This law of nature has been hidden from science – until now | Robert Hazen

You may be familiar with the “arrow of time,” but did you know there could be a second one?

Dr. Robert Hazen, staff scientist at the Earth and Planets Laboratory of Carnegie Science in Washington, DC, thinks that a single arrow of time may be too limiting. A second arrow, which he dubs “the law of increasing functional information,” takes evolution into account. Specifically, Hazen explains that evolution seems to not only incorporate time, but also function and purpose.

Consider a coffee cup: it works best when holding your coffee, but it could also work as a paperweight, and it would not work well at all as a screwdriver. Hazen explains that it appears the universe uses a similar way of evolving not only biology, but other complex systems throughout the cosmos.

This idea suggests that while as the universe ages and expands, it is becoming more organized and functional, nearly opposite to theories surrounding increasing cosmological disorder. Hazen suggests that these two “arrows” – one of entropy and one of organized information – could very well run parallel to one another. If true, this theory could be groundbreaking in the way we perceive time, evolution, and the very fabric of reality.

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About Robert Hazen:

Robert Hazen is a renowned American mineralogist and geologist, known for his pioneering work in mineral evolution and mineral ecology. He is a Senior Staff Scientist at the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory and a Professor of Earth Sciences at George Mason University.

Hazen has written over 400 articles and 25 books, contributing research as a profound leader in mineral evolution and mineral ecology. His studies delve into the complex interactions between minerals and life, contributing to our understanding of Earth’s history and the potential for life on other planets. Hazen is also a passionate educator and science communicator.

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[seamon]

Note to viewers: The John Templeton Foundation is a religious / spiritual organization.
Do with that info what you will.

[JustinEltoft]

I think this is mainly a demonstration of how difficult it is for humans to comprehend how long the universe has and will exist. Local increases in order due to a star pumping a large amount of energy into its planets is not evidence for a new law of physics.

[mrboredj]

Life is a Higher Order Entropy Pump, the goal is still to increase entropy globally, but it does it via lowering entropy locally. This is compatible with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, just like a Heat Pump is.

[Rupture-]

Today I learnt:
- Things that last over time, are the things that happen to be in the right configuration to survive their circumstance
- As such, there is an increasing amount of surviving configurations that were best suited to their circumstance
- Coffee cups make for terrible screwdrivers

[lupita]

The universe isn’t selecting for function, your subjectiveness does.
You select to pay attention to things that serves a function to you.
There’s a vast amount of meaningless that you don’t subjectively choose to pay attention to.

[cf]

I didn't hear any science in this. Thermodynamics has already explained evolution, there is no gap that needs to be filled by a second arrow of time.

[seekthetruth]

The second law of thermodynamics doesn't need a second arrow to explain entropy. Earth is not a closed system, thus a highly ordered system like our star provides energy which is borrowed by life on earth to increase in complexity temporarily. This order is created by borrowing more ordered forms of energy and releasing it as less complex and more disordered form of energy.

This video is an overreach to connect some sort of religious beliefs to science, as someone pointed out below, the John Templeton Foundation is often tried to bridge the gap between science and religion.

[thatchinaboi]

Scientism meets teleology. Not only is this hypothesis unfalsifiable (thereby making it unscientific), it relies on confirmation bias as well as the belief in absolute motion (moments in time coming into existence from previous non existence). Unfortunately the Theory of Relativity demonstrates how the passage of time is an illusion, which means the arrow of time is an illusion from our Time Dependent perspective of The Universe. The passage of time is perceptual, not actual. No need for a second arrow of time.

[prschuster]

I learned nothing about science in this video, but I sure learned a lot about how to reframe Intelligent Design to make it look like science without mentioning the mysterious Designer.

[sethrw]

I was cautiously into this until the last 45 seconds. The purpose/contextual argument is laughably under developed (or poorly defined) and, 'can I say', anthropocentric.
A ceramic material merely "is". We ascribe utility/purpose to it when it's shaped into a cup, but importantly, the material properties of the ceramic are nominally identical whether its shaped like a cup, a pile of shards, or a planar slate.
The intrinsic qualities of hardness, low conductivity, thermal capacity, and moderate densitity are all the same, regardless of form. By all metrics, the apparent arrow of time remains unidirectional, but the conflation of 'is' with 'ought' is recursive in human history.

[WillPerry-br]

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[posthocprior]

(Have downloaded the paper on this. So, my criticism is just based on this short video.) One problem with associating time, a physical characteristic of our universe, with functionality is that one is not reversible and the other is. Stars do implode. Civilizations fall. Time, however, never reverses. If functionality is reversible, then, why doesn't time?

(Skimmed the paper.) On page 6, the maximum likelihood estimation for any configuration is: -log(sub)2(1/N) = log(sub)2(N), where N is the number of configurations. If, however, you have a density function where the supremum is infinite, then you can't find the MLE. This isn't just a technical problem with the math. This means that, because there is no discernible way to determine what is functional, then time would not move forward. This obviously doesn't exist in our universe.

[frusie]

The whole premise this is based on is false.. the second law of thermodynamics does NOT state that chaos rules over order. It states that energy gets more spread out over time. It also doesn’t mean that locally entropy can not decrease (your car does it all the time), with energy exchanging the system it’s not a violation (only isolated systems increase entropy over time). So the quest starts on the wrong foot.

[MysterMysteryHunter]

Coffee cup as a screwdriver would work a treat if the screw heads were also coffee cup shaped. It's usless as a paperweight if there is no paper to put it on. The cup can also hold screws. So it is also a screw holder. A very effective screw holder at that.

[johnmcguire]

“Can I use the word purpose?” That’s where this blithering exposes itself!

[lack_parrow]

College dorm room bong hit level word salad. Good grief... There is no purpose, there is no design. It's just laws of physics naturally unfolding.

[RicardoMorenoAlmeida]

"We" think that anywhere where there is a high influx of extra energy there is a likelihood of "higher order". The second law of thermodynamics (entropy) only applies to closed systems. The Earth is NOT a closed system.

[Walter-gibz]

This is what I love about science. Observe, study, hypothesise, but also admit ‘We could be spectacularly wrong’. However the core driver will persist: We want to understand.

[vene]

As time progresses, entropy in the universe increases, starting with the most unstable elements.

If you squint you could call this selection for the function of stability, but you don't need a second arrow of time for this - it's still a function of entropy, not something separate.

Life is unusual and unique in that it, too, changes with time - it "competes" against entropy. But I really don't see a need for a new law to explain why this happens - again, this seems like a natural result of the progression of time and therefore entropy.

In other words: if you consider what the second arrow of time would have to look like, it's just the inverse, or maybe parallel to the arrow of entropy. It is just a direct consequence of entropy, not an entirely new fundamental law.

[LordOscur]

3:30 This looks more like a probability take on a outcome of a "goal" or ideal outcome, discarding all other paths that do not lead to it.
If you considered the many-worlds interpretation or the wave function collapse with this missing law, then the outcome includes the information of the discarded outcomes in a information only reality in that outcome, where only the most probable "useful" or "optimal" is the goal, there by limiting Entropy with a unknown "contextual" desired outcome where all the information is concentrated.
Take 2 paths in a maze, 1 takes the shortest path to the exist, that one holds very little information about the maze system, the 2nd one takes all the wrong turns, that one does hold the most information and can paint a very detailed picture about the actual maze and all its limits of that system.
If the purpose is information, the one with all the wrong turns is more valuable, even if the Time is not most optimal.