On Being
by Peter Atkins
(Oxford, 2011)
“ ... longing is not itself an adequate proof of the existence of what is longed for.”
(page xi)
“There are, in fact, three related profound questions to address in the context of creation. One is the mechanism of the coming into being of the universe: what actually happened at the beginning? Another is whether there is any meaning to the question of what preceded the universe and had, in some sense, the potential to become a universe. ... The third is whether an agent was needed to trigger the process of cosmogenesis.”
(page 2)
“There are no laws in a universe that does not yet exist, for laws come into existence as the behaviour they summarize emerges with the emerging universe.”
(page 12)
“The total electric charge of the universe is zero, but there are positively charged and negatively charged entities within it. We know that the total charge is zero, for otherwise the enormous strength of the interaction between unbalanced charges would have blasted it apart as soon as it had formed.”
(page 13)
“ ... so the coming into being of the universe was accompanied by the separation of ‘no charge’ into opposites. Charge was not created at the creation: electrical Nothing separated into equal and opposite charges. This ‘electrical creation’ event was not the manufacture of electric charge, it was the separation of opposites.”
(page 14)
“ ... the original Nothing was turned into a much more interesting and potent current nothing when
some kind of event split it into ... opposites.”
(page 15)
“What we see around us is in fact nothing, but Nothing that has bene separated into oposities to give, thereby, the appeareance of something.”
(page 17)
“The separation of Nothing into opposites still needs explanation, but it seem [sic] to me that such a process, though fearsomely difficult to explain, is less overwhelmingly fearsome than the process of positive, specific, munificent creation. The latter raises the question about, for instance, where all our energy comes from; the former diminishes the task of explanation because it reveals that no energy had to be created.”
(page 17)
“ ... in due course, to understand everything, scientists will be left to study the richness of absolutely nothing at all.”
(page 18)
“ ... purposeless decay into disorder is the spring of all change, even when that change is exquisite or results in seemingly purposeful action.”
(page 20)
“ ... our mental activity ensures that our lives are full of personal purpose. The sense of purposefulness is so great that there is then a natural tendency to extend the notion to cosmic entities. As a result, people have reflected at length on the purpose of the universe, taking the view that if anything is made, then as for human activities there lies purposeful action behind it.”
(pages 20-21)
“Information is organized structure ... “
(page 28)
“Evolution is not about the purposeful acquisition of complexity: it is about the random generation of successful junk. Instead of thinking of ourselves arrogantly as the apotheosis of creation, it is perhaps more humbling to think of ourselves as currently top junk.”
(page 30)
“Evolution is a fact; natural selection is a theory of how that evolution came about. ... to refer to it as the ‘theory of evolution’ colours the term evolution to suggest that it, evolution, is a theory whereas it is a fact.”
(page 31)
“ ... natural selection depends on the heritability of genetic variation, the over-proliferation of offspring, and the suitability of those offspring for their environment. It is a process entirely local in time, being blind to the consequences for a future generation. ... There is no striving after perfection; there is not necessarily progress, for a felicitous adaptation now might prove to be a burden later.”
(page 35)
“Those who deny evolution and natural selection deny themselves the ability to understand the function and structure of the living.”
(page 38)
“Life is easy to identify but remarkably difficult to define.”
(page 39)
“Life ... may be the imperfect sustenance of information by a flux of energy. ... Structural complexity - complexity right down to the molecular scale - is information, the absence of randomness, signal into noise. Death is the loss of structural complexity, the loss of information as the flux of energy ceases. With death, we become our surroundings; with death, we as signal revert to noise.”
(page 40)
“The fact that the replication of DNA is not without error is the root of evolution. ... At a molecular level, evolution and genetic disease are indistinguishable. The trick, as Nature has discovered, is not to introduce too much error at any one time and to edge further rather than bluster into new territory. Bluster is almost certainly disease; cautiously successful edging is evolution.”
(page 49)
“ ... life, from the professionally dispassionate viewpoint of a scientist, is the avoidance of a certain kind of equilibrium; death is the usually unwilling achievement of that equilibrium. Conception, gestation, and birth build the apparatus for the temporary avoidance of equilibrium; dying is accompanied by that apparatus’s final, irreversible loss.”
(page 69)
“ ... surely there is little point in going to the trouble of having an afterlife if you are unconscious of it.”
(page 88)
“There is absolutely no evideence for the existence of a brain-free miasma-like emanation that corresponds to a self’s actual spirit. The faithful’s hopeful elaboration of consciousness, the Soul, ka writ large, is nothing but a metaphor for the sense of self.”
(page 89)
“Matter will probably decompose into radiation. I say ‘probably’ because the long-term future of matter is currently uncertain, but the indications are that all matter will be gone in about 300 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 years, or so. That is indeed unworryingly decently far distant, but that is not the point: science is helping us to see into the infinite future, and finding the absence of everything.”
(pages 98-99)
“The scientific method is a distillation of common sense in alliance with honesty ... ”
(page 105)
“ ... myth-making ... is entertainment in alliance with the desperation of sought but thwarted understanding.”
(page 105)