III. Organic Universe: An Animate, Amniotic Cosmos

This chapter highlights an interrelated constellation of findings which testify to why the universe is becoming understood as biological in kind and a conducive matrix for the emergence of embryonic life, mind and self-aware, intelligent, creative beings on fertile bioplanets.

A. Quantum Cosmology

A grand convergence and unification of particle physics and cosmology at the singularity origin of the universe has occurred over the past two decades. As the initial big bang, inflationary expansion proceeded, elemental components were successively formed from quarks, muons, baryons and others to nuclear atoms. The slightest gravitational ripples led to coalescing galaxies and stars. Today, after centuries of observation and experiment from Galileo to the Hubble telescope, a sensate earth through humankind begins to achieve a comprehensive, “precision” understanding of the immense evolutionary cosmos. This fractal image is from the luminous Lunar Archives site: www.lunararchives.com and is titled Beginnings.

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1. Systems Physics

Most other scientific fields have made the turn from reduction to emergence such as Systems Biology (genetics), Systems Neuroscience, and even Systems Chemistry, as this website chronicles. While likewise having catalogued all the pieces of its cosmic and material realms, physics remains largely ensconced at the depths and reaches of matter, time and space. A Systems Physics, or Cosmology, has not yet similarly cohered. Indeed, a curious inversion is has occurred whereof the subject that initiated human inquiry now seems to be the last to reinvent itself.

There are vested reasons. Twentieth century physical research began when studies of black body radiation did not fit the Newtonian frame, which led Max Planck, Albert Einstein and colleagues into quantum and relativistic realms. The necessary descent into atomic particles proceeded from neutrons, protons, orbital electrons, the Niels Bohr model, to a plethora of muons, leptons, bosons, quarks and so on into multidimensional strings and branes.

But life was lost along the way. In the Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme of the American Institute of Physics, biological dynamics are not noted until the end, circa category 89.75. Journals are likewise skewed. Physics Research Letters tacks on a “Soft Matter” section, thats us creatures. Physica A, which variously covers statistical and condensed matter subjects, has an Interdisciplinary Applications addendum for nonlinear complexity.

Yet akin to 1900 with its radiative anomaly, universal self-organization will not be found on the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider or International Linear Collider. Such dynamically generative phenomena from galaxies to genomes to Gaia will not appear in smashed atoms. Surely players such as Lee Smolin and Philip Anderson know this and are trying to change course and emphasis from a benthic theory of everything to iconic systems everywhere.

(A comparison might be made between the Colliders and the Iraq war. Both reflect an obsession with looking for something that is not there. Obviously going down the wrong road, we seem psychologically unable to admit this, to extract ourselves, or to rechart a new salutary course.)

A Systems Physics to reassemble and reunite quantum and cosmos looking toward whom life, intelligence and personhood in community might become is an overdue imperative. This new section will note glimmers but an overt change in focus and direction awaits.

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B. An Organic Cosmos

A continuous thread seems to link together the events of the history of the Universe, from the Big Bang to the advent of Homo sapiens. The striking continuity of the general pattern of evolution suggests that the Universe was pregnant with life since beginning, and the biosphere was right from the start pregnant of mankind. Francesco Gaeta

The natural earthly realm, which became separated from a physical basis in the 19th century, has lately regained roots in a cosmic substrate increasingly seen as biological in kind. At the start of the 21st century a sequential continuity is filled in from a singular point of origin to humankind’s worldwide sentience. This is an epochal but largely unrecognized achievement. These composite advances now reveal and substantiate a spontaneously life-friendly, amniotic universe.

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1. Systems Chemistry

A section added in March 2007 to gather novel advances in the realm of supramolecular chemistry and constitutional dynamic and adaptive chemistry. These terms, along with systems chemistry, are coined by the Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Lehn and colleagues for new appreciations of how the universal self-organizing principles can similarily be found to drive an emergent, nested complexity of chemical and prebiological materiality.

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C. An Informational Source

(John Archibald) Wheeler’s appeal to information is symptomatic of a new approach to understanding the universe and the objects within it, including living things. This new approach may have the power to resolve many mysteries about quantum physics, life, and the universe. It’s a new view of science focused on the idea that information is the ultimate ‘substance’ from which all things are made. Tom Seigfried

Information itself is becoming recognized as a primary creative quality, along with and prior to matter and energy, space and time. A major revision just underway is the informational essence of quantum phenomena. The sequential rise of this immaterial quality through the evolutionary scale is considered in detail in Part VI, Emergent Genetic Information. This present section also enters the academic field of semiotics which studies symbolic signs and their communication.

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D. Intelligence and Consciousness

.…western science is changing very rapidly now, toward an understanding of nature as alive, self-organizing, intelligent, conscious or sentient and participatory at all levels from subatomic particles and molecules to entire living planets, galaxies and the whole Cosmos…. Elisabet Sahtouris

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E. A Thermodynamics of Life

The sterile, mechanical universe of the 19th century theories was conceived as a closed, isolated system tending to equilibrium. As predicted by the second law of thermodynamics, it will inexorably expire as available energy is spent doing work and converted to entropy. The “noonday brilliance” of the human moment is all for naught wrote its philosopher Bertrand Russell early in the 20th century. But a recent revision is underway by which life has become known as an open system infused and organized by a flow of energy and information. The gloomy pronouncement has been superseded by far-from-equilibrium version which can describe and qualify the florescent rise of life and its human phase. An effort to articulate a “fourth law of thermodynamics” counter to the second law is now in progress. Altogether these efforts presage a "physical" source and explanation for and impetus to biological and cultural evolution, which serves to reunite organic beings with a conducive cosmos.

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F. Fractal Spacetime

Both the depths of elemental matter and the expanses of the celestial raiment are being found to display a discrete, self-similar organization. From quantum phenomena to interstellar clouds and galactic clusters, a fine grained, variegated yet analogous correspondence once again appears, this time uncovered by the composite efforts of scientists and mathematicians worldwide. This image is from the Fractales site at http://fractales.free.fr.

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G. The Anthropic Principle

Since the 1970’s scientists have observed that many cosmic, atomic, chemical, and biomolecular parameters and constants seem to be precisely tuned so that complex life can appear and evolve into human beings. These findings have resulted in a view called the Anthropic Principle which means that the presence of people in the universe defines and constrains the inherent properties it must have. It has various renditions such as a “weak” or “strong” version depending on how much credence or interpretation is given to these surely intriguing qualities. Credit: MoonRunner Design UK at http://brattahlid.tripod.com/sw3-21web.htm.

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H. Astrobiology

As our special, fertile planet Earth through cerebral humankind begins to explore its heavenly environs in space and time, this integral vista implies a biological universe rich with emergent life, sentience, intelligence and creativity. The section includes proceedings for a series of international conferences on this field of study, which has lately converged upon the term Astrobiology. It also reports on the many realms of the search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence. The image is from the NASA Ames Research Center posted at http://amesnews.arc.nasa.gov/releases/2002/02images/astrobiology/astrobio.html. On this webpage NASA states its vision: To Improve Life Here, To Extend Life There, To Find Life Beyond.

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I. ExoEarths

With increasing numbers, now in the hundreds, of extrasolar giant planets being detected, along with a novel acuity to find earth-size orbs, has made it imperative to set up a new (October 2008) dedicated section. Technical books have chronicled so far, with more in the works, but a public appreciation of the historic immensity of this discovery of a galaxy and cosmos filled with earthly brethren has not yet registered. For it can at once endow a common biospheric identity and perspective we are in so much need of and can greatly expand our environmental and evolutionary neighborhood and relevance.

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