What is Matter? with Bryan Cheong—Entitled Opinions 08/05/2021

08/05/2021

What is Matter? with Bryan Cheong

A conversation with Bryan Cheong about the laws of thermodynamics. Bryan Cheong received his Bachelor of Science from Stanford University, with a degree in applied and computational mathematics. He then went on to receive a Masters degree in Materials Science, also from Stanford. Outro Song: “Pick Up The Pieces” by The Average White Band

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00:00:00.000	This is KZSU Stanford.
00:00:02.400	Welcome to entitled opinions.
00:00:08.800	My name is Robert Harrison and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
00:00:12.640	The average white band with pickup the pieces.
00:00:29.840	That's all we have in the end, pieces.
00:00:32.080	That's all we have in the beginning too.
00:00:34.880	The subatomic particles that form atoms, the atoms that form molecules,
00:00:40.960	the molecules that form elements, entities, and organisms.
00:00:45.520	The star systems that form galaxies, and the black holes that devour them eventually.
00:00:52.400	It's all in the pieces and no one knows whether there's a hole to which they belong
00:00:58.720	or whether the material world is just parts outside of parts, outside of parts.
00:01:04.080	Practice X-appatus as medieval scholasticism used to define matter.
00:01:10.640	Thank you.
00:01:12.160	[Music]
00:01:33.200	Barrowing from Alan Lightman, the credo of the scientific view of the world can be stated as follows.
00:01:40.160	The universe is made of matter and nothing more.
00:01:42.880	It is governed exclusively by a small number of fundamental forces and laws,
00:01:48.160	and all composite things in the world, including humans and stars,
00:01:53.280	eventually disintegrate and return to their component parts.
00:01:56.960	Now even though the phenomenologist in me objects to nothing but philosophies,
00:02:03.440	I can live with the idea that the universe is made of matter and nothing more.
00:02:09.440	Matter after all isn't what it used to be.
00:02:11.680	We're starting to understand that matter can in fact think and feel,
00:02:16.880	that under some conditions it can self-transcend, and that spirit is a rare,
00:02:23.920	maybe the rarest form of sublimated matter.
00:02:26.400	So if matter indeed contains the potentiality of spirit,
00:02:31.440	if it can glint or glow in someone's eye, and if it can even ask what matter itself is,
00:02:38.720	as my guest and I will be doing shortly, then yes I'm happy to call myself a materialist,
00:02:44.640	in the most scopious sense of the term.
00:02:46.720	There's a word you haven't heard me use before on entitled opinions,
00:02:52.320	scopious, having a wide scope, spacious, first known use, 1599,
00:02:59.440	in Thomas Middleton's Microcynecon.
00:03:03.440	I quote, "streams ER barred their course swelled with more rage and far more greater force,
00:03:11.280	until their full stuffed gorge of passage makes into the wide maws of more scopious lakes."
00:03:19.200	Scopious indeed is our theme today. I'm joined by Stanford Graduate Brian Chong to discuss
00:03:28.960	some of the more basic laws of the material world above all those of thermodynamics.
00:03:35.040	Brian received his Bachelor of Science with a degree in applied and computational mathematics
00:03:40.880	here at Stanford. He then went on to receive a Master's degree in material science,
00:03:45.760	also from Stanford, and I'm delighted he's here today to help us think through some
00:03:49.920	fundamental aspects of what we call matter. Brian, welcome to entitled opinions.
00:03:54.560	Thank you Robert, the pleasure is entirely mine to be here.
00:03:57.840	So Brian, I mentioned earlier that matter is not what it used to be, meaning that our conceptions
00:04:02.320	of it, of matter, and of the laws that govern it have changed quite a bit in the past few centuries.
00:04:08.240	Why don't we start with the basic question like what are some of the significant transformations
00:04:13.680	in our understanding since the 1700s? Well, thank you. In many ways the 1700s and the 1800s were
00:04:24.480	very special time in science and our understanding of matter. It was a time when, after the discovery
00:04:30.800	of Newton's laws and the invention of many types of scientific apparatus that was able to describe
00:04:36.560	the expansion of air and heat. Many of the thinkers in Europe started to move towards a very
00:04:43.520	deterministic and mechanistic view of the universe of a clockwork universe where all of motion
00:04:50.160	is mediated through fluids and cogs and rods and all of these very fixed and rigid mechanisms.
00:04:58.640	And that is the deterministic universe of the 18th and 19th centuries, while the universe of our
00:05:06.240	current conception is one that's a bit more dynamical, more probabilistic. And because these
00:05:11.360	phenomena are probabilistic, we think of these universal phenomena in terms of statistics. What
00:05:20.160	is statistics? It is the science of treating probabilistic phenomena when something is not
00:05:25.760	deterministic. When you don't know what is going to happen in the future, the art of predicting
00:05:31.280	that and the art of predicting the distribution of outcomes is statistics. And because our
00:05:38.640	conception of matter is now very much dynamical and probabilistic, statistics is the tool with which
00:05:45.840	we rely on in order to come up with the ways that we describe matter. And a very good example of
00:05:53.600	that would be from the evolution of our understanding of heat in the 18th and 19th centuries,
00:06:00.240	people thought of heat as a sort of fluid in, if it was, it would mean like a substance.
00:06:07.840	It's indeed an actual fluidic substance like a liquid. When it was producing combustion, they
00:06:14.160	called it floriston, and when it's being transferred from a hot to cold object, they called it
00:06:18.240	caloric and it's called the caloric theory of heat. We now know that in material objects,
00:06:23.520	these things are not actual liquids. Anyway, we think of heat instead as the kinetic energy of
00:06:29.680	particles. It is the average speed at which particles move about if it's in it. These would be
00:06:34.800	subatomic particles. No, these are atoms and molecules. So if it's in a gas, they would be moving
00:06:40.400	about in space. And if they're in a solid, they usually just vibrating really quickly. And the speed
00:06:45.440	of this movement and vibration is what we call heat. There's no fluid to mediate the transfer of heat
00:06:52.400	at all. And when you have a particle that moves really quickly, and that's a, they are really hot,
00:06:59.440	if your particles move very slowly, they're really cold. And a transfer of heat from a hot object to
00:07:04.480	cold object is nothing more than a really fast moving particle knocking against slow moving particles
00:07:11.120	and transferring some of their speed. So famously, second law of thermodynamics, we'll get into it
00:07:18.640	more in detail later. Heat can only go from a hot to cold. Why can't they go from cold to hot?
00:07:26.800	It can. So James Clerk Maxwell, who was a very famous physicist, described how the second law
00:07:34.320	of thermodynamics is a statistical law. It's not a purely mathematical one. It can be violated when it's,
00:07:40.000	you have very small collection of particles and on very, like, local areas. But when you have a lot
00:07:45.600	of particles has a whole, the law is violated because of the law of large numbers. And this law is
00:07:52.000	defined as, well, there's different formulations of it. And I know of it as the law of entropy,
00:07:59.120	but maybe you can give a more formal definition of the second law of thermodynamics. We're going
00:08:03.040	to speak a lot about that. Sure. And there are many different ways of formulating that this second law
00:08:08.320	of thermodynamics. And one of the earliest ones is from Sadif Garneau. He actually thought of heat
00:08:15.200	in terms of the caloric theory. He thought of heat as a fluid, but he was able to come up with the
00:08:20.160	second law of thermodynamics by thinking of what an ideal engine looked like, an ideal engine that's
00:08:26.240	powered by no more than a difference in temperature between a hot object and cold object. And the first
00:08:32.000	earliest statement of the second law is that there exists a maximally efficient engine. Another
00:08:39.440	system. It means that you, there's only a maximum amount of work that you can get from a different
00:08:45.200	in temperature. So engines derive from differences in temperature. You have a hot thing and a cold
00:08:50.960	thing and then you try to derive work by this difference. You don't have to think of it in terms of
00:08:55.040	heat. You can think of it in terms of say a fountain or a dam where a turbine is being driven by
00:09:01.440	something as a very high water level versus something as a very low water level. And a difference is what
00:09:06.960	drives turbines and same with heat as well. So given two different water levels in terms of heat,
00:09:14.000	there's only a maximum amount of work that you can derive from it.
00:09:17.200	So why not call this energy rather than the transfers from hot to colders? That's how we understand
00:09:25.840	energy. Well, energy is something, well, we have to go back to the first law for that as well.
00:09:30.480	Energy is something that cannot be created and destroyed. And that's the first law of thermodynamics.
00:09:35.280	That's right. Conservation of energy. That's right. And the second law is about how the form,
00:09:40.720	it's governs the forms that this energy can take. Your turning heat energy into movement
00:09:47.840	energy or work energy. That is a transfer or transformation of energy. But it's a difference in
00:09:55.440	terms of you're not really creating energy along this way. So it'll be incorrect to say that
00:10:00.160	you're creating energy from an engine. Yeah, well, that's a very subtle distinction that I will
00:10:09.520	have to keep in mind because I think that if you put coal into the steam engine, you are
00:10:14.960	generating energy or what you're allowing for the second law of thermodynamics to do its thing,
00:10:21.360	I guess you would put it that way, right? I'll say that you are putting the chemical energy of coal
00:10:27.440	inside a engine. And that's the whole thing. You're transforming that chemical energy into
00:10:33.280	heat and then the heat into work energy. Okay, so, so, Brian, between the 16, 17,
00:10:42.400	1800s and now the real shift in thinking is that we've gone from a mechanical deterministic
00:10:50.880	view of matter to one where now matter is composed of particles. That's right. Small bits.
00:10:58.480	And heat, for example, is the speed at which these particles interact. That's right.
00:11:06.480	The faster the hotter the slower the colder. That's right. And therefore, we need a statistical
00:11:15.200	understanding of matter rather than let's say a mechanical one because at the quantum level or at
00:11:25.120	the molecular atomic level, it's only a huge amount of particles that will give patterns of order
00:11:34.400	that then can be measured only statistically rather than exactly. So, there are two things to think
00:11:41.280	about here right now. The first is the law of large numbers. This is a statistical law that governs
00:11:46.960	when you have a lot of things versus very few things. And the law is things tend to the expected value,
00:11:53.360	the more you have of them. So, if you flip two coins, the expected value of the number of heads you
00:11:59.440	get is one. But if you flip just any two coins, you might get both tails or both heads. But if you
00:12:05.040	flip this coin, these pair of coins many trillions of times, the final expected value from many of
00:12:11.440	these flips will be one. So, is that what's called equilibrium in the final analysis?
00:12:16.400	That is not an equilibrium. The second thing I have to talk about because when I say that
00:12:23.440	heat is the average speed of particles, a hot object can have very slow particles as well as very
00:12:30.960	fast particles. So, these slow particles are considered cold but how can cold particles exist in a
00:12:36.800	hot object? It's because particles form a distribution of cold and hot particles inside a single body.
00:12:45.440	And usually if it's sort of an ideal gas, this distribution is known as a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution.
00:12:51.120	And very often you encounter these sort of distributions and statistics as well because these
00:12:55.760	distributions basically tell you how you, if you have something that is probabilistic,
00:13:02.800	what is the probability of finding it in a cold as a cold particle or a hot particle? And the
00:13:09.360	distribution describes that probability. And the main theorists of this new kind of statistical
00:13:17.200	understanding of matter would, I mean you mentioned the Maxwell, you've told me about the Maxwell-Boltzmann
00:13:27.120	distribution. So, Boltzmann is another figure here. I mentioned Boltzmann and I think one way to
00:13:33.840	illustrate this distribution would be to think of one of Boltzmann's own thought experiments.
00:13:40.000	Boltzmann in particular, the theory called H theory. And to think of how a Maxwell-Boltzmann
00:13:46.960	distribution of particles of slow and fast particles can arise naturally, just think of a box of particles
00:13:54.480	with even speeds. Imagine you have lots of particles on a box, they all trapped inside and they all
00:13:59.600	have the same speed. This is actually very unnatural. It has very low entropy and a system
00:14:05.840	obstacle to a place where fire entropy, wise that the case. Because when you have two particles of
00:14:11.360	even speeds hitting on each other, one will speed up and one will slow down. And eventually,
00:14:17.840	as faster particles are more likely to hit other particles, while the slow particles are less likely
00:14:22.960	to hit other particles. And so at some point, the rate at which fast particles get slowed down by
00:14:29.120	hitting another particle and the rate at which slow particles speed up by being hit by another
00:14:35.280	particle becomes even and that's an equilibrium. That is what is called a fine balance. And once
00:14:42.160	this condition is reached, you realize that a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of particles emerges
00:14:47.920	where there's a lot of slow particles and some really, really fast particles. But then when they
00:14:53.520	even are and they reach equilibrium, that's almost like a death. It means that nothing happens anymore.
00:14:59.040	It's still a dynamical system. That's why I still describe it as a dynamical system. Particles
00:15:04.080	are still slowing down and speeding up all the time is just that the proportion of them
00:15:08.480	will forever remain the same if they're in our particles in that box unless something from outside
00:15:13.680	the box intervenes. Right. So here we're talking about closed systems. That's right. Okay.
00:15:19.040	Does this theory of particles and their constant, you call it speed, you say their motion and
00:15:27.840	interaction, their relations? Does this theory proceed the quantum mechanics, the thinking of
00:15:36.320	quantum mechanics? Because it seems like quantum mechanics is also predicated upon very much of the
00:15:41.360	same notion of a dynamical systems where you have probabilistic knowledge of where, for example,
00:15:48.960	electron will be and so forth. But it sounds to me like the laws of thermodynamics are
00:15:57.360	independent of quantum mechanics. Very much so. These sorts of things are entirely of a statistical
00:16:04.400	description. And in some ways, it's even more fundamental than a quantum mechanical one.
00:16:09.440	If you go to a physicist and tell them that you have observed something, something that breaks
00:16:13.600	the standard model of quantum mechanics, they might believe you. If you go to them and say,
00:16:18.640	I found something that violates the second law of thermodynamics, they'll laugh you out of the
00:16:22.400	the room, because it's that fundamental. So if matter were to be in the same conception as
00:16:28.160	Epicurus, where they would just rigid balls or rigid objects rather than a quantum mechanical
00:16:33.360	system, they will still behave in the same way and they will still reach the same equilibrium,
00:16:37.680	just entirely from this statistical principle of how this distribution can arise from the
00:16:43.680	fine balance. What about irreversible ability? Because the second law of thermodynamics is very
00:16:50.320	famously associated with the concept of things that are irreversible. And we were reading Carlow
00:16:57.680	Ruhveli, the quantum theorist who has written some really magnificent books, especially for
00:17:05.200	people like me who don't follow the equations. But he has a book called The Order of Time,
00:17:11.600	in which he claims that the only law in the universe, which can account for the fact that time
00:17:18.160	moves from past to the future is the second law of thermodynamics, because it's the only law
00:17:23.440	about that has to do with the irreversibility and things. And time itself is being irreversible.
00:17:28.640	How does the irreversibility of time relate to the second law of thermodynamics?
00:17:33.600	That's a very good point. So one of the things that a purely deterministic universe has
00:17:39.840	is if you took the arrow of every single part of the universe and the direction that
00:17:44.960	moving in and flipped it, the world would be as it is. That's obviously not the case. If you film something
00:17:50.400	and you do it in reverse, you can tell quite obviously that there is an arrow of time. And the second
00:17:56.160	law is that arrow. Because when you think the difference between the present and the past and the
00:18:01.360	future and the present is that the future will always have more entropy, as long as there's some sort
00:18:06.480	of irreversible process. So in order to approach this concept, let's think of, let's try to define
00:18:13.440	what entropy is. Yes, let's do that. So one common understanding of entropy is that it is disorder.
00:18:20.160	But disorder is not something that you can really quantify, right? If you break a plate,
00:18:24.160	the pieces of the plate is more disorderly. But the universe doesn't care if it played as whole,
00:18:29.040	or if it is in many pieces. No, but we say entropy negative because you can go from the plate to
00:18:35.600	the pieces. Now we're going back to the average white band song, pick up the pieces. But you cannot
00:18:41.760	go from the pieces of the broken plate and it will not reform naturally the plate.
00:18:46.480	So I don't like calling entropy sort of negative thing. And no, I don't either. That's why I want
00:18:53.120	to hear a few. I want to, I'm strong, a pologee as the Latin say for entropy as being utterly vital.
00:19:01.120	So when you think of entropy, think instead of it as a measure of degrees of freedom. So
00:19:08.880	the entropy of a crystal is very low because the particles in a crystal, the atoms are fixed in
00:19:14.080	position and they can move at all. They can only vibrate in place. The entropy of a gas is very high
00:19:20.400	because the particles are free to go all over the place and take the form of wind and breeze and so on.
00:19:25.440	So the entropy of particles in a very restricted place is really low, well, if you expand that space
00:19:33.040	and give them more states of freedom, what a physicist called microstates, then the entropy becomes
00:19:39.680	higher. And one restatement of entropy is that it is the measure of the degrees of freedom
00:19:46.800	and a restatement of the second law is that the degrees of freedom once given cannot be taken back.
00:19:52.320	And I'd like to say that it's like the material arc of the universe bends towards freedom as it
00:19:58.640	well, because once you give freedom to these particles, these forms of matter, you can take it back
00:20:04.880	anymore. And that's what irreversibility means, things that are free, you can capture them back.
00:20:10.320	So for me, that sounds like a highly radical revolutionary understanding of entropy as something that
00:20:18.400	is the condition for the creation of the universe, for the origins of life, for all sorts of things
00:20:28.000	that come into being, that emerge into forms that what I don't understand is things emerge into order.
00:20:36.320	And this idea that everything is a kind of irreversible directionality towards a disorder,
00:20:43.360	which is another word for entropy in the common understanding of entropy. I don't understand how we
00:20:50.480	get new forms of order created, except perhaps by creating more entropy elsewhere than within the
00:20:57.360	systems that are ordered spontaneously. So we can think of the universe as moving through arcs of complexity.
00:21:06.240	The very young universe, everything was all put together, there weren't too many big galaxies,
00:21:10.960	there weren't any, there wasn't any life and that had very low entropy. And I think one way of
00:21:16.720	thinking about it is that entropy is like the weights of a grandfather clock, where you're able to,
00:21:23.440	the beginning of the universe is a very low entropy place. And...
00:21:27.200	Well, excuse me, but how can I be low entropy when you have all this extraordinary creation of
00:21:33.120	stars and galaxies and the expansion of space, that sounds to me like the utmost arena freedom
00:21:42.480	and freedom for work to take place. That's precisely that when you say expansion of space,
00:21:49.360	you're using the same words I did to describe it increase in entropy. And that increase in freedom
00:21:54.720	of universal freedom is the very first breath, the very first fiat looks of the increase of entropy.
00:22:01.200	And the young universe was a really hot, really localized, very compact sort of place, where all
00:22:08.320	the stars are close to get, all of the matter was very close together. And now it's
00:22:12.080	freer to take all different forms. When you think of entropy and transfer of entropy,
00:22:18.400	or rather the transfer of free energy, you think of the increase of entropy in the heart of the sun.
00:22:24.480	And that gives earth a free gift of free energy and under the do our work and create our own
00:22:31.600	complexities of life. Entropy is not just an increase in the degrees of freedom, it's also,
00:22:38.080	the freedom arises in terms of complexity. When you have a more complex system, it's often
00:22:42.320	something that is more entropic in nature. And so when you want to think of a future universe,
00:22:48.240	think of future Earth, think of even more complex, more, I don't like what messy,
00:22:52.960	but you know, messy sort of place. So I have a question about life, if one imagines that life
00:23:00.720	is one of the most complex dynamical systems of matter that we know of. Then how does one
00:23:09.920	understand the entropic condition of possibility for life? And is life by virtue of it's being
00:23:19.760	alive and remaining alive and thriving in its animate form? Is it creating all sorts of disorder
00:23:28.000	outside of itself by virtue of itself perpetuation? This is certainly the theory of some biologist,
00:23:36.480	Lynn Margulis and others, even Schrodinger, who wrote a book called What Is Life claims that
00:23:42.960	this extraordinary complexity that life is creates a great deal of entropic disorder outside of itself
00:23:53.120	in order to maintain itself in being. So I want to think of life as a sort of entropy itself is
00:24:03.520	like life, right? Because life is the process of being far away from an equilibrium process. You
00:24:09.840	are constantly creating irreversible changes to the world around you and inside you. And being
00:24:17.200	in this state of constant irreversible processes, you are constantly increasing entropy. But
00:24:23.760	it's hard to think of it as creating disorder outside yourself because let's go by all the way to
00:24:31.040	what powers life, right? How does life get this potentiality to actualize into the forms that it takes?
00:24:37.120	For that we need to first think of what is free energy. So I mentioned before that energy cannot
00:24:43.520	be created or destroyed, it can only be transformed. Well, there are some forms of energy that
00:24:48.560	can be transformed to others, but not the other way around because of the increase of entropy
00:24:54.240	from one form to the other. And the free energy that powers life and comes from mostly the sun,
00:25:02.000	the sun gives us light and the light hits an electron in the leaf of a plant.
00:25:08.400	The electron, this single subatomic particle leaves from one molecule, one jumps from one atom to
00:25:15.600	the other, and that small gap, that tiny little jump is what powers most of the life forms that you
00:25:22.960	see. You're describing photosynthesis. I am describing photosynthesis. And how does it work
00:25:27.280	exactly? It's a decoupling of an electron from it's nucleus. So it is indeed you
00:25:33.600	some ultraviolet light hits an electron and the electron makes a small jump. And that tiny
00:25:40.480	subatomic jump is like the lifting of a weight of an old grandfather clock. The way you
00:25:45.840	usually power it is that you would lift a weight hung on a chain on a grandfather clock and then
00:25:51.040	over the course of a day or even two days that the weight would slowly descend as it powers the
00:25:56.000	rotation of the hands of the clock. Well, that single jump of a single subatomic electron is
00:26:02.000	like lifting the weight of a grandfather clock. And that electron is passed from molecule to
00:26:06.960	molecule within the chloroplasts or the green powerhouses of a plant, making us very slow
00:26:14.480	energetic descent so that you are squeezing every bit of free energy you can from that single
00:26:19.600	jump of an electron. And when animals and humans ingest plants, we take into ourselves the potentiality
00:26:27.760	powered by that free energy given by the sun. And so in ways we are increasing entropy, but the cost
00:26:35.360	has already been incurred in the heart of the sun by some hydrogen has already combined possibly
00:26:40.800	thousands of years ago. I like to think of it as a big drama of things between the sun and the
00:26:46.480	earth and everything that lives on the earth. It's not necessarily that we are just engines of disorder,
00:26:51.760	just generating disorder all the time from ourselves. It is this big system that spans our entire
00:26:57.760	solar system. Yeah, well, I did a show on the sun. I think last year it was a solo show called
00:27:03.680	the heart of the sun. I went to the very heart of the sun to look at the kind of processes that
00:27:08.960	take place in terms of nuclear fusion. Yes indeed, you also remind me that the earth has its own
00:27:19.120	molten core which itself at the heart of our planet, there is a great deal of heat that is coming
00:27:26.320	from radioactive decay and that is also another condition for the possibility of life in so far as
00:27:33.760	if only because it gives us the magnetic shield that protects our atmosphere from burning away
00:27:41.760	thanks to the heat that's generated at the heart of the heart of the earth itself.
00:27:48.000	So there are sort of heat-loving bacteria that never touched the light of the sun and they are
00:27:53.520	indeed powered entirely by the heat in the earth. So there are three forms of energy that humanity
00:28:00.720	has captured. One is the common source of most energetic life forms, whether it's organic life forms like
00:28:08.880	plants and animals or what I want to call inorganic life forms like the breeze and the ocean waves.
00:28:15.520	Those are all powered by the light of the sun. The light of the sun is also what is found in
00:28:20.800	petroleum and in coal and everything else. Of course, those have got fossil fuels because they
00:28:26.720	are fossilized sunlight. The light of sun created those plants, the plants become fossilized and then we
00:28:32.480	release the energy once more. That's the bulk of the energy that humanity uses to power our
00:28:37.840	modern industries and also our living bodies. The second form is as you described from the earth.
00:28:44.160	Most of the heat of the earth, the center of the earth comes from the breakdown of radioactive
00:28:48.880	particles, of radioactive elements like uranium and because the earth is so thick, it's like a
00:28:54.160	safe blanket that traps most of this heat inside. So nuclear reactors and geothermal stations use the
00:29:00.160	same power which is the breakdown of uranium. The third form of energy that we tap into is the
00:29:07.200	rotation of the earth. The only way I can think of that really manifesting itself in the
00:29:15.280	non-organic living systems of earth is in tidal energy. The tides are powered by the rotation of the
00:29:22.880	earth. Not only are the tides powered by it, the tides give a bit of the energy away to the moon and so
00:29:28.480	the moon is actually inching slowly away from earth, powered by that rotation. Those are the three
00:29:33.440	forms of energy that power all the free energy activity on earth. All of these forms of energy,
00:29:40.880	not only here on our earth and solar system, but the entire universe, are governed by
00:29:48.000	these fundamental laws. One is the conservation of energy and the second law of thermodynamics,
00:29:55.360	you say for every action there's a reaction, remember that? That's a law of motion,
00:30:01.600	Newton's a third law. Motion. So for every action there's a reaction, is the old understanding
00:30:09.440	of a kind of symmetry. You do this and then you get that. But we are living in a very different
00:30:14.720	conception of matter where we don't have that kind of equivalence because there's this irreversible
00:30:23.280	process at work in forms of energy. I think we want to be more precise in nuance here. There is no
00:30:30.320	contradiction between every action has a reaction and the second law of thermodynamics. In fact,
00:30:36.880	the thing that powers the second law is that every action has a reaction when I mentioned the
00:30:42.320	particles in a box hitting each other. The reason why energy is transferred is because of Newton's
00:30:48.800	third law of motion that every reaction, every action has a reaction. Let's think of matter
00:30:55.920	statistically now. Let's conceive of a balloon. What is forcing a balloon to hold its shape?
00:31:01.920	It's the air inside. But I told you that air has loads of particles moving around all the time.
00:31:07.520	So how do these particles maintain shape? It is because of collisions. On average, there are enough
00:31:14.160	particles colliding with the side of the balloon both from the outside and the inside to even out
00:31:19.920	at that point of that balloon to how have it maintained its shape. The shape of the balloon,
00:31:25.280	and in fact the shape of anything that is maintained by pressure and fluidic dynamics,
00:31:30.240	is from the energy of particles colliding against its side and balancing itself out.
00:31:36.880	So this third law is about that transfer of energy that happens when you have that collision.
00:31:42.480	And when you think of it statistically, think of it in terms of the law of large numbers,
00:31:47.280	there is in a, let's say you have a balloon that's about a liter inside. Then there are about,
00:31:53.760	I think I'm going to get the order of magnitude wrong and you're going to get angry emails. They're
00:31:57.680	about several tens of trillion trillion particles in that balloon. Some of them are slow and they'll
00:32:03.600	never hit the side of it. Some of them are really fast and they're hit really hard,
00:32:06.720	disproportionately hard. But on average, when you have so many particles in the same place,
00:32:12.080	they are very predictable. You tend towards having this particular pressure applied by these
00:32:17.520	number of particles. And that's the nature of how the third law of motion relates to the second law
00:32:23.680	and how the world is maintained by many of these fine balances happening.
00:32:28.720	Well, that's very interesting because I'm preparing for the show and also having read
00:32:33.760	Cardinal Ravelli, I've been plunged in quantum mechanics of late. And also having done a show
00:32:42.400	with Mark Taylor, philosopher, we're talking about relational ontologies where
00:32:48.560	for Ravelli too, he thinks that the essence of quantum mechanics that everything is in
00:32:54.160	relation that there are not substances, but that there are almost events and these events are the way
00:33:00.080	things act and interact with each other. And that's fine and there's relations. But
00:33:06.080	in preparation for this show, I realize that even more fundamental than relationality is
00:33:12.240	collision. It's extraordinary how much of the very motor and agency of all of matter depends on
00:33:19.440	collision and things smashing into each other. And this is also what we experience in our
00:33:28.080	lives in everyday lives and in moments of heightened activity or conflict and things that
00:33:39.840	collision, contact, it's such a mystery to me because it just means that all of matter seen,
00:33:48.400	it's all conspired to not just interact with each other, but to collide and sometimes annihilate
00:33:55.600	the other particles and so forth. This is a very violent view of matter, wouldn't you say?
00:34:03.200	I'd say let's think of it in certain ways, in certain ways, in a certain way,
00:34:07.920	why don't we think of in terms of serendipity? These are all serendipitous meetings and the sum of
00:34:13.600	all these serendipities create the properties of the things we see around this. But if they didn't
00:34:18.320	collide, there wouldn't be any activity, there wouldn't be any, as you said, the slow particles
00:34:24.000	are hit by fast particles and they get faster and the other ones get slower, but without
00:34:29.680	collision, nothing happens. That's true. And even with collision, nothing can happen.
00:34:36.480	And that's sort of the cursive entropy. You can, if you, if the number of collisions that you have
00:34:42.880	doesn't change on average, on a macroscopic level, nothing happens. And in that way, you can have a very
00:34:48.480	tip at universe with a very large as many collisions as you have now. So I think that it's
00:34:55.520	this sort of like fundamental violence that's happening beneath the surface of macroscopic properties
00:35:02.320	happens regardless of whether we have a creative, beautiful, complex universe, or one that's really
00:35:09.840	tepid and really informative. And it is just that the particles themselves don't think of it
00:35:17.280	in terms of violence. They think of it in terms of this is the way that we manifest our energies
00:35:22.880	and we transfer energies. It's by giving and receiving and sometimes like giving and receiving
00:35:27.760	is a bit faster than we on our very slow macroscopic levels. I used to.
00:35:32.560	So you mentioned the word tepid. So I want to ask two big questions for the, you know, the remainder of
00:35:41.280	the show. One is because the word tepid reminds me, and I know it reminds you of a passage in St. John's
00:35:48.320	Revelation. That's right. Which is related to the revelation is the vision of the end of time.
00:35:56.160	And we could call it the end of the universe. And there's something there where John speaks
00:36:02.240	about the lukewarm. Can you relate that moment in St. John's Revelation to the vision of the
00:36:11.600	end of a universe where the entropy gets to the point where we are in this kind of neither
00:36:17.360	cotton or coal, but a kind of lukewarm tepid equilibrium state. So
00:36:23.440	entropy is irreversible in the sense that you lose potential energy, right? Things that are hot,
00:36:32.640	one of the other restatements of the second law of thermodynamics by Lord Kelvin is you cannot
00:36:37.760	spontaneously transfer heat from a cold object to a hot one. And so eventually the heat of the
00:36:44.240	universe will be so even things will be so sit it still on average, same-ish, that no more changes
00:36:51.520	will happen. And finally, the universal region equilibrium point from which you'll never depart.
00:36:57.200	And that is the lukewarm universe. In reality, it might be about four degrees above absolute
00:37:01.440	zero or five depending. So it's not necessarily, it's not exactly a lukewarm day. It's quite cold by
00:37:09.040	human standards. But really, this is, again, this I don't want to be unfair to the notion of
00:37:15.040	entropy because the way that we have put it, it sounds like entropy is the bringer of the eschaton,
00:37:19.520	it's the coming of the end times. When in reality, entropy is really just the whole process of
00:37:24.560	life and living. I know, and that's great, it's a very important corrective to the normal
00:37:32.160	connotation of entropy. However, life, the condition of life which requires a lot of energy and
00:37:40.880	mobilizes, creates it. So it's also death. And so it's no devaluation of life to say that it ends in
00:37:49.920	death because without death, you wouldn't have life, as we know it, at least most forms of life that
00:37:56.960	we know. So in that sense, maybe a kind of eschaton or death is a price you pay for a miracle,
00:38:07.600	such as this higher form organization of matter which we call the not only life, but the spirit of
00:38:16.720	life too. Well, let's think, let's go all the way back to Sadhi
00:38:23.360	Gahunoh's engine. If you want a state of the universe that will never, that will never
00:38:28.640	approach entropy, but still changes, you can always have this perfect engine that's constantly
00:38:34.480	being powered. You can run for ever because it is always lubricated. The problem with it is,
00:38:39.920	the calf no engine needs to run infinitely slowly, become infinitely isolated, and be infinitely
00:38:47.440	lubricated. And can you imagine a universe of only that sort of thing? Well, I can not only
00:38:53.520	imagine, but I can even be nostalgic for one, it ends when I'm in certain moods because when I think
00:38:59.440	of our moment in history and the kind of aggravated modernity that we are living in, that we are
00:39:08.080	so overheated at a cultural, you know, socio-political level that there is so much going on,
00:39:16.480	and the transformations are so rapid and disorienting that I can understand the nostalgia of
00:39:24.160	cultures that are anti-motor where they would like to go back to a much slower homeostatic
00:39:35.840	condition where every year you don't have to completely reorientate your understanding of the world
00:39:43.760	you live in because things are changing at a much slower pace. I can understand the desire to
00:39:51.040	cool things down at historically speaking. So yes, I wouldn't want to have the kind of
00:39:59.440	engine where it's kind of frozen to death, but do you think that we live historically in a very
00:40:06.640	overheated moment? I do not. And the two things to say about that, what you've said just now,
00:40:12.640	homeostasis, you want to, you mentioned that this is a homeostatic, you want to have a nostalgia
00:40:18.720	for homeostatic. Well, homeostasis is the process of maintaining something far from equilibrium,
00:40:25.840	your body's maintaining your body temperature and life through homeostasis in a system that doesn't
00:40:31.840	want to go down all the way to equilibrium. So you've already described a very irreversible
00:40:36.240	process over there. And the second thing is that it's not how life works. Perhaps what I meant to
00:40:42.400	say is that the historical conditions of our reality are completely non-homeostatic.
00:40:49.920	Well, there are two ways to look at it, right? Because the way that the variety of life has
00:40:55.440	arisen, the way that evolution has arisen is by many of these shocking changes and by introduction
00:41:01.120	on random changes. And we, this is not, this is a false nostalgia because life has never been like
00:41:08.640	this. Life has taken many forms and moves and transforms even when there's nothing, we think you
00:41:15.120	are an isolated island of the Galapagos. Life will always find a way to specialize and change in
00:41:22.080	its conditions and compete with each other. And I think it's a false nostalgia thing that you can
00:41:27.200	always have this sort of stasis. Well, we can leave nostalgia out of it. We can talk about the,
00:41:33.440	what Freud called the death drive. And it's a very compelling Freudian notion that
00:41:42.560	all of matter was universally and originally inanimate. And that in order to move from, to jump from
00:41:50.480	the inanimate into an anima state, it took a tremendous traumatic shock of transition and that
00:41:57.920	therefore in everything alive, there is even more fundamental and deeper than the pleasure
00:42:04.960	principle or the reproduction is a death drive that wants to return invariably to this inanimate
00:42:12.880	static state that preceded the emergence into organic living being. And that is true because
00:42:20.800	the only way that these irreversible processes is powered is because there is an ultimate end
00:42:25.680	of that equilibrium state. I mentioned the grandfather clock being powered by life,
00:42:31.920	that equilibrium state that the universe is. The, when that weight on that grandfather clock that
00:42:37.280	was lifted just once by the fiat looks of Genesis finally hits its bottom and there's nowhere else to go
00:42:44.560	and the clock stops ticking. That however is going to take tens of trillions of years and I think it
00:42:50.720	takes a cosmic level of bad faith to think of that particular end when there's so much more
00:42:57.120	drama and so much more story to happen between now and then. Oh yeah, but I'm not particularly
00:43:02.320	concerned with the grand finale of the whole thing. I'm just more concerned with what it means to
00:43:08.480	be an embodied life form in this particular moment that I'm living in and the way in which
00:43:16.080	entropy works for me, for you, for our society, the way the death drive may covertly be sponsoring
00:43:26.400	all sorts of destructive behavior that history is made of. You can say that that destructive
00:43:32.000	behavior is part of the entropic processes that create life. It's funny, but I think that we,
00:43:37.760	we deny the implacability of the death drive at our own peril. So that's, we can close that
00:43:45.200	little parentheses now about that because I want in the time remaining the few minutes we
00:43:50.720	made to ask you about your specialty, which is statistical mathematics and analysis and you spoke
00:43:56.960	about the the large numbers, the big numbers, but this whole thing also is related to what we are
00:44:03.680	living culturally as an era of big data and how big data this compilation of statistical
00:44:12.080	probabilities and averages has an almost predictive power of how we are going to behave as
00:44:17.840	individuals, right? That's right. So the reason why the second law, it's so absolute,
00:44:24.960	is because we are unable to track the location of every single particle in the trillions of
00:44:30.960	trillions of particles that are around us. James Fluck Maxwell had this hypothetical thought
00:44:36.880	experiment of a demon that is able to track every single particle in a box and it has control
00:44:43.280	over a gate. And so Maxwell's demon will open the gate only for hard particles and close the
00:44:49.120	gate for cold particles. And so by just using this gate without changing any of the behavior of
00:44:55.120	the other particles, you're able to aggregate all the hot particles on one side of the gate and
00:44:59.840	cold ones on the other side. And so you're spontaneously violated the second law as the
00:45:05.360	Lord Kelvin statement of the second law. You cannot spontaneously create a hot and cold body
00:45:09.840	and separated out like that. And that's only possible only because this demon is omniscient,
00:45:16.240	is able to track and measure the speed of all these particles about actually creating
00:45:20.160	any new change or any new entropy around it. And that's an impossibility because there's no such
00:45:27.920	way of creating this omniscient demon. Every measurement for particle will create disorder as well.
00:45:33.280	And in that way, omniscience, this impossible omniscience implies omnipotence because it empowers
00:45:39.440	you to reverse the second law of thermodynamics and time itself and the laws of the universe itself.
00:45:46.320	But while you are unable to track the individual motion of particles, you can track the motion of
00:45:54.720	individual humans. So we can't make meaningful predictions of individual humans. We have this
00:46:02.240	freedom to choose as we want to. Sociologists and social scientists are able to make meaningful
00:46:08.080	descriptions of humans in the large when you have a large collection of people in the society,
00:46:13.680	you can make meaningful predictions about how they would behave in certain circumstances and so on.
00:46:17.760	It's just that we're beginning to live in an era where we collect enough data to construct
00:46:24.880	lots of little Maxwell demons for each person. We are able to track our location, now preferences,
00:46:30.240	where we go, what we listen to, who our friends are. And so the people who possess these data
00:46:35.520	can become more than chosen than Facebook. Well, I'm not going to name anyone because I am
00:46:40.560	a native of Silicon Valley and so these people are my lords and masters and one I will not speak
00:46:48.800	against my betters. But they are able to construct certain amounts of Maxwell demons. And I want
00:46:54.560	to think very carefully about the consequence of that without any individual changing their
00:47:00.640	behavior or knowing they are changing their behavior. You are able to separate the
00:47:05.520	hots from the colds, the lambs from the goats entirely just by the opening and closing of a gate.
00:47:13.200	And while we cannot be omnipotent when it comes to the particles of matter,
00:47:18.080	that omnipotence isn't necessarily out of our hands when it comes to human beings.
00:47:24.160	So are your lords and masters the lords and masters of me and everyone else at this point?
00:47:31.360	Well, not because they possess the big data. Not quite yet, there's not enough to do something like that.
00:47:37.680	We'll see how the world looks like in the future, whether we as human beings can follow the
00:47:43.760	material arc of the universe and find ourselves in an irreversible state of freedom.
00:47:49.360	Well said, Brian. We've been speaking with Brian Chung. I'm really proud to have had him as a
00:47:56.480	student of mine years ago in a freshman seminar and we've been in touch ever since and
00:48:01.840	delighted to have you come on the show and explain some things about the concept of matter as we
00:48:09.200	understand it today and it will continue to evolve. So thank you very much for coming on to
00:48:13.600	entitled opinions. I'm Robert Harrison. Stay tuned for our next show. Bye bye.
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