past to the future is the second law of thermodynamics, because it's the only law
about that has to do with the irreversibility and things. And time itself is being irreversible.
How does the irreversibility of time relate to the second law of thermodynamics?
That's a very good point. So one of the things that a purely deterministic universe has
is if you took the arrow of every single part of the universe and the direction that
moving in and flipped it, the world would be as it is. That's obviously not the case. If you film something
and you do it in reverse, you can tell quite obviously that there is an arrow of time. And the second
law is that arrow. Because when you think the difference between the present and the past and the
future and the present is that the future will always have more entropy, as long as there's some sort
of irreversible process. So in order to approach this concept, let's think of, let's try to define
what entropy is. Yes, let's do that. So one common understanding of entropy is that it is disorder.
But disorder is not something that you can really quantify, right? If you break a plate,
the pieces of the plate is more disorderly. But the universe doesn't care if it played as whole,
or if it is in many pieces. No, but we say entropy negative because you can go from the plate to
the pieces. Now we're going back to the average white band song, pick up the pieces. But you cannot
go from the pieces of the broken plate and it will not reform naturally the plate.
So I don't like calling entropy sort of negative thing. And no, I don't either. That's why I want
to hear a few. I want to, I'm strong, a pologee as the Latin say for entropy as being utterly vital.
So when you think of entropy, think instead of it as a measure of degrees of freedom. So
the entropy of a crystal is very low because the particles in a crystal, the atoms are fixed in
position and they can move at all. They can only vibrate in place. The entropy of a gas is very high
because the particles are free to go all over the place and take the form of wind and breeze and so on.
So the entropy of particles in a very restricted place is really low, well, if you expand that space
and give them more states of freedom, what a physicist called microstates, then the entropy becomes
higher. And one restatement of entropy is that it is the measure of the degrees of freedom
and a restatement of the second law is that the degrees of freedom once given cannot be taken back.
And I'd like to say that it's like the material arc of the universe bends towards freedom as it
well, because once you give freedom to these particles, these forms of matter, you can take it back
anymore. And that's what irreversibility means, things that are free, you can capture them back.
So for me, that sounds like a highly radical revolutionary understanding of entropy as something that
is the condition for the creation of the universe, for the origins of life, for all sorts of things
that come into being, that emerge into forms that what I don't understand is things emerge into order.
And this idea that everything is a kind of irreversible directionality towards a disorder,
which is another word for entropy in the common understanding of entropy. I don't understand how we
get new forms of order created, except perhaps by creating more entropy elsewhere than within the
systems that are ordered spontaneously. So we can think of the universe as moving through arcs of complexity.
The very young universe, everything was all put together, there weren't too many big galaxies,
there weren't any, there wasn't any life and that had very low entropy. And I think one way of
thinking about it is that entropy is like the weights of a grandfather clock, where you're able to,
the beginning of the universe is a very low entropy place. And...
Well, excuse me, but how can I be low entropy when you have all this extraordinary creation of
stars and galaxies and the expansion of space, that sounds to me like the utmost arena freedom
and freedom for work to take place. That's precisely that when you say expansion of space,
you're using the same words I did to describe it increase in entropy. And that increase in freedom
of universal freedom is the very first breath, the very first fiat looks of the increase of entropy.
And the young universe was a really hot, really localized, very compact sort of place, where all
the stars are close to get, all of the matter was very close together. And now it's
freer to take all different forms. When you think of entropy and transfer of entropy,
or rather the transfer of free energy, you think of the increase of entropy in the heart of the sun.
And that gives earth a free gift of free energy and under the do our work and create our own
complexities of life. Entropy is not just an increase in the degrees of freedom, it's also,
the freedom arises in terms of complexity. When you have a more complex system, it's often
something that is more entropic in nature. And so when you want to think of a future universe,
think of future Earth, think of even more complex, more, I don't like what messy,
but you know, messy sort of place. So I have a question about life, if one imagines that life
is one of the most complex dynamical systems of matter that we know of. Then how does one
understand the entropic condition of possibility for life? And is life by virtue of it's being
alive and remaining alive and thriving in its animate form? Is it creating all sorts of disorder
outside of itself by virtue of itself perpetuation? This is certainly the theory of some biologist,
Lynn Margulis and others, even Schrodinger, who wrote a book called What Is Life claims that
this extraordinary complexity that life is creates a great deal of entropic disorder outside of itself
in order to maintain itself in being. So I want to think of life as a sort of entropy itself is
like life, right? Because life is the process of being far away from an equilibrium process. You
are constantly creating irreversible changes to the world around you and inside you. And being
in this state of constant irreversible processes, you are constantly increasing entropy. But
it's hard to think of it as creating disorder outside yourself because let's go by all the way to
what powers life, right? How does life get this potentiality to actualize into the forms that it takes?
For that we need to first think of what is free energy. So I mentioned before that energy cannot
be created or destroyed, it can only be transformed. Well, there are some forms of energy that
can be transformed to others, but not the other way around because of the increase of entropy
from one form to the other. And the free energy that powers life and comes from mostly the sun,
the sun gives us light and the light hits an electron in the leaf of a plant.
The electron, this single subatomic particle leaves from one molecule, one jumps from one atom to
the other, and that small gap, that tiny little jump is what powers most of the life forms that you
see. You're describing photosynthesis. I am describing photosynthesis. And how does it work
exactly? It's a decoupling of an electron from it's nucleus. So it is indeed you
some ultraviolet light hits an electron and the electron makes a small jump. And that tiny
subatomic jump is like the lifting of a weight of an old grandfather clock. The way you
usually power it is that you would lift a weight hung on a chain on a grandfather clock and then
over the course of a day or even two days that the weight would slowly descend as it powers the
rotation of the hands of the clock. Well, that single jump of a single subatomic electron is
like lifting the weight of a grandfather clock. And that electron is passed from molecule to
molecule within the chloroplasts or the green powerhouses of a plant, making us very slow
energetic descent so that you are squeezing every bit of free energy you can from that single
jump of an electron. And when animals and humans ingest plants, we take into ourselves the potentiality
powered by that free energy given by the sun. And so in ways we are increasing entropy, but the cost
has already been incurred in the heart of the sun by some hydrogen has already combined possibly
thousands of years ago. I like to think of it as a big drama of things between the sun and the
earth and everything that lives on the earth. It's not necessarily that we are just engines of disorder,
just generating disorder all the time from ourselves. It is this big system that spans our entire
solar system. Yeah, well, I did a show on the sun. I think last year it was a solo show called
the heart of the sun. I went to the very heart of the sun to look at the kind of processes that
take place in terms of nuclear fusion. Yes indeed, you also remind me that the earth has its own
molten core which itself at the heart of our planet, there is a great deal of heat that is coming
from radioactive decay and that is also another condition for the possibility of life in so far as
if only because it gives us the magnetic shield that protects our atmosphere from burning away
thanks to the heat that's generated at the heart of the heart of the earth itself.
So there are sort of heat-loving bacteria that never touched the light of the sun and they are
indeed powered entirely by the heat in the earth. So there are three forms of energy that humanity
has captured. One is the common source of most energetic life forms, whether it's organic life forms like
plants and animals or what I want to call inorganic life forms like the breeze and the ocean waves.
Those are all powered by the light of the sun. The light of the sun is also what is found in
petroleum and in coal and everything else. Of course, those have got fossil fuels because they
are fossilized sunlight. The light of sun created those plants, the plants become fossilized and then we
release the energy once more. That's the bulk of the energy that humanity uses to power our
modern industries and also our living bodies. The second form is as you described from the earth.
Most of the heat of the earth, the center of the earth comes from the breakdown of radioactive
particles, of radioactive elements like uranium and because the earth is so thick, it's like a
safe blanket that traps most of this heat inside. So nuclear reactors and geothermal stations use the
same power which is the breakdown of uranium. The third form of energy that we tap into is the
rotation of the earth. The only way I can think of that really manifesting itself in the
non-organic living systems of earth is in tidal energy. The tides are powered by the rotation of the
earth. Not only are the tides powered by it, the tides give a bit of the energy away to the moon and so
the moon is actually inching slowly away from earth, powered by that rotation. Those are the three
forms of energy that power all the free energy activity on earth. All of these forms of energy,
not only here on our earth and solar system, but the entire universe, are governed by
these fundamental laws. One is the conservation of energy and the second law of thermodynamics,
you say for every action there's a reaction, remember that? That's a law of motion,
Newton's a third law. Motion. So for every action there's a reaction, is the old understanding
of a kind of symmetry. You do this and then you get that. But we are living in a very different
conception of matter where we don't have that kind of equivalence because there's this irreversible
process at work in forms of energy. I think we want to be more precise in nuance here. There is no
contradiction between every action has a reaction and the second law of thermodynamics. In fact,
the thing that powers the second law is that every action has a reaction when I mentioned the
particles in a box hitting each other. The reason why energy is transferred is because of Newton's
third law of motion that every reaction, every action has a reaction. Let's think of matter
statistically now. Let's conceive of a balloon. What is forcing a balloon to hold its shape?
It's the air inside. But I told you that air has loads of particles moving around all the time.
So how do these particles maintain shape? It is because of collisions. On average, there are enough
particles colliding with the side of the balloon both from the outside and the inside to even out
at that point of that balloon to how have it maintained its shape. The shape of the balloon,
and in fact the shape of anything that is maintained by pressure and fluidic dynamics,
is from the energy of particles colliding against its side and balancing itself out.
So this third law is about that transfer of energy that happens when you have that collision.
And when you think of it statistically, think of it in terms of the law of large numbers,
there is in a, let's say you have a balloon that's about a liter inside. Then there are about,
I think I'm going to get the order of magnitude wrong and you're going to get angry emails. They're
about several tens of trillion trillion particles in that balloon. Some of them are slow and they'll
never hit the side of it. Some of them are really fast and they're hit really hard,
disproportionately hard. But on average, when you have so many particles in the same place,
they are very predictable. You tend towards having this particular pressure applied by these
number of particles. And that's the nature of how the third law of motion relates to the second law
and how the world is maintained by many of these fine balances happening.
Well, that's very interesting because I'm preparing for the show and also having read
Cardinal Ravelli, I've been plunged in quantum mechanics of late. And also having done a show
with Mark Taylor, philosopher, we're talking about relational ontologies where
for Ravelli too, he thinks that the essence of quantum mechanics that everything is in
relation that there are not substances, but that there are almost events and these events are the way
things act and interact with each other. And that's fine and there's relations. But
in preparation for this show, I realize that even more fundamental than relationality is
collision. It's extraordinary how much of the very motor and agency of all of matter depends on
collision and things smashing into each other. And this is also what we experience in our
lives in everyday lives and in moments of heightened activity or conflict and things that
collision, contact, it's such a mystery to me because it just means that all of matter seen,
it's all conspired to not just interact with each other, but to collide and sometimes annihilate
the other particles and so forth. This is a very violent view of matter, wouldn't you say?
I'd say let's think of it in certain ways, in certain ways, in a certain way,
why don't we think of in terms of serendipity? These are all serendipitous meetings and the sum of
all these serendipities create the properties of the things we see around this. But if they didn't
collide, there wouldn't be any activity, there wouldn't be any, as you said, the slow particles
are hit by fast particles and they get faster and the other ones get slower, but without
collision, nothing happens. That's true. And even with collision, nothing can happen.
And that's sort of the cursive entropy. You can, if you, if the number of collisions that you have
doesn't change on average, on a macroscopic level, nothing happens. And in that way, you can have a very
tip at universe with a very large as many collisions as you have now. So I think that it's
this sort of like fundamental violence that's happening beneath the surface of macroscopic properties
happens regardless of whether we have a creative, beautiful, complex universe, or one that's really
tepid and really informative. And it is just that the particles themselves don't think of it
in terms of violence. They think of it in terms of this is the way that we manifest our energies
and we transfer energies. It's by giving and receiving and sometimes like giving and receiving
is a bit faster than we on our very slow macroscopic levels. I used to.
So you mentioned the word tepid. So I want to ask two big questions for the, you know, the remainder of
the show. One is because the word tepid reminds me, and I know it reminds you of a passage in St. John's
Revelation. That's right. Which is related to the revelation is the vision of the end of time.
And we could call it the end of the universe. And there's something there where John speaks
about the lukewarm. Can you relate that moment in St. John's Revelation to the vision of the
end of a universe where the entropy gets to the point where we are in this kind of neither
cotton or coal, but a kind of lukewarm tepid equilibrium state. So
entropy is irreversible in the sense that you lose potential energy, right? Things that are hot,
one of the other restatements of the second law of thermodynamics by Lord Kelvin is you cannot
spontaneously transfer heat from a cold object to a hot one. And so eventually the heat of the
universe will be so even things will be so sit it still on average, same-ish, that no more changes
will happen. And finally, the universal region equilibrium point from which you'll never depart.
And that is the lukewarm universe. In reality, it might be about four degrees above absolute
zero or five depending. So it's not necessarily, it's not exactly a lukewarm day. It's quite cold by
human standards. But really, this is, again, this I don't want to be unfair to the notion of
entropy because the way that we have put it, it sounds like entropy is the bringer of the eschaton,
it's the coming of the end times. When in reality, entropy is really just the whole process of
life and living. I know, and that's great, it's a very important corrective to the normal
connotation of entropy. However, life, the condition of life which requires a lot of energy and
mobilizes, creates it. So it's also death. And so it's no devaluation of life to say that it ends in
death because without death, you wouldn't have life, as we know it, at least most forms of life that
we know. So in that sense, maybe a kind of eschaton or death is a price you pay for a miracle,
such as this higher form organization of matter which we call the not only life, but the spirit of
life too. Well, let's think, let's go all the way back to Sadhi
Gahunoh's engine. If you want a state of the universe that will never, that will never
approach entropy, but still changes, you can always have this perfect engine that's constantly
being powered. You can run for ever because it is always lubricated. The problem with it is,
the calf no engine needs to run infinitely slowly, become infinitely isolated, and be infinitely
lubricated. And can you imagine a universe of only that sort of thing? Well, I can not only
imagine, but I can even be nostalgic for one, it ends when I'm in certain moods because when I think
of our moment in history and the kind of aggravated modernity that we are living in, that we are
so overheated at a cultural, you know, socio-political level that there is so much going on,
and the transformations are so rapid and disorienting that I can understand the nostalgia of
cultures that are anti-motor where they would like to go back to a much slower homeostatic
condition where every year you don't have to completely reorientate your understanding of the world
you live in because things are changing at a much slower pace. I can understand the desire to
cool things down at historically speaking. So yes, I wouldn't want to have the kind of
engine where it's kind of frozen to death, but do you think that we live historically in a very
overheated moment? I do not. And the two things to say about that, what you've said just now,
homeostasis, you want to, you mentioned that this is a homeostatic, you want to have a nostalgia
for homeostatic. Well, homeostasis is the process of maintaining something far from equilibrium,
your body's maintaining your body temperature and life through homeostasis in a system that doesn't
want to go down all the way to equilibrium. So you've already described a very irreversible
process over there. And the second thing is that it's not how life works. Perhaps what I meant to
say is that the historical conditions of our reality are completely non-homeostatic.
Well, there are two ways to look at it, right? Because the way that the variety of life has
arisen, the way that evolution has arisen is by many of these shocking changes and by introduction
on random changes. And we, this is not, this is a false nostalgia because life has never been like
this. Life has taken many forms and moves and transforms even when there's nothing, we think you
are an isolated island of the Galapagos. Life will always find a way to specialize and change in
its conditions and compete with each other. And I think it's a false nostalgia thing that you can
always have this sort of stasis. Well, we can leave nostalgia out of it. We can talk about the,
what Freud called the death drive. And it's a very compelling Freudian notion that
all of matter was universally and originally inanimate. And that in order to move from, to jump from
the inanimate into an anima state, it took a tremendous traumatic shock of transition and that
therefore in everything alive, there is even more fundamental and deeper than the pleasure
principle or the reproduction is a death drive that wants to return invariably to this inanimate
static state that preceded the emergence into organic living being. And that is true because
the only way that these irreversible processes is powered is because there is an ultimate end
of that equilibrium state. I mentioned the grandfather clock being powered by life,
that equilibrium state that the universe is. The, when that weight on that grandfather clock that
was lifted just once by the fiat looks of Genesis finally hits its bottom and there's nowhere else to go
and the clock stops ticking. That however is going to take tens of trillions of years and I think it
takes a cosmic level of bad faith to think of that particular end when there's so much more
drama and so much more story to happen between now and then. Oh yeah, but I'm not particularly
concerned with the grand finale of the whole thing. I'm just more concerned with what it means to
be an embodied life form in this particular moment that I'm living in and the way in which
entropy works for me, for you, for our society, the way the death drive may covertly be sponsoring
all sorts of destructive behavior that history is made of. You can say that that destructive
behavior is part of the entropic processes that create life. It's funny, but I think that we,
we deny the implacability of the death drive at our own peril. So that's, we can close that
little parentheses now about that because I want in the time remaining the few minutes we
made to ask you about your specialty, which is statistical mathematics and analysis and you spoke
about the the large numbers, the big numbers, but this whole thing also is related to what we are
living culturally as an era of big data and how big data this compilation of statistical
probabilities and averages has an almost predictive power of how we are going to behave as
individuals, right? That's right. So the reason why the second law, it's so absolute,
is because we are unable to track the location of every single particle in the trillions of
trillions of particles that are around us. James Fluck Maxwell had this hypothetical thought
experiment of a demon that is able to track every single particle in a box and it has control
over a gate. And so Maxwell's demon will open the gate only for hard particles and close the
gate for cold particles. And so by just using this gate without changing any of the behavior of
the other particles, you're able to aggregate all the hot particles on one side of the gate and
cold ones on the other side. And so you're spontaneously violated the second law as the
Lord Kelvin statement of the second law. You cannot spontaneously create a hot and cold body
and separated out like that. And that's only possible only because this demon is omniscient,
is able to track and measure the speed of all these particles about actually creating
any new change or any new entropy around it. And that's an impossibility because there's no such
way of creating this omniscient demon. Every measurement for particle will create disorder as well.
And in that way, omniscience, this impossible omniscience implies omnipotence because it empowers
you to reverse the second law of thermodynamics and time itself and the laws of the universe itself.
But while you are unable to track the individual motion of particles, you can track the motion of
individual humans. So we can't make meaningful predictions of individual humans. We have this
freedom to choose as we want to. Sociologists and social scientists are able to make meaningful
descriptions of humans in the large when you have a large collection of people in the society,
you can make meaningful predictions about how they would behave in certain circumstances and so on.
It's just that we're beginning to live in an era where we collect enough data to construct
lots of little Maxwell demons for each person. We are able to track our location, now preferences,
where we go, what we listen to, who our friends are. And so the people who possess these data
can become more than chosen than Facebook. Well, I'm not going to name anyone because I am
a native of Silicon Valley and so these people are my lords and masters and one I will not speak
against my betters. But they are able to construct certain amounts of Maxwell demons. And I want
to think very carefully about the consequence of that without any individual changing their
behavior or knowing they are changing their behavior. You are able to separate the
hots from the colds, the lambs from the goats entirely just by the opening and closing of a gate.
And while we cannot be omnipotent when it comes to the particles of matter,
that omnipotence isn't necessarily out of our hands when it comes to human beings.
So are your lords and masters the lords and masters of me and everyone else at this point?
Well, not because they possess the big data. Not quite yet, there's not enough to do something like that.
We'll see how the world looks like in the future, whether we as human beings can follow the
material arc of the universe and find ourselves in an irreversible state of freedom.
Well said, Brian. We've been speaking with Brian Chung. I'm really proud to have had him as a
student of mine years ago in a freshman seminar and we've been in touch ever since and
delighted to have you come on the show and explain some things about the concept of matter as we
understand it today and it will continue to evolve. So thank you very much for coming on to
entitled opinions. I'm Robert Harrison. Stay tuned for our next show. Bye bye.
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