You may be familiar with the ‘arrow of time’, but did you know there could be a second one?
Dr. Robert Hazen, a staff scientist at Carnegie Science’s Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington, DC, thinks a single time arrow may be too restrictive. A second arrow, which he calls ‘the law of increasing functional information’, takes evolution into account. Hazen specifically explains that evolution appears to include not only time, but also function and purpose.
Think about a coffee cup: it works best for storing your coffee, but it could also serve as a paperweight, and as a screwdriver it wouldn’t work well at all. Hazen explains that it appears the universe uses a similar way to evolve not only biology, but other complex systems throughout the cosmos.
This idea suggests that as the universe ages and expands, it becomes increasingly organized and functional, almost contradicting theories of increasing cosmological disorder. Hazen suggests that these two ‘arrows’ – one of entropy and one of organized information – could well run parallel to each other. If true, this theory could be groundbreaking in the way we perceive time, evolution, and the structure of reality.
Robert Hazen: I have a confession to make 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 profound truth about the cosmos. We have a dozen laws of nature, of which only one currently has a time arrow. That’s the second law of thermodynamics, the increase in entropy – it’s disorder; it is decay.
We’re all getting old. We’re all going to die. But the second law doesn’t explain why things evolve; why life comes from non-life. You look around and you see flowers blooming and trees blooming and birds singing. It seems that all of these things contradict 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 is a missing law, a second time arrow that describes this increase in order, and we think this has to do with an increase in information. So there are two possibilities. We could just be wrong. We could be terribly wrong, dramatically wrong. But I think if we’re wrong, we’re wrong in a very interesting way. And I think, if we’re right, it’s very important.
I’m Bob Hazen. I am a staff scientist at Carnegie Science’s Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington, DC. I do mineralogy and astrobiology. I like science. We think there’s a second arrow of time missing for some reason. And that arrow has to do with an increase in information, an increase in order, an increase in patterns that goes side by side 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’ you immediately think of Darwin, but this idea of selection goes far, far beyond Darwin and life. It applies to the evolution of atoms. It applies to the evolution of minerals. It applies to the evolution of planets, atmospheres and oceans. Evolution, which we see as an increase in diversity, patterns, and complexity of systems over time.
And so the question is, “Well, what is evolution?” Evolution is simply selection by function. And this applies to any kind of system. Now, in life, you select organisms that can survive long enough so that they can reproduce and have offspring that pass on their characteristics. That’s what Darwin said, and that’s a very important example of selection by function. But in the mineral world you choose organizations, assemblies, structures of atoms that persist, that can last for billions of years, even in new environments.
They don’t break. They don’t dissolve. They don’t defend themselves. It is very analogous to biological evolution, but it is different in detail. We think there is a law missing: it is a law of evolution. And if there is a law, it must be quantitative. There has to be a metric. You have to be able to measure something. And what we’ve been focusing 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 for myself. Imagine a system, an evolving system that has the potential to form large numbers of different configurations. Let’s say it’s atoms to make minerals, and you have dozens of different mineral-making elements, and they can arrange themselves in all kinds of different ways. And 99.99999999 – I could go on – percent of those configurations won’t work. They will fall apart. They will never form. A very small portion forms a stable mineral, and you end up with a few stable minerals and a lot of waste.
All you have to do is think about that part. If one in a hundred trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion possibilities is stable, then you can represent that fraction as information. And because it is such a very small part, you need many pieces of information: that is functional information. Evolution is simply an increase in functional information, because as you select for better and better results, you select for minerals that become more and more stable. You select for living creatures that can swim. They can fly. They can see.
You need more information, and each step up the evolutionary ladder leads you to more and more functional information. So our law, our missing law, the second arrow of time, is called the ‘Law of Increasing Functional Information’. And that’s the parallel arrow of time that we think is out 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; Maybe you’re holding one right now.
You have a lot of atoms, and those atoms can be in trillions of trillions of trillions of different configurations, but only a small fraction of those configurations can hold a cup of coffee. Now think of a coffee cup as a paperweight. I know you used a coffee cup as a paperweight. We all have that, and he’s pretty good at it, but you can make a better paperweight. And a coffee cup is a terrible screwdriver. Think about this: we are saying that the coffee cup has value as a coffee cup. It has some value as a paperweight, but not as a screwdriver – that’s contextual.
So this is why the second arrow of time is difficult for science, because it says that there is something in the natural world that is not absolute. It’s contextual. It depends on what your goal is. It depends on what your position is. If it is true, then we are saying that there is something in the universe that is increasing, that complexity is increasing, and that is not happening in a random way. It is selection by function. And if so, if you select by function, that means it almost seems to exist – can I use the word ‘target’?
Do minerals serve a purpose? Do atmospheres serve a purpose? Does life have a purpose? To me there is something real, and the old way of thinking about a single arrow of time no longer makes sense to me.