Читать книгу A Physical Principle of Universal Order - Jaime S. Carvalho - Страница 9

The solar system is virtually frictionless and for this reason it is a reversible system—it can follow trajectories, forward and backward. Newton’s laws of motion are thus reversible. They assert that time has no direction.

Although reversible systems are seldom found in nature—they belong to the rare class of stable systems—Newton’s laws were accepted by physics as expressing the ideal of objective knowledge. And from the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards, time in physics became reversible.

Accordingly, the mathematical expressions of relativity theory and the basic equation of quantum mechanics, the wave function, are both reversible. Reversibility implies no distinction between past and future.

Classical science emphasizes stability and equilibrium but in the real world, we see instabilities and evolutionary trends in a variety of areas, from atomic and molecular physics to chemistry, biology, and sociology. Irreversible systems exist everywhere in nature. They have an arrow of time which is incompatible with Newtonian and quantum dynamics.

A time direction was first introduced to physics in the mid nineteenth century, by the second law of thermodynamics, through the concepts of temperature and entropy, the latter being a measure of the unavailability of a system’s energy to do work. Both of these parameters determine the direction in which an irreversible process can go: the temperature of a body or system determines whether heat will flow into it or out of it; the entropy of a closed system increases with time and is accompanied by a decrease in energy availability.

Thermodynamics was instrumental in revealing the existence of some irreversible processes in nature but, being a partial theory of limited applicability, it could not resolve the reversibility and irreversibility of time—the “time paradox”—in a definitive way.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, encouraged by the success of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) in biology, the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906) proposed an evolutionary approach to physics: available energy was the quantitative physical principle of evolution. Physics and biology were thus unified. But any attempt to confer on the arrow of time a fundamental significance was resisted as a threat to the ideal of objective knowledge.

Nevertheless, in the late twentieth century, the Belgian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) became fully convinced of the existence of irreversibility in nature. He recognized that the arrow of time was essential to the existence of biological systems, which contain highly organized irreversible structures. Prigogine knew that time irreversibility was a fundamental property of nature but its cause escaped him. The glory of unveiling the mystery of irreversibility was to belong to Lancelot Whyte.

The inclusion of irreversibility changes our view of nature. The future is no longer given. It unfolds continuously out of the present. Our world is in continuous construction ruled by a simple tendency embedded in natural structure. In unitary thought, there is no cause behind irreversibility, such as a physical field or force imposed on structure from without. There is just a one-way tendency to symmetry inherent in structure itself.

The development process is continuous, but its continuity—in the form of orderly change—is only realizable when local circumstances permit. In the limiting case when change vanishes, approached only towards the absolute zero temperature, the form of process becomes the perfect symmetry of a static pattern.

In complex systems such as organisms, development is accompanied by mutual adjustment of the parts of the system, of organism and environment. The organism adapts to its environment. Furthermore, development is self-facilitated. The structural patterns that facilitate the symmetry tendency of the field tend to be retained, while those that distort it tend to be eliminated selectively. In this way, a gradual increase of mutual conformity between organism and environment is achieved. All of this activity contributes to the one-way direction of development.

By envisaging a new notion of time—a local time expressed as a temporal relation of succession—Lancelot Whyte has put forward the foundations of the simplest and most general physical theory that can be conceived at present time. Contrary to all available theories, the unitary theory applies to all realms. When fully developed physically and mathematically, the final unitary theory, if confirmed, may prove to be the ultimate general theory. So far, it appears to describe in a veridical way some of the most obvious secrets of nature. The dynamic process of our world, recognized by the Greek philosophers over two thousand years ago, has finally been scientifically explained.