Cosmology, order and life
Feb 10, 2004 Dov, in biologicalEbvolution forum.
Introductory page by G Musser (staff editor), Scientific American, Feb 2004, p.31, introduction to "Four Keys to Cosmology".
I read this introduction with a feeling of discomfort. Examples of puzzling statements:
- "The big bang is best thought of not as a singular event but as an ongoing process ( I agree, will go on to the end.Dov ), a gradual molding of order out of chaos".
- (…following a period in which radiation "filled [ ? ] the void". Dov )" Gradually the universe imposed order on itself".
- "Matter steadily wrested control of the cosmos away from radiation".
I am disturbed because I learned and thought that the "pre-Big-Bang singularity" was the ultimate epitome of Order that contained All the contents of our universe, and that ever since the Bang, as the universe has been evolving, order is continuously diminishing in a process of ever accelerating expansion of galaxies clusters into the Big Void, and that "matter" and "energy" are the "same lady, in different dresses".
One example I know of a process that runs contrary to the universal expansion and to diminishing oredr/energy-content is Life. Life seems to me a phenomenon that uses energy and matter to build up organisms that store energy in the form of ordered structures and interdependent processes, in a direction opposite the universal trend, as if in an attempt to stop the expansion and to reverse it; death is yielding to the universal process.
end.DH.