Skip to content

Comment on A New Physics Theory of Life

Comments

My biggest issue with Jeremey England is that he's basically rehashing Ilya Prigogine's ideas. Read Prigogine's books "order out of chaos", " Exploring complexity: An introduction" (best one), and less so "The End of Certainty". Prigogine won the Nobel prize for his "discovery" of dissipative structures, and he was a driving force in the ideas behind complexity theory. Wolfram's early work was full of references to Prigogine, but then Wolfram decided to write him out of history. As did England above. Progigine was derided for his ideas: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/prigo... I think the ideas are great, but we have some work to do.

What about Eric Chaisson's Cosmic Evolution, Goodwin's Signs of Life, Shrodinger's What is Life?, Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe? All of these books I've read which argue the same damn thing as this guy, so what's new? That last book by Kauffman is probably the most simialr, and I highly recommend it to those interested.

I'm not sure what your point is. Most ideas have some connection to ideas that came before. Are you saying England has added nothing to the idea, or that he is knowingly/intentionally leaving out Progigine as the rightful originator? If neither of these points are the case then your tone is entirely unwarranted. Many times ideas get re-discovered until the timing is right for them to gain wide acceptance. This point takes nothing away from England.

You put your finger on it. He's intentionally leaving out Prigogine as the main thinker behind these ideas. In fact, most of what he is saying is a rehash from the book. The main contribution by England is his idea of replicators as entropy minimizers1 in a closed system. However, his proof for this is a simulation of a simulation. Prigogine came up with the Brusselator, which is essentially the same theoretical model England is proposing for chemical systems. His points about the arrow of time are just the same points Prigogine made, without any attribution. Prigogine's reputation is in tatters now, and England could help rebuild it. Instead, he's going the non-humble path....

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.