Evolution of Matter

Have you ever wondered how we, the thinking organisms, came into being?

The most popular theory of our Universe's origin postulates a cosmic cataclysm unmatched in all of history — the Big Bang. According to the proponents of the theory, the massive blast that occurred 10-20 billion years ago allowed  the Universe's known matter and energy — even space and time themselves — to spring from some ancient and unknown type of energy.  In those initial moments only the heavy particles mediating weak nuclear interaction came into being in a background field of radiation or photons (see accompanying graphics). With that, our journey commenced, in some primordial soup!

Diagram outlining the critical stages of evolution of the Universe from the Big Bang to the present. ((c) CERN)

As the Universe rapidly cooled, particles such as proton, neutron and meson emerged around 10^-10 seconds. By the third minute, when the temperature was down to 10⁹K (0 K = -273.15°C), atomic clusters of these particles began to form. The laws of the Universe were solely under the purview of Physics. The Universe had to cool down to 6000K over a period of 300,000 years before the atoms could bond into molecules, ushering the dawn of Chemistry. Finally, Biology took hold when life, based on DNA double helix, emerged on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago. The march of the Universe has been towards matter of increasing complexity, from fundamental particles to thinking organisms — from divided and disordered building blocks, matter became condensed, organized, living and thinking.

What is the driving force behind this evolution? 

Even though we understand perfectly the laws governing the interaction of atoms, we cannot directly extrapolate these laws to explain the beginning of life, or the auto-catalysis of complex molecular networks, or why we have brains that can contemplate the world around us. Due to the overwhelming unlikeliness of random events leading to complex systems like ourselves, it seems as if an organizing agent or “God” must be invoked who puts the building blocks together.

It turns out that the answer to the above query lies in the most basic of all features, the most fundamental concept: self-organization. Under the pressure of information, systems assume greater complexity through self-organization towards more and more complex forms of matter, up to the generation of life and thought.

To this end, a complex system can be thought of as a collection of interacting agents, representing components as diverse as people, cells or molecules. Because of the non-linearity of the interactions, the overall system evolution is to an important degree unpredictable and uncontrollable.  However, because of self-organization, the local interactions eventually produce global coordination and synergy.

The processes of self-organization literally create “order out of disorder.” They are responsible for most of the patterns, structures and orderly arrangements seen in the natural world, e.g., crystallization, thermal convection of fluids, chemical oscillation, and animal swarming. Many phenomena in the realms of mind, society and culture are also due to self-organization. The network effect, where the more users use a product the greater its value becomes, such as the telephone and Facebook, is an example of self-organization through positive feedback.

Complex systems are able to strike a balance between rigidity and turbulence or stay on the “edge of chaos” because of these processes. A number of theorists have proposed that this precarious balance is precisely what is necessary for adaptation, self-organization, and life to occur, and that complex systems tend to spontaneously evolve towards this “edge.”

How does self-organization work?

It is the very first question that comes to anybody’s mind: Does every individual system in nature have to be probed on a case-by-case basis? Indeed, such a “stamp collection” approach has prevailed in sciences, such as in geophysics and biology, and attempts to look for a unifying description have been met with strong skepticism among the practitioners of those sciences, although there have been a handful of exceptions.

Perhaps nature does not need to invent a multitude of mechanisms, one for each system. Indeed the regularities observed in statistical description of complex systems support the view that only a limited number of mechanisms, or principles, contribute to complexity in all its manifestations – from the galactic or universal to the molecular.

For example, rivers, mountain ranges, etc. exhibit scaling behavior, both in spatial and temporal domains, where sediment deposits or landslides interrupt the quiet steady state. The landslides are scale-free, so are the earthquakes. The distribution of energy released during earthquakes is a simple power law, despite the enormous complexity of the underlying system, involving a multitude of geological structures. Forest fires exhibit a similar behavior, as do volcanic activities. Black holes are surrounded by accretion disks, from which the materials collapse into the black hole in intermittent, earthquake-like events, which interrupt the otherwise steady evolution and occur over a wide range of scales.

Biological evolution is also marked by regularities in the form of long periods of little activity punctuated by extinction events of all sizes where many species disappeared, and other species emerged. About 50 million years ago the dinosaurs vanished during such an event, but this is far from the biggest. 200 million years ago we had the Permian mass extinction, and 500 million years ago the Cambrian explosion took place. Paleontologists have coined the term “punctuated equilibrium” to describe the pace of evolution.

Scientific community asserts that punctuated equilibrium dynamics is the essential dynamical process for a system that evolves and becomes complex, with a specific behavior that is strongly contingent on its history. The periods of stasis allow the system to remember its past, the punctuations allow change in response to accumulated forcing factors over long time scales, and the criticality assures that even minor perturbations can have dramatic effects on the specific outcome of a particular system.

These dynamics allow complex systems to have distinct individual histories and forms. For example, the extinction of many species is attributed to seemingly minor accidents. If the tape of the history of life were to be rerun, an entirely different set of species would emerge.

How do complex systems emerge through self-organization?

Complex systems are delicately balanced between order and disorder in a self-organized criticality (SOC). Essentially, the concept of SOC is that due to slow external drive and in presence of dissipation, a system attains a critical operating point through self-organization. Once the criticality is reached, the system remains at the critical point without requiring any fine-tuning of its parameters (as is the case of general criticality). In traffic flow such a criticality would correspond to a uniform flow of cars with all cars moving at maximum possible velocity.

SOC is conceptually illustrated with avalanches in a pile of grains. The grains are dropped onto a pile one by one, and the pile ultimately reaches a stationary “critical” state in which its slope fluctuates about a constant angle of repose that the sand pile cannot exceed no matter how much sand is added. Thus, each new grain is capable of inducing an avalanche on any of the relevant size scales. The mechanism of the local avalanches decreases the local slopes whenever they become too steep.

In the ordered state, every place looks like every other place. In the disordered state, there are no correlations between events that are separated in time or space. It is only in the critical state that very large correlations exist, so the individual degrees of freedom cannot be isolated. The infinite degrees of freedom interacting with one another cannot be reduced to a few. This irreducibility is what makes critical systems complex.

SOC provides a general mechanism for the emergence of complex behavior in nature from spontaneous simple local interactions. It has been proposed that the crust of the earth, river networks, superconductors in a magnetic field, traffic, etc., all operate in SOC.

Complexity is a hierarchical phenomenon, where each level of complexity leads to the next: astrophysics, with its own hierarchy of scales, leads to geophysics, which is the prerequisite for chemistry, biology, and ultimately the social sciences. Although the origin of the hierarchy is not understood, we do have the rudiments of a theory for the emergence of one level out of the previous one. Due to this hierarchy of emergence, it isn’t necessary to understand the mechanism of the Big Bang in order to understand the dynamics of earthquakes.

A common feature of the systems mentioned thus far, and perhaps of all complex systems, is that they are driven by slow pumping of energy from a lower level of the hierarchy. For instance, biological life is driven by the input of energy from the sun. The energy is stored and later dissipated in a scale-free avalanche process like an earthquake.

Even a small increment in energy can trigger a large catastrophe, making these systems strongly contingent on previous history. They operate far from equilibrium, which is necessary since systems in equilibrium tend to become more and more disordered (rather than becoming complex) over time, according to the second law of thermodynamics. That equilibrium states are catastrophically unstable may be seen in the traffic example – a smooth traffic flow is more likely to exhibit breakdown events or avalanches, such as traffic jams, than stopped traffic. Actually, there are some striking statistical regularities indicating that the mass extinctions are part of a self-organized critical process.

Where is the evolution of complex matter heading?

The emergence of thinking organisms is the most recent episode in the evolution saga. To this end, the development of the brain among species is perhaps the strongest evidence that the Universe is evolving towards complex organization and collective operation from small size and individual addressing. The brain is the most complex object known to us and builds up by self-organization. It is also self-wired and self-integrated, as well as self-connected through the sensory pathways.

The emergence of the brain should come as no surprise. In a sub-critical world everything would be simple and uniform – there would be nothing to learn. In a supercritical world, everything would be changing all the time in a chaotic way – it would be impossible to learn. The brain is necessary for us in order to navigate in a complex, critical world.

The only remaining question: what other and what higher forms of complex matter can there be to evolve or be created? Whatever evolves or is created, will likely have novel features unseen thus far. Supramolecular science operating beyond the realm of molecules is trying to unravel the complexification of matter through self-organization.

Together with the corresponding areas in physics and biology, supramolecular chemistry is leading towards a science of complex matter, of informed, self-organized, evolutive matter. The goal is to progressively discover, understand, and implement the rules that govern its evolution from inanimate to animate and beyond, to ultimately acquire the ability to create new forms of complex matter.

Midnight Wanderer

“Transport is here,” thundered a service personnel decked in U.S. Army fatigues while standing in the doorway of the makeshift waiting lounge. There were about fifteen of us in that enclosure – all men; a few were soldiers and the rest were Department of Defense contractors like me. Some were reading or filling out papers; the least concerned among us used their Government-issued backpacks as pillows. It was well past midnight, probably around one o’clock. Most of us were there for extended hours and people had grown tired of waiting. In this part of the world, transportation was not guaranteed. This was a battlefield.

A day earlier, I had taken a flight out of Kuwait City to arrive at Camp Victory. A part of Baghdad International Airport was carved up to house five U.S. military camps that served the Green Zone. From here, I would be flying north, to Tikrit – Saddam Hussain’s hometown. I had left home, in New Jersey, soon after Labor Day to get here. The night outside was warm in this early part of September. “Remember to keep yourself hydrated,” cautioned the security officer when I was checking into the Green Zone, “it is hundred-and-ten degrees (°F) during daytime.” Two weeks earlier, the mercury was hitting 120°F (49°C). Needless to say, we drank water like fish. Water bottles were stacked up throughout the facility.

“Those who want to go to Camp Speicher – the transport is here,” repeated the soldier. I quickly grabbed the steel-plated protective vest and Kevlar helmet from underneath my seat. Without those armors, one would not be allowed on the “transport.” A race ensued to slap on the gears – one would easily be a good thirty-pound heavier with them – and falling in a line. The ‘courtesy’ transport was on a first-come-first-serve basis, and oh, the soldiers were bumped ahead of the contractors. I learnt it the hard way on the previous night. By the time I ensured that my helmet was secured before getting into the line, there were a dozen people ahead of me. Each transport, a UH-60 Black Hawk, could ferry about eleven troops.

No room inside the transport meant I had to look for an accommodation outside.  Fortunately, I was traveling with two other team members from the same project, one of whom was a Government employee. He was conversant with the military lingo and could find out the directions to our “hotel.” We hailed a “courtesy” taxi to ferry us. On our way, we passed one of Saddam Hussein’s several palaces. Our driver, who was doubling as a tour guide, told us that that opulent structure featured gold-trimmed toilets! As fate would have been, the erstwhile owner of that place was resting six feet under, while the visitors swapped stories about his excesses.

Our overnight accommodation turned out to be a “tent city” with rows of empty cots under each roof. “I can sleep anywhere,” I thought and so did my companions. In our sprawling tent, cold air was being pumped through a maze of ducts. We soon found out, picking a cot that was optimally positioned with respect to these ducts, was a challenge. Too close to the ducts, one would freeze to death; too far out, the sweltering heat would overpower. Eventually, we ended up huddling in a tight spot.

I looked at my watch; its hands had struck two o’clock. That would be nine o’clock in Baghdad time. It had been a couple of hours since we landed with the setting sun on our back. In the rush to avail a transport to our final destination, we had overlooked the dinner. “Should we look for a place to eat,” I inquired my fellowmen. By that time, I was no longer certain of the outcome of such an effort.

The Ugandan soldiers guarding the camp (outsourcing had hit the US military too!) informed us that the dining facility was closed for the night. There were a few take-out places that might be open, like Subway, Pizza Hut, etc. “I’m in a mood for fried chicken,” declared one of my companions. Lo and behold, we found a KFC place that was open, or so we thought.

As we approached the kiosk, the sight and sound were familiar. There were three young men conversing in Bengali. I went straight to the point. “Are you from Dhaka,” I asked in Bengali. They were a bit startled; clearly they were not used to seeing a person from their ethnic background among the visitors. I went on conversing in Bengali to the bewilderment of my colleagues. The place had closed up for the night, but I resolved the situation in our favor. I did not want to be a loser for a second time on that day.

I beckoned my party to follow me to a picnic table in the quadrangle. Very soon, the three lads arrived with a large bucket of fried chicken, a container of coleslaw and several biscuits. We continued chatting in Bengali for a little longer, after which they left without even collecting the money. I explained to my companions how those men took pity on us and gave away their share of dinner. Perhaps, our common ethnicity had helped me to broker the conversation. However, that was not the first time I had seen humanity to prevail over all other considerations and it would not be the last.

“Please have your paperwork ready,” reminded the soldier as we filed past him into the open field adjacent to the waiting enclosure. There were ten people in front of me. Would I be fortunate enough to bag a ride on this night? I looked behind where my co-travelers were standing; they put their thumbs up. Nobody seemed as anxious to catch a ride as I was.

My eyes were fixated on a pair of bright dots in the distant horizon. As they grew bigger, the whirring of rotor blades became more distinct. The Black Hawks mostly flew in pair, but never alone. Soon the beams illuminated the whole field and the aerial transports gently landed kicking up moon dust. We were wearing protective glasses for no small reason. I could feel sweat dripping from underneath the helmet and down my cheeks. The steel-plated vest seemed heavier with every breath.

The doors of the Black Hawks opened to unload their human cargo. A group of soldiers and civilians, twenty in my count, streamed past us. I heaved a sigh of relief. We were asked to file against the rear of the birds to avoid being sucked into the rotating blades. The men ahead of me got into one, while I waited for my turn. A soldier motioned me to climb into the front. Front? I was bewildered for a moment. He again pointed towards the cockpit. Carrying two backpacks and clutching the helmet and the glasses – boy, did I move fast – I stepped into a Black Hawk, a machinery made famous by Mark Bowden’s book Black Hawk Down, for the first time in my life!

The dim cabin light had made the interior mystic. The two pilots were listening to radio communications, while the two gunners on either side adjusted their night goggles. Before I could overcome my bewilderment, the doors of front and rear cabins were slammed shut. I was still struggling to secure the seatbelt – the buckle on that contraption was very different from the familiar ones – when the helicopter took off, executing its typical gyrations. I glanced at the soldier sitting next to me. He was taking a nap with the M-16 carefully tucked between his legs, a sight reminiscent of the daily passengers on local trains in India. I held on to the seatbelt tightly as the pull of the gravity became apparent.

The helicopter continued to climb up and then pushed forward; piercing the envelope of darkness, it headed for a destination in an unknown land. The final leg of my journey had begun. A blast of warm air greeted us. The outside view, through the windows where the gunners stood, looked very familiar. It was as if I was peering at rural India with its dimly lit roads and scattered clusters of homes. The young gunners craned their necks to spot muzzle flash as the helicopter leveled off at a low altitude.

A train of thoughts wrecked my mind. How predictable was a war zone? Would I reach my destination that night? I heard from a colleague in New Jersey about his difficulties to get out of this place when he did his tour several years ago. He kept getting bumped off flights, which were ferrying wounded soldiers, at the height of the Iraq War. Eventually, he could secure a ride after five days of wait in Balad.

What would happen if the helicopter came under fire? Would the two young gunners be able to hold their firepower? I was reminded of the scene in Black Hawk Down in which Black Hawk Super Six-One was hit by an RPG and crashed inside Mogadishu. Before coming on this tour, I had to spend an entire week in Ft. Benning, Georgia, undergoing basic training. We learned how to apply tourniquet to stem the flow of blood when a solder got hurt. We trained our sights to spot a suicide bomber or a buried IED amidst unfamiliar settings. However, we weren’t briefed on our options if the helicopter had crash landed. I couldn’t close my eyes; the worries kept me peering into the darkness.

Suddenly, the vehicle jerked and started to descend. One can imagine how I reacted to that. I looked around and saw tranquility – I was assured of my survival. I glanced at my watch; it indicated that we had been airborne for about forty-five minutes. We were in Speicher already, I pondered. That couldn’t be possible as we were told that the journey would last several hours. So, what else could be the reason of the descent? By then, I was certain that the helicopter was not hit by artillery fire. Eventually, we came to rest on the tarmac. We were asked to disembark without our belongings and walk towards a waiting area. We obliged while moving away from the rotating blades quickly. I had become conversant with the etiquette of the battlefield. 

After a short while, we were summoned to return to our transport. My travel companions were seated in the main compartment with a few soldiers and several civilians. They had found out that “essential” goods were being delivered to that post on the outskirts of Baghdad. After we were reseated, I asked my co-passenger: “Sir, if you won’t mind, can you kindly show me how to buckle up?” “This is how I do it,” demonstrated the soldier with his seatbelt. “Tango Mike,” I could not resist the temptation to demonstrate my newly-acquired military lingo skills to the Good Samaritan. All of a sudden, I felt that my desperation had evaporated. I was firmly buckled as the Black Hawks lifted off for Tikrit.

The helicopters quickly ascended into the night sky. I learned from my soldier friend, James, the rotorcraft had to stay beyond the range of small arms and light weapons fire. We were in hostile territories north of Baghdad. He also informed me that the flight path would take us over Balad, but we would not be landing at that military base. Instead, we would fly close to Tigris River on our journey north into Tikrit.

James was on his second tour of Iraq and was from Modesto, California. His current assignment would last for another four months. He hoped to be home for Christmas, to enjoy his “R&R” with his two young daughters. Our short exchanges ended soon as James drifted off to slumber. He and his unit were returning to Camp Speicher after a week-long mission around Baghdad.

The interior of the air vehicle had become eerily quiet. It was dark already; the dim lights were switched off as soon as we were airborne. The whirring of the rotor was the only lingering sound disrupting the otherwise still night. As I stared into the darkness, I suddenly faced that eternal question – who was I in this grand cosmos? What was I doing at that very moment in a place literally ‘foreign’ to me? Yes, I was on this post-midnight mission to fulfill my contractual obligation towards the U.S. Government – deliver new force protection technologies. However, my true contribution towards the grand scheme of the universe extending all around me was utterly insignificant; and so were those of James, who by then was in deep sleep, and his comrades. In fact, no one in the whole wide world at that very moment could have claimed to impact, beyond personal confines, any event with far reaching consequences.

Below me extended a dark carpet that was the land of Iraq, embroidered with scattered lights. The bright clusters signified military bases and outposts; the dim lights shone from the homes of ordinary citizens, mostly along Tigris River. Who would be burning midnight oil in those homes? Could it be a young student preparing for exams, a housewife winding up her day’s work or a family taking turns to guard the front door fearful of it being knocked down in the middle of the night? A despot and a prolonged war must have had profound effects on the psyche of the population; but I, being where I was, would never encounter these inhabitants or find the right answer.

There is perhaps no better display of self-interest than in a war. The Iraq War was in its eighth year by then and was on the way to joining the Afghan War as the longest U.S. engagements militarily. I could barely account for a handful of the ‘great’ wars that were influential in changing the course of history. Wars are like waves in a vast ocean; they flow and ebb in the expanse of humanity without leaving any trace.

As I sat motionless in my seat, I started to feel the weight of the vest. It was probably the longest time that I had worn the armor. According to the regulation, I was supposed to retain it as well as the helmet throughout my flight. I glanced at James; he seemed to be at ease in his gear. The two gunners were still at their stations, peering into the darkness through their night vision goggles. I loosened the straps of my helmet and unbuckled the vest; I inhaled the warm air circulating inside the cabin.

Words penned in another century came rushing to me:

“The last sun of the century sets amidst the blood-red clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred.

The naked passion of self-love of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the clash of steel and the howling verses of vengeance.”

I could not shake off Rabindranath Tagore at that hour in the most unlikely of places – inside a Black Hawk flying over a battle-scarred land. Then I remembered Wilfred Owen, the famous trench poet of World War I. He found solace in the beauty of Tagore’s words in the midst of a war that caused widespread suffering among civilians as the Allies pursued the retreating Germans through French villages in the summer and fall of 1918.

Owen perished while crossing the Sambre–Oise Canal, exactly one week before the signing of the Armistice. After the death of her son, Owen's mother retrieved his personal possessions. In his pocketbook, she found Poem 96 of Tagore’s Gitanjali (“Song Offerings”) that Owen recited in his farewell address to his mother. "When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable," reads the opening line.

I wondered if Owen felt the same way as I did, arriving on the battlefield for the first time. He certainly had a much longer tenure and saw the horrors of war up-close. Unlike Owen, I was not in a position to exchange farewell with anybody. My life’s journey was far from over. However, between my excitement of stepping onto a Black Hawk and my apprehension of surviving the nearly three-hour flight in a battlefield, I could say my experience of that night had been “unsurpassable.”

Tagore’s premonition in the closing hours of the 19th century about the hubris of jingoistic pride embodied in the model of the modern nation-state, reverberated in the darkened cabin of the Black Hawk. Each of us was representing our self-interest to preserve that model in one way or the other; so did Owen, through his participation in the war. Yet he found refuge from the crass materialism engulfing his world in Tagore's poems, which encapsulated a simple faith in man and divinity.

A cloak of silence was draped all around me, except for the sound of the rotors. I gazed straight ahead, past the pilots, out through the cockpit window. As far as my eyes could see, darkness extended to the horizon. We should be following the course of Tigris River as James had explained, but apparently we did not. I looked up – the canopy was decorated with twinkling stars. We must be above the smoke and dust layers that quite often obliterated the majestic view, I thought.

Thousands of miles removed from my comfort zone and my familiar world, the crammed, dark, hot interior of the Black Hawk felt apocalyptic. At the same time, it served as a protective enclosure from unknown forces. Did Owen also find his trenches, his fox holes, to be such dichotomies when bullets whizzed and shells exploded overhead? And did he peer at the star-filled sky from his vantage point and feel the infinitely bigger presence embracing him? If indeed he did, he probably had arrived at the same conclusion as I – humankind is not in control of its destiny.

Our behavior is predicated on limited knowledge about our world. We can go only so far guided by our own actions before those of others force us to re-strategize. These snippets of activities when spliced create the trail of our journey through space and time. A successful completion of my journey that night rested on the actions of many – the pilots, the gunners and even James - who were busy ensuring that my chosen plan ran its course.

Would I safely return to my comfort zone, would I ever encounter a night like this in another place – answers to those questions rested on our collective actions in the future. All I could feel at that very moment, thundering across the starry sky, was being an awestruck wanderer in the grand universe. Raising my voice above the hum of the rotors, I sang to myself:

“In this Universe, space and eternity

I, the mortal, alone I wander, wander in awe.”