[Fis] _ Re: _ RE: Cho 2016 The social life of quarks
Bob Logan
logan at physics.utoronto.ca
Thu Jan 21 18:30:54 CET 2016
Dear Colleagues - Using the terms communication and information to talk about the interaction of quarks and all non-sentient particles for that matter is strictly metaphoric and as a teacher of the poetry of physics how could I object. I do not but at the same time I want to invoke my relativity of information principle so that we are clear about the terms communication and information applied to quarks and other non-sentient particles as opposed to the sentient folks who can read this post unlike any quark on the face of the universe. In a paper I co-authored with Stuart Kauffman and others including R. Este, R. Goebel, D. Hobill and I. Shmulevich entitled Propagating Organization: An Enquiry we invoked the principle of the relativity of information, namely that the word information refers to many different phenomena and that its meaning depends on the context in which the word is used.
best wishes - Bob Logan
PS Here is the abstract:
Abstract
Our aim in this article is to attempt to discuss propagating organization of process, a poorly articulated union of matter, energy, work, constraints and that vexed concept, “information”, which unite in far from equilibrium living physical systems. Our hope is to stimulate discussions by philosophers of biology and biologists to further clarify the concepts we discuss here. We place our discussion in the broad context of a “general biology”, properties that might well be found in life anywhere in the cosmos, freed from the specific examples of terrestrial life after 3.8 billion years of evolution. By placing the discussion in this wider, if still hypothetical, context, we also try to place in context some of the extant discussion of information as intimately related to DNA, RNA and protein transcription and translation processes. While characteristic of current terrestrial life, there are no compelling grounds to suppose the same mechanisms would be involved in any life form able to evolve by heritable variation and natural selection. In turn, this allows us to discuss at least briefly, the focus of much of the philosophy of biology on population genetics, which, of course, assumes DNA, RNA, proteins, and other features of terrestrial life. Presumably, evolution by natural selection – and perhaps self-organization - could occur on many worlds via different causal mechanisms.
Here we seek a non-reductionist explanation for the synthesis, accumulation, and propagation of information, work, and constraint, which we hope will provide some insight into both the biotic and abiotic universe, in terms of both molecular self reproduction and the basic work energy cycle where work is the constrained release of energy into a few degrees of freedom. The typical requirement for work itself is to construct those very constraints on the release of energy that then constitute further work. Information creation, we argue, arises in two ways: first information as natural selection assembling the very constraints on the release of energy that then constitutes work and the propagation of organization. Second, information in a more extended sense is “semiotic”, that is about the world or internal state of the organism and requires appropriate response. The idea is to combine ideas from biology, physics, and computer science, to formulate explanatory hypotheses on how information can be captured and rendered in the expected physical manifestation, which can then participate in the propagation of the organization of process in the expected biological work cycles to create the diversity in our observable biosphere.
Our conclusions, to date, of this enquiry suggest a foundation which views information as the construction of constraints, which, in their physical manifestation, partially underlie the processes of evolution to dynamically determine the fitness of organisms within the context of a biotic universe.
The whole article is available at: https://www.academia.edu/783503/Propagating_organization_an_enquiry
And here is the section on the relativity of information:
Section 4. The Relativity of Information
In Sections 2 we have argued that the Shannon conception of information are not directly suited to describe the information of autonomous agents that propagate their organization. In Section 3 we have defined a new form of information, instructional or biotic information as the constraints that direct the flow of free energy to do work.
The reader may legitimately ask the question “isn’t information just information?”, i.e., an invariant like the speed of light. Our response to this question is no, and to then clarify what seems arbitrary about the definition of information. Instructional or biotic information is a useful definition for biotic systems just as Shannon information was useful for telecommunication channel engineering, and Kolmogorov (Shiryayev 1993) information was useful for the study of information compression with respect to Turing machines.
The definition of information is relative and depends on the context in which it is to be considered. There appears to be no such thing as absolute information that is an invariant that applies to all circumstances. Just as Shannon defined information in such a way as to understand the engineering of telecommunication channels, our definition of instructional or biotic information best describes the interaction and evolution of biological systems and the propagation of organization. Information is a tool and as such it comes in different forms. We therefore would like to suggest that information is not an invariant but rather a quantity that is relative to the environment in which it operates. It is also the case that the information in a system or structure is not an intrinsic property of that system or structure; rather it is sensitive to history and environment. To drive home this point we will now examine the historic context in which Shannon (1948) information emerged.
Before delving into the origin of Shannon information we will first examine the relationship of information and materiality. Information is about material things and furthermore is instantiated in material things but is not material itself. Information is an abstraction we use to describe the behavior of material things and often is thought as something that controls, in the cybernetic sense, material things. So what do we mean when we say the constraints are information and information is constraints as we did in Section 3.
“The constraints are information” is a way to describe the limits on the behavior of an autonomous agent who acts on its own behalf but is nevertheless constrained by the internal logic that allows it to propagate its organization. This is consistent with Hayle’s (1999, p. 72) description of the way information is regarded by information science: “It constructs information as the site of mastery and control over the material world.” She claims, and we concur, that information science treats information as separate from the material base in which it is instantiated. This suggests that there is nothing intrinsic about information but rather it is merely a description of or a metaphor for the complex patterns of behavior of material things. In fact, the key is to what degree information is a completely vivid description of the objects in question.
This understanding of the nature of information arises from Shannon’s (1948) original formulation of information, dating back to his original paper:
The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one that will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design. If the number of messages in the set is finite then this number or any monotonic function of this number can be regarded as a measure of the information produced when one message is chosen from the set, all choices being equally likely.
A number of problems for biology emerge from this view of information. The first is that the number of possible messages is not finite because we are not able to prestate all possible preadaptations from which a particular message can be selected and therefore the Shannon measure breaks down. Another problem is that for Shannon the semantics or meaning of the message does not matter, whereas in biology the opposite is true. Biotic agents have purpose and hence meaning.
The third problem is that Shannon information is defined independent of the medium of its instantiation. This independence of the medium is at the heart of a strong AI approach in which it is claimed that human intelligence does not require a wet computer, the brain, to operate but can be instantiated onto a silicon-based computer. In the biosphere, however, one cannot separate the information from the material in which it is instantiated. The DNA is not a sign for something else it is the actual thing in itself, which regulates other genes, generates messenger RNA, which in turn control the production of proteins. Information on a computer or a telecommunication device can slide from one computer or device to another and then via a printer to paper and not really change, McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” aside. This is not true of living things. The same genotype does not always produce the same phenotype.
According to the Shannon definition of information, a structured set of numbers like the set of even numbers has less information than a set of random numbers because one can predict the sequence of even numbers. By this argument, a random soup of organic chemicals has more information that a structured biotic agent. The biotic agent has more meaning than the soup, however. The living organism with more structure and more organization has less Shannon information. This is counterintuitive to a biologist’s understanding of a living organism. We therefore conclude that the use of Shannon information to describe a biotic system would not be valid. Shannon information for a biotic system is simply a category error.
A living organism has meaning because it is an autonomous agent acting on its own behalf. A random soup of organic chemicals has no meaning and no organization. We may therefore conclude that a central feature of life is organization—organization that propagates.
On 2016-01-18, at 11:06 PM, Xueshan Yan wrote:
> Dear colleagues,
>
> The issue “Quark Communication” raised by Bob and Howard etc. is interesting and radical; it can help us to clarify that if there is a universal physical information problem besides black hole information that only is studying by a few astrophysicists such as Stephen Hawking etc. Here I provide some reference about “messenger particles” extracted from Wikipedia under the term: “Force carrier” to this question:
>
> The concept of messenger particles dates back to the 18th century when the French physicist Charles Coulomb showed that the electrostatic force between electrically charged objects follows a law similar to Newton's Law of Gravitation. In time, this relationship became known as Coulomb's law. By 1862, Hermann von Helmholtz had described a ray of light as the "quickest of all the messengers". In 1905, Albert Einstein proposed the existence of a light-particle in answer to the question: "what are light quanta?"
>
> In 1923, at the Washington University in St. Louis, Arthur Holly Compton demonstrated an effect now known as Compton scattering. This effect is only explainable if light can behave as a stream of particles and it convinced the physics community of the existence of Einstein's light-particle. Lastly, in 1926, one year before the theory of quantum mechanics was published, Gilbert N. Lewis introduced the term "photon", which soon became the name for Einstein’s light particle. From there, the concept of messenger particles developed further.
>
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Xueshan
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es [mailto:fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Pedro C. Marijuan
> Sent: Monday, January 18, 2016 7:51 PM
> To: 'fis'
> Subject: Re: [Fis] Cho 2016 The social life of quarks
>
> Dear Howard and colleagues,
>
> OK, you can say that quarks communicate, but immediately we need to
> create another term for "real" communication. I mean, there are quarks
> (fermions) and bosons (particle forces) everywhere: planets, stars,
> galaxies, etc. Their multiple interactions constitute most of the
> contents of physics. If you want to term "communication" to some basic
> categories of physical interactions based on force exchange --of some of
> the 4 fundamental forces, whatever-- we run into difficulties to
> characterize the communication that entails signals, agents and
> meanings, and responses. That's the "real" communication we find after
> the origins of that singular organization we call life --essential then
> for the later emergence of superorganisms, peaking order, memes, etc.
> You have oceans of interacting fermions and bosons around, but the new
> communicating phenomenology is only found in our minuscule planet.
>
> As an explanatory metaphor, it is not a good idea, almost wrong I dare
> say. But as a free-wheeling, literary metaphor it belongs to the
> author's choice. The problem is that both realms of information, so to
> speak, have relatively overlapping components, depending on the
> explanatory framework used (see the ongoing exchanges by Stan, John,
> Terry, etc.) And that kind of apparent homogenization blurs the effort
> to establish the distinctions and advance in a unifying perspective (I
> think!!). In any case, it deserves more discussion. In your Jan. 14th
> message you ad more elements--I will think twice!.
>
> All the best--Pedro
>
> PS. Clarifying the two messages per week rule (responding to offline
> quests): the two messages should be counted along the "international
> business week": starting on Monday until the end of Sunday, Greenwich
> Time. Thanks to all for respecting this "boundary condition"!
>
> HowlBloom at aol.com wrote:
> > re: quarks
> >
> > the big question for FIS is this: do quarks communicate? and can
> > their communications be called informational?
> >
> > are quarks more than just the first bits of matter in the cosmos? are
> > they also the first socializers? the first team-makers?
> >
> > with oomph--howard
> > ____________
> > Howard Bloom
> > Author of: /The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the
> > Forces of History/ ("mesmerizing"-/The Washington Post/),
> > /Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the
> > 21st Century/ ("reassuring and sobering"-/The New Yorker)/,
> > /The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism/ ("A
> > tremendously enjoyable book." James Fallows, National Correspondent,
> > /The Atlantic/),
> > /The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates/ ("Bloom's argument
> > will rock your world." Barbara Ehrenreich),
> > /How I Accidentally Started the Sixties/ ("Wow! Whew! Wild!
> > Wonderful!" Timothy Leary), and
> > /The Mohammed Code/ ("A terrifying book…the best book I've read on
> > Islam." David Swindle,/ PJ Media/).
> > www.howardbloom.net
> > Former Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute; Former Visiting
> > Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University.
> > Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; Founder, Space
> > Development Steering Committee; Founder: The Group Selection Squad;
> > Founding Board Member: Epic of Evolution Society; Founding Board
> > Member, The Darwin Project; Founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab;
> > member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the
> > Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of
> > Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International
> > Society for Human Ethology, Scientific Advisory Board Member, Lifeboat
> > Foundation; Editorial Board Member, Journal of Space Philosophy; Board
> > member and member of Board of Governors, National Space Society.
> >
> > In a message dated 1/16/2016 11:48:34 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
> > logan at physics.utoronto.ca writes:
> >
> > Stan et al - you honour me by asking the question. We know that
> > matter (and here I do not include dark matter or dark energy) is
> > made up of a small number of quarks and gluons. As we go higher
> > and higher energy we will continue to create these "freaks of
> > nature" freaks in the sense that we create the conditions for them
> > to come into existence using our high energy colliders. I am sure
> > they sometimes occur naturally in stars from time to time but they
> > do not have any long term effects - they are a passing fancy, a
> > novelty, and an amusing one at that. Perhaps they will help us
> > understand the quark gluon interaction. The analogy I see with the
> > transition from prokaryotes to eukaryotes that I sent to Malcolm
> > was my indulging in scientific based poetry. BTW I teach an
> > undergrad course since 1971 called the Poetry of Physics (also the
> > title of a book available on Amazon) to teach physics to
> > humanities students without using math to promote science literacy
> > among humanists.
> >
> > Another analogy that came to mind was that of proliferation of
> > nucleic acids made up of the same 4 elements: C, G, A, and T.
> > They are the quarks of biology and their chemical bonds the gluons.
> >
> > Metaphorically your - Bob Logan
> > ______________________
> >
> > Robert K. Logan
> > Prof. Emeritus - Physics - U. of Toronto
> > Fellow University of St. Michael's College
> > Chief Scientist - sLab at OCAD
> > http://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertKLogan
> > www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan
> > <http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan>
> > www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Logan5/publications
> > <http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Logan5/publications>
> >
> > On 2016-01-16, at 10:33 AM, Stanley N Salthe wrote:
> >
> >> One way to complicate anything is to smash it into bits. I
> >> wonder, Bob, if you would comment on this point as a former
> >> particle physicist!
> >>
> >> STAN
> >>
> >> On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 11:13 PM, Malcolm Dean
> >> <malcolmdean at gmail.com <mailto:malcolmdean at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >>
> >> Yes. I don't know enough about Biology, but I noticed the 3+2
> >> business some time ago. I'm automatically suspicious of
> >> theories which are "vexingly complex" (QCD) and only
> >> "beautiful" (String Theory) to a few people with certain math
> >> backgrounds. But the Two and the Three have been important to
> >> humans for thousands of years. I think Nature is actually
> >> very simple, but we get overwhelmed and confused by its
> >> enormous scales and by our attempts to manage observation by
> >> (necessarily) creating over-simplified Objects.
> >>
> >> M.
> >>
> >> *Malcolm Dean*
> >> /Member/, Higher Cognitive Affinity Group, BRI
> >> <http://www.bri.ucla.edu/research/affinity-groups/higher-cognitive-function-in-neural-integration-affinity-group>
> >> /Research Affiliate/, Human Complex Systems, UCLA
> >> <http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/Malcolm_Dean>
> >> /Member/, BAFTA/LA <http://baftala.org/>
> >> /On Google Scholar
> >> <http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ZopY3eQAAAAJ&hl=en>/
> >>
> >> On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 6:47 PM, Bob Logan
> >> <logan at physics.utoronto.ca
> >> <mailto:logan at physics.utoronto.ca>> wrote:
> >>
> >> eukaryote came about by two prokaryotes joining together
> >> and 5 quark combo can be thought of as a nucleon (3
> >> quarks) and a meson(2quarks) combining and the 4 quqrk
> >> state as 2 mesons combining. By this logic perhaps there
> >> will be 6 quark beast if 2 nucleons combine.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On 2016-01-15, at 4:17 PM, Malcolm Dean wrote:
> >>
> >>> Could you specify the relata?
> >>>
> >>> Malcolm
> >>>
> >>> On Jan 15, 2016 5:31 AM, "Bob Logan"
> >>> <logan at physics.utoronto.ca
> >>> <mailto:logan at physics.utoronto.ca>> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Hi Malcolm - thanks for this article that supports
> >>> my notion that my former field of particle physics
> >>> is becoming like biology. The 4 and 5 quark combos
> >>> represent an analogy of the transition in biology
> >>> from prokaryotes to eukaryotes. :-) - Bob
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On 2016-01-14, at 7:39 PM, Malcolm Dean wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6270/217.summary
> >>>> Science 351(6270):217-219, 15 January 2016; DOI:
> >>>> 10.1126/science.351.6270.217
> >>>> *The social life of quarks*
> >>>> Adrian Cho
> >>>>
> >>>> Particle physicists at Europe's CERN laboratory in
> >>>> Switzerland say they have observed bizarre new
> >>>> cousins of the protons and neutrons that make up
> >>>> the atomic nucleus. Protons and neutrons consist of
> >>>> other particles called quarks, bound by the strong
> >>>> nuclear force. By smashing particles at high
> >>>> energies, physicists have blasted into fleeting
> >>>> existence hundreds of other quark-containing
> >>>> particles. Until recently, all contained either two
> >>>> or three quarks. But since 2014, researchers
> >>>> working with CERN's Large Hadron Collider have also
> >>>> spotted four- and five-quark particles. Such
> >>>> tetraquarks and pentaquarks could require
> >>>> physicists to rethink their understanding of
> >>>> quantum chromodynamics, or they could have less
> >>>> revolutionary implications. Researchers hope that
> >>>> computer simulations and more collider studies will
> >>>> reveal how the oddball newcomers are put together,
> >>>> but some wonder whether experiments will ever
> >>>> provide a definitive answer.
> >>>>
> >>>> ...
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> > =
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Fis mailing list
> > Fis at listas.unizar.es
> > http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
> >
>
>
> --
> -------------------------------------------------
> Pedro C. Marijuán
> Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
> Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
> Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
> Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X
> 50009 Zaragoza, Spain
> Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
> pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
> http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
> -------------------------------------------------
>
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