Is there a second arrow of time? New research says yes

I have to make a confession here. I have to be honest. We could be wrong. We could be

spectacularly wrong. But it's also possible that science is missing a profound truth about the

cosmos. We have these 10 or so laws of nature, only one of which currently has an arrow of time

That's the second law of thermodynamics, the increase in entropy. It's disorder. It's decay. We all grow old. We all die

But the second law doesn't explain why things evolve, why life emerges from non-life

You look around and you see flowers bloom and trees blossom and birds sing

It seems like all of those things are counter to the idea of disorder

In fact, it's a kind of ordering of nature. So let me tell you what we think

We think there's a missing law, a second arrow of time that describes this increase in order

and we think it has to do with an increase in information. So there's two possibilities

We could just be wrong. We could be terribly wrong, dramatically wrong

But I think if we're wrong, we're wrong in a very interesting way

And I think if we're right, it's profoundly important. I'm Bob Hazen

I'm a staff scientist at the Earth and Planets Laboratory of Carnegie Science in Washington, D.C

I do mineralogy, astrobiology. I love science. We think that for some reason there been missing a second arrow of time And that arrow has to do with an increase of information an increase in order an increase of patterning that goes side by side with the arrow of increasing disorder

an increasing chaos, entropy. The core of everything we've been thinking about in terms

of the missing law is evolution. When I say the word evolution, you immediately think of Darwin

But this idea of selection goes much, much beyond Darwin and life

It applies to the evolution of atoms. It applies to the evolution of minerals. It applies to the evolution of planets and atmospheres and oceans

Evolution, which we see as being an increase in diversity, of patterning, in complexity of systems through time

And so the question is, well, what is evolution? Evolution is simply selection for function

And this applies to every kind of system. Now, in life, you select for organisms that can survive long enough that they can reproduce and have offspring that will pass on their characteristics

That's what Darwin said. And that's one very important example of selection for function

But in the mineral world, you select for organizations of assemblies of structures of atoms that persist, that can last billions of years, even in new environments

They don't break down. They don't dissolve. They don't weather away. It's very ogous to biological evolution, but it's different in detail

We think there's a missing law. It's a law of evolution. And if there is a law, it has to be quantitative

It has to have a metric. You have to be able to measure something. And what we've zeroed in on is a fascinating concept about information

But not just information in general. It's something called functional information. Let me see if I can explain this to you because it took me a while to figure it out myself Imagine a system an evolving system that has the potential to form vast numbers of different configurations

Let's say they're atoms to make minerals, and you have dozens of different mineral-forming elements

and they can arrange themselves in all different ways. and 99.99999999 and it can keep going

percent of those configurations won't work. They will fall apart. They'll never form

A tiny, tiny fraction makes a stable mineral and you end up with a few stable minerals

and lots of rejects. Now, all you need to do is think about that fraction

If it's one in 100 trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion possibilities that's stable

then you can represent that fraction as information. And because it's such a tiny

tiny fraction, you need a lot of bits of information to do that. That's functional

information. Evolution is simply an increase in functional information because as you select

for better and better outcomes, you select for minerals that are more and more stable

You select for living things that can swim, they can fly, they can see

You need more information and each step of the evolutionary ladder leads you to increasing functional information

So our law, our missing law, the second arrow of time is called the law of increasing functional information

And that's the parallel arrow of time that we think is out there that we want to understand

The idea of increasing functional information has a really profound implication Think about the functional information of a coffee cup You might be holding one right now You have a bunch of atoms and those atoms could be in trillions of trillions

of trillions of different configurations, but only a tiny fraction of those configurations

will hold a cup of coffee. Now, think about a coffee cup as a paperweight. I know you've used

a coffee cup as a paperweight. We all have, and it's pretty good at that, but you can make a better

paperweight, and a coffee cup makes a terrible screwdriver. So think about this. We're saying

that the coffee cup has value as a coffee cup. It has some value as a paperweight, but it has no

value as a screwdriver. That's contextual. So this is why the second arrow of time is difficult

for science, because it's saying there's something in the natural world that is not absolute. It's

contextual. It depends on what your purpose is. It depends on what your function is

If it's true, what we're saying is there's something in the universe

that is increasing order, it's increasing complexity, and it isn't doing this in a

random way. It's selecting for function. And if it is, if you're selecting for function

it means that there almost seems to be, can I use the word purpose

Do minerals have a purpose? Do atmospheres have a purpose? Does life have a purpose

To me, there's something real there, and the old way of thinking of a single arrow of time

no longer rings true to me