A science fiction novel by Hugo-award winning writer Liu Cixin has transcended geopolitics and brought together Chinese and American audiences. The Netflix adaptation Cixin’s trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past is more controversial in China (and Netflix is banned in the country) but the underlying message on the salience of science resonates across borders. Scientists are at once victims, saviors and villains in this saga. The first novel of the trilogy “The Three Body Problem” is named after a real conundrum in the annals of astrophysics. The laws of gravitation provide for stability in orbits between two entities but a third entity being added can lead to chaotic and unpredictable behavior over longer time periods.
As the story goes, humanity’s “first contact” with an alien species four light years away occurs in a system with three suns and hence their orbits go through wild chaotic phases. This leads to extreme climatic changes and evolutionary punctuations for the inhabitants, eventually leading them to find more stable solar systems for habitation. Clearly there is environmental messaging in this aspect of the story about how fortunate we are to have a more stable stellar system. And yet the anti-hero of the novel is so disenchanted by our ecological and social plunder that she cries out to the aliens for help.
A more subtle message in the series also pertains to the hubris with which we may try to consider an understanding of natural laws and the ability to predict and determine future outcomes. In his erudite review of Irish neuro-geneticist Kevin Mitchell’s monumental book Free Agents: Howe Evolution gave us Free Will , science writer James Gleick sums up the roots of our confusion around issues like the Three Body Problem or determinism in general:
“We say that the laws govern the universe, but that is a metaphor; it is better to say that the laws describe what is known….The laws are a model, a simplified description of a complex reality. No matter how successful, they necessarily remain incomplete and provisional.”
If we consider such an adaptive approach to the “laws of nature” then it becomes much easier to consider their value as a heuristic that helps us navigate complexity. Patterns such as “power laws” in natural systems may still emerge but they would also have slight deviations and exceptions (as even seen in the diagrams in physicist Geoffrey West’s bestselling book Scale). Conversely, such an approach also helps us to come to grips with the “fine tuning” challenge in physics – the unlikelihood of existence with small deviations from proposed explanatory “laws” and consequential “constants” in physics. Scientific atheists such as Richard Dawkins note that the fine-tuning challenge is perhaps the most convincing argument for the existence of God, though the question of where is “the tuner” still remains unanswered.
Recently, a group of astrophysicists, mineralogists and philosophers have suggested a new law of nature that has at its core a notion that evolution in physical systems occurs just as in biological systems – leading to “increased functional information.” I had a chance to engage in a conversation with two of the authors, mineralogist Robert Hazen and astronomer Jonathan Lunine, who specially noted the ways this law applies to the inanimate world. Their paper focused on the atmospheric geochemistry of Saturn’s moon Titan as an example dynamic persistence, “where complex organic aerosols play a functional role in maintaining their own creation.” Around the same time another paper also considered “Assembly Theory” in nature whereby existence of objects comes from their formational history on which physical laws act. Complexity scientist and physician Stuart Kauffman has similarly used the concept of “fitness landscapes” from evolutional biology to describe the Origins of Order in his eponymous book.
These approaches to redefining the laws of nature are more accommodating of functionality, and even purpose, are somewhat reminiscent of the Gaia hypothesis that was posited by the late James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis (named after the Earth goddess in Greek mythology). Initially this was ridiculed and misunderstood as the Earth being an organism. Later it was more seriously examined and considered as a legitimate theory of functional feedback loops that favor the emergence of life. These feedback loops can also be degenerative and led to a competing “Medea Hypothesis” (named after a more malevolent Greek goddess) wherein the planet creates functionality that could be increasingly less hospitable to life as well.
The Three Body Problem has given us an opportunity to consider these mysteries of natural systems and our own fragile place in the universe with refreshing nuance. Let’s hope the series whets the appetite of the public to engage further in fundamental scientific inquiry with awe and humility. Any efforts towards charting a more sustainable future for our species will depend on a yearning to understand the allure and limits of structures and laws in the universe.
