Essay or Quote on How Existence Is a Product of Exchange

April 10, 2019 11:34 AM

Please help me recall a quote or essay/article (or Ted talk?) about how the basis of life, growth, and existence of all matter scientifically comes down to how particles must exchange (heat? Electrons?) with one another in order to develop. The implication is that we only grow when we interface. Maybe related to the concept of Complexity.
posted by Jason and Laszlo to Science & Nature (1 answer total)

Perhaps it was related to the concept of entropy? In the sense that all life processes (and work/actions in general) are dependent on exploiting energy differentials, and each such interaction inevitably increases the overall entropy of the universe until the (very) eventual heat death where life/action/time is no longer possible or meaningful.

One of my favorite short stories, Ted Chiang's "Exhalation," tackles this idea through the metaphor of a universe of mechanical beings powered by compressed air whose existence is similarly predicated on pressure differentials. I thought the ending was very poetic in describing how this basic physical fact unites us all:

The universe began as an enormous breath being held. Who knows why, but whatever the reason, I am glad that it did, because I owe my existence to that fact. All my desires and ruminations are no more and no less than eddy currents generated by the gradual exhalation of our universe. And until this great exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on. [...]

It cheers me to imagine that the air that once powered me could power others, to believe that the breath that enables me to engrave these words could one day flow through someone else’s body. I do not delude myself into thinking that this would be a way for me to live again, because I am not that air, I am the pattern that it assumed, temporarily. The pattern that is me, the patterns that are the entire world in which I live, would be gone. [...]

I hope you are not saddened by that awareness. I hope that your expedition was more than a search for other universes to use as reservoirs. I hope that you were motivated by a desire for knowledge, a yearning to see what can arise from a universe’s exhalation. Because even if a universe’s lifespan is calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not. The buildings we have erected, the art and music and verse we have composed, the very lives we’ve led: None of them could have been predicted, because none of them were inevitable. Our universe might have slid into equilibrium emitting nothing more than a quiet hiss. The fact that it spawned such plenitude is a miracle, one that is matched only by your universe giving rise to you.

Though I am long dead as you read this, explorer, I offer to you a valediction. Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.

posted by Rhaomi at 11:59 PM on April 10, 2019 [1 favorite]