I was aghast!
Last
night, Brian Cox, professor of Physics, and a staunch disciple of the
standpoint of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, put
out the first episode in a proposed TV series on The Wonders of
Life.
Now,
as a physicist myself, I know that our subject in its current state
is totally incapable of dealing with such questions as Life. And
having therefore spent a good proportion of my own life redressing
the inadequacies of a purely Physics-based position, via a prolonged
and detailed study of Geology, Biology, Palaeontology and Philosophy,
I wonder how he, a very narrowly defined type of physicist, feels he
can tackle such an important subject with such a clearly inadequate
grounding. It
can only be that he obviously feels absolutely certain that his
grounding (in Physics) actually covers Everything!
He has presented many TV programmes, and even series, on Physics over
several years now, but here he has presumed to “apply”
his very biased and even distorted philosophy on the one area, which
has, in the main, successfully held out against the nonsense that is
currently perpetrated and even defended in Modern Physics.
He, along with a majority of his fellow physicists, have surprisingly
felt able, for almost a century, to insist upon the Copenhagen
retreat as some sort of progressive revolution, because he, and they,
always considered Mathematics as the distilled essence of Reality,
and hence the Queen of all the Sciences, and, without any regrets, he
and his ilk had switched the emphasis in Sub Atomic
Physics from Explanation-via-Causes to Formal-Description-Only –
from Theory to Equations.
But, the one area where such nonsense could never win, was in
Biology, and particularly in that Key area concerning its most
profound question about the Origin of Life on Earth and its
Subsequent Development. And, once more, he also seems to have the audacity(?) to take the
questions attempted (with predictable, abject failure by many of his
kind in the past (Schrödinger and Gell-Mann come to
mind). Indeed the very philosophical basis of Physics guarantees that it
cannot add anything of value to the Only Real Questions – “How
did Life emerge?” and ”Where does it dwell?”.
Can they really just be a subset of Physics?
Yet here was Physics’ pretty-boy-professor putting all those
“shallow”, “soft-science” biologists right, and making it
absolutely clear that Life was an inevitable outcome from only the
Laws of Physics and nothing else.
Now such authority has always been impossible from such a group, and
ever since the victory of Bohr and Heisenberg at Solvay
in 1927, their Copenhagen position has woefully emasculated Physics,
and backed it unavoidably into a purely formal and, at best,
pragmatic cul de sac.
All attempts at explanation were condemned by this tendency as merely
self-kid. Some things at the Sub Atomic Level were deemed
“”Unknowable Things in Themselves” and all that could be relied
upon instead as the real driving truths were the formal laws that the
physicists have “fitted up” to extracted data. The fact that
their position was full of contradictions was considered unavoidable,
and the only course was to formulate formal relations that could be
used, without any accompanying explanatory narrative.
Yet, here was their pin-up-boy crossing the Rubicon, and extending
the realm of his subject to the whole of the sphere of Life! It was, as you would expect, a travesty!
He didn’t deliver any sort of breakthrough. On the contrary, he
instead, via a dubious set of arguments, intimated that when the
physicists have finally completed their known and defined tasks, they
would explain, not only the Double Slit Experiment and Nuclear
Physics, but also, indeed, the whole of Living Reality too. Yet, such a path is impossible!
It was nonsense when Laplace defined it physically in terms of
knowing the positions and velocities of all particles and their
limited set of physical laws of inter-relation, and thus being able
to deliver Everything in Reality thereby. And, it is just as useless in the way that Cox has presented it
today.
He does, of course, use lots of facts to bolster his speculations.
But that doesn’t wash either! Showing us wonders from across the
Earth, with enthusiasm does not in any way prove his claims. Indeed,
they do the very opposite! His attempt to add his twopennyworth to the Origin of Life with
proton gradients in volcanic situations proves nothing! As the fact
that complex crustaceans were also found at these present day vents,
proves that Life could get there from elsewhere, so no matter how
many primitive types were found in those situations CANNOT prove the
Origin had to be there!
There are lots of natural sources and storage mechanisms for energy
in the Cosmos, but the mere presence, both in living things and in
non-living Reality, does not prove that this was a cause
of the Origin of Life, just that whatever did create this wholly new
Level of Reality did integrate this energy form within the new state. What still has to be explained is what actually created the Systems
of Life, which made use of these available sub systems.
Cox made the usual sleight of hand assumption - that if the elements
that Life uses, were established, then, if they were all available at
the same place and at the same time, Life would automatically, and
indeed, inevitably, appear. Not so!
The mechanist, incrementalist stairway to Heaven is not true at all!
Revolutionary developments, such as that of the Origin of Life from
entirely inanimate stuff could never be automatic or even necessary. Believe it or not, such a scenario, if true, would certainly assure
that Origins of Life would occur many times in many different places,
and would still be happening today. They didn’t and they don’t!
As with all major transformations, they never emerge incrementally,
but can only arise out of some sort of System Catastrophe!
What mechanists like Cox fail to realise is that their Stable World
never allows such revolutions to occur. The very stability is
not some natural lowest energy consequence, but is always the result
of the establishment of a self-maintaining System. All new rival
proto systems would not last a minute, but would be destroyed
immediately.
So, for such revolutionary innovations to appear and succeed requires
the demolition of the old Stability completely. And perhaps surprisingly, such calamities are NEVER caused by wholly
new emerging alternatives, but by weaknesses within the
Stability itself, and due entirely to allowed processes within it.
Perhaps amazingly, the first all-embracing collapse of an old
Stability is always a catastrophe of epic proportions, which
seems to be heading the whole system towards complete oblivion, but
which in sweeping away ALL the necessary maintaining processes of the
prior Stability, opens the door to numerous new
alternative proto systems, that are no longer subdued or prohibited
by those essential defensive, maintaining subsystems of a Stable
Level. The creative Phase of such a Revolution always occurs following
such a catastrophe.
Stability is NOT the natural, simplest or most easily maintained mode
of Reality. It is a state achieved out of an almost chaotic starting
point, and involves the emergence of many competing alternative proto
systems, ultimately resolved by the victory of only one of these and
the demise of all other alternatives. And because of this Rebirth nature, and, of course, the continuing
presence of the achievements of past stabilities, the new Level is
inevitably an advance upon the prior Level. It, to have succeeded, must have included its own defensive processes
to suppress any other possible rivals, so will be not only stable,
but necessarily conservative.
Yet, every single such Stability is never eternal. It too will in
time undergo a similar crisis and catastrophe, and in the process of
another Emergence will create another wholly new and higher Level.
Not much like Cox’s inevitable occurrence is it?
Indeed, Life did not gradually grow from small innovatory gains, to
conquer the old Stability, but arose out of a calamitous crisis and
failure of a prior stable situation. It has become evident that all major creative developments
in all spheres of Reality occur only in this way! Cox’s gradualist and inevitable ever-upwards development of
absolutely everything from a few elementary particles and enormous
amounts of energy is an invention with NO evidence to support
it. Yet, the revolutions of entirely new forms from major
catastrophes have a great deal of evidence. Even the current
Cosmology that is greatly underpinned by Cox’s Copenhagen nonsense,
cannot avoid such happenings. One claim often voiced by Cox is that
“We are made of stardust”” – in which he shows
how the very elements from which we, as living creatures, are made,
were created in the catastrophes of Supernovae.
But, they are
eclectic add-ons to a basically stability-dominated process of
development. At no time does he include any major crises and
calamities in his Origin of Life. And to put it all down to Physics is
laughable.
