SCI 206 Guest Lecture Nov 7, 2016

Introduction
Human wonder:
Who are we?
Where do we come from?
Are we alone?

What is this place?

How does it all work?
Why is there something instead of nothing?

What principles unify everything?

What is the ultimate nature of reality?
What mysteries remain?

Organization of SCI 207:

- Life
- Universe
- Everything
Nature of SCI 207:
- Survey
- Research
- Big Picture How it works
Goal of SCI 207:
- Scientific Literacy
- Sharing Ideas
- Self-reflection

Energy
- Energy is the lifeblood of the universe.
- The story of everything that was, is, or will be, is the story of energy transformations
- Ex. Niagara Falls, gravitational energy to kinetic energy to thermal energy
- But what is energy? No one knows, exactly.
- One of the great mysteries
- Einstein discovered two clues:
o First clue: E=mc^2
o All forms of energy have mass
o A hot cup of coffee (thermal energy) has more mass than the same cup of
coffee, cold! (thermal energy has mass)
o Conversely, mass itself has energy
o Life on Earth survives by literally eating the sun! (photosynthesis and production
of glucose)
o Second clue Gab + Agab = (8piG/c^4)Tab
 o Mass-energy is inextricably woven into the very fabric of space & time itself
(Interstellar movie)
o This is a powerful clue in our search for a unified theory of everything
- Remarkably, it appears as if energy is conserved:
o If energy decreases here, it increases there so that total = constant
o Energy can move or charge form but it cannot be created/destroyed
o If this is true, the universe contains the same amount of energy as it was before
the big bang
o Energy is eternal, we cant use or waste energy, energy will never run out
- It doesnt run out, it runs down
o Whats running out is useful energy (free energy)
o If the universe were to reach equilibrium (no gradients of temperature, pressure,
density), energy could no longer flow/transform. Lifeblood would freeze
o The quantity of energy is constant, but the quality continually decreases.
o High quality/ ordered energy -> Lower quality/ disordered energy
o disorder = entropy
o The entropy/ disorder of the universe is continually increasing
o Called second law of thermodynamics
- So what?
o The flow to disorder is the force that animates living organisms, and possibly
created life in the first place.
o Living organisms do not consume energy. Energy in = Energy out (Burger in, body
heat out)
o They consume order, so as to maintain their own high degree of order, against
their tendency towards disorder and death.
o DNA sequence is ordered and disorder can cause human to have arm coming out
of forehead for example.
- Entropy
o Diffusion of particles is an example of entropy/ disorder increasing.
o Diffusion happens spontaneously: there are simply many more ways for the
particles to be spread out, than localized. This spreading continues until
equilibrium is reached.
o Thermal energy spontaneously flows from hot to cold, spreading out the energy
amongst more particles, until thermal equilibrium is reached and net energy flow
ceases (death)
o Summary: The Entropy/ disorder of the universe spontaneously increases, on
balance
o loophole: Disorder can decrease locally (order increase locally) provided
disorder increases more elsewhere, so that the net disorder increases.
o This is how life is possible: living organisms spontaneously extract order from
(the flow to) disorder. This is the essence of life
o Humans have learned to construct machines that do exactly the same thing
- Order from disorder
 o Machines exist all around us that spontaneously extract order from (the flow to)
disorder
o Thermal energy spontaneously flows from hot to cold, increasing the
disorder of the universe.
o Along the way it heats the gas in the cylinder. Hot gas atoms bombard the
piston, which absorbs only right-moving kinetic energy ( a simple one-way
valve)
o Some of the disordered KE (random, thermal motion of the gas atoms) is
converted into ordered KE (all the atoms in the car moving the same way)
o This ordered/high quality energy is used to move people, build cities, and create
order of all kinds, but must be accompanied by greater destruction of order
elsewhere.
o Early on, humans mastered burning fuels to produce heat (wood, coal, oil, etc.) ,
but only recently figured out how to burn fuels to create order. -> industrial
revolution
- A human is the same sort of machine:
o It takes in high quality/ordered energy (food)
o It burns it and expels low quality/disordered energy (excrement & body heat)
o In the process, it constructs highly ordered materials (DNA, cells, etc.) and
extracts highly ordered energy for locomotion, consciousness, etc.
o Once you have the machine, you just need to feed it; it will function
spontaneously
o What animates living organisms is simply the spontaneous dispersion of energy
& particles from more ordered to less ordered forms
o A human consumes order to maintain its relatively low entropy/highly ordered
form
- Human as Piston Engine?
o ATP is the universal energy currency of all life on Earth. Animals, plants, etc.
o It provides the high quality energy needed for synthesis of proteins and
membranes, all cell movements and functions, cellular division, etc.
o How is it generated?
o Electrochemical battery! E.g.: Drop a cube of iron (Fe) into a copper (Cu) sulfate
solution.
o Electrons spontaneously flow from the Fe to the Cu2+ ions, in random directions
o IDEA: Force electrons to flow in one direction only, exactly life we extracted
ordered KE in the piston engine! Then use electric current to charge ADP up to
ATP!
o Nature has evolved a similar battery, using glucose & oxygen:
Glucose gets snipped into two pyruvate ions (act life Fe to donate
electrons)
Oxygen has a strong affinity for electrons (acts life Cu2+)
The spontaneous flow of electrons from pyruvate to oxygen (burning
sugar) is used to charge ADP to ATP!
- The Complexity Problem
 o Problem: The ADP->ATP energy machinery is very complex!
The electron flow drives a proton pump that forces protons across a
membrane, creating a proton gradient that stores potential energy (like a
battery) for later use.
This store of energy is tapped by allowing protons to flow back across the
membrane through a machine called the ATP synthase.
o The electric field in the proton gradient accelerates the protons to large KE. They
collide with angled vanes attached to a shaft, forcing it to rotate.
o Life a rotary motor, the turning shaft mechanically converts ADP to ATP. Its very
much a physical gears and wheels machine, not traditional chemistry!
o This type of energy machinery is universal to all life, as universal as the genetic
code itself.
o It exists inside mitochondria in cells
- Spontaneous Emergence of Order/Complexity
o The entire history of the universe if FILLED with precisely this process.
o The universe began in a hot dense state (Big Bang) with (almost) no
order/structure. Ever since then it has been expanding and cooling, causing
various structures to condense out.
o At each stage, local order/structure increases, but net order decreases.
o Example. Snowflakes
o Ice is more ordered than water vapor.
o But in forming, thermal energy is released, creating much more disorder in the
surrounding air than the emergent order of the snowflake.
o Example: proteins, life ATP synthase
o When ATP synthase is spontaneously created by the ribosome machine, with
instructions from DNA, the disorder created >> the local order created
o But how did the complex machinery that builds proteins arise in the first place?
(one of the biggest questions that humans asked for the longest time)
- Deeper understanding of the second law of thermodynamics
o 1994: Denis Evans & Debra Searles proved: The second law is not strictly true. In
microscopic systems, the entropy of an isolated system can fluctuate, mostly
increasing, but sometimes decreasing
o After 1994: Ever deeper developments in understanding the physics of the
second law
o 2013-2015: Jeremy England, MIT biophysicist, applied this to living organisms:
In doing so, England may have taken us a significant step closer to
explaining the origin of lifes complex
May have answered, why is there life?
o Idea: Dissipation-driven adaptation of matter
o England: You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for
long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant.
o England: Under the right circumstances, which arent rare at all, matter tends
naturally toward greater organization, complex structures and adaptive
behavior, making life a likely, even inevitable result of physics.
 o Complex molecules, ever better at eating energy in the environment, may
emerge spontaneously!? ATP synthase, too?
o The idea may subsume evolution, and go further: explain origin of life. Pre-life
adaptation to the environment!
- SCI 207
o This is one thread in the Life section of SCI 207
Life
Universe
Everything
o We then discuss the nature and possible origins of the universe-> roots of life go
all the way back to the big bang.
o And finally, we go even deeper