The Order-to-Order Principle

Two Ways Of Producing Orderliness

The orderliness encountered in the unfolding of life springs from a different source.

There are 2 different ‘mechanisms’ that produce orderly events:

1. The ‘statistical mechanism’

This produces ‘order from disorder’

2. Order-to-Order

This produces ‘order from order’.

This is actually followed in Nature.

It alone conveys an understanding of the line of natural events and their irreversibility.

But the ’laws of physics’ derived from order-to-order do not straightaway explain the behaviour of living matter.

• The most striking features of living matter are based mostly on the ‘order-from-order’ principle.

These 2 different mechanisms do not bring about the same type of law.

• Do not expect your key to open your neighbour’s door as well.

The New Principle Is Not Alien To Physics

This new principle is quantum theory all over again.

All physical laws are based on statistics.

There are phenomena whose conspicuous features:

• are visibly based directly on the ‘order-from-order’ principle
• have nothing to do with statistics or molecular disorder.

The order of the solar system, the motion of the planets, is maintained for an almost indefinite time.

The constellation of this moment is directly connected with the constellation at any particular moment in the times of the Pyramids; it can be traced back to it, or vice versa.

Historical eclipses have been calculated and have been found in close agreement with historical records or have even in some cases served to correct the accepted chronology.

These calculations do not imply any statistics. They are based solely on Newton’s law of universal attraction.

The regular motion of a clock also has nothing to do with statistics.

In short, all purely mechanical events follow distinctly and directly the ‘order-from-order’ principle.

If we say ‘mechanical’, the term must be taken in a wide sense.

A very useful kind of clock is based on the regular transmission of electric pulses from the power station.

Max Planck wrote on the topic ‘The Dynamical and the Statistical Type of Law’

The distinction is precisely the one we have here labelled as ‘order from order’ and ‘order from disorder’.

That paper showed how the interesting statistical type of law, controlling large-scale events, is constituted from the ‘dynamical’ laws supposed to govern the small-scale events, the interaction of the single atoms and molecules.

The latter type is illustrated by large-scale mechanical phenomena, as the motion of the planets or of a clock, etc.

Thus, this ’new’ order-from-order principle, which is the clue to the understanding of life, is not new to physics.

Planck’s attitude even vindicates priority for it.

We seem to arrive at the ridiculous conclusion that the clue to the understanding of life is that it is based on a pure mechanism, a ‘clock-work’ in the sense of Planck’s paper.

The conclusion is not ridiculous and is not entirely wrong. But it has to be taken ‘with a very big grain of salt’.

THE MOTION OF A CLOCK

A clock is not at all a purely mechanical phenomenon.

A purely mechanical clock would need no spring, no winding.

Once set in motion, it would go on forever.

A real clock without a spring stops after a few beats of the pendulum, its mechanical energy is turned into heat. This is an infinitely complicated atomistic process.

The general picture the physicist forms of it compels him,to admit that the inverse process is not entirely impossible: a springless clock might suddenly begin to move, at the expense of the heat energy of its own cog wheels and of the environ- ment. The physicist would have to say: The clock experiences an exceptionally intense fit of Brownian movement.

We have seen in chapter 2 (p. 16) that with a very sensitive torsional balance (electrometer or galvanometer) that sort of thing happens all the time. In the case of a clock it is, of course, infinitely unlikely.

Whether the motion of a clock is to be assigned to the dynamical or to the statistical type of lawful events (to use Planck’s expressions) depends on our attitude. In calling it a dynamical phenomenon we fix attention on the regular going that can be secured by a comparatively weak spring, which overcomes the small disturbances by heat motion, so that we may disregard them. But if we remember that without a spring the clock is gradually slowed down by friction, we find that this process can only be understood as a statistical phenomenon.

However insignificant the frictional and heating effects in a clock may be from the practical point of view, there can be no doubt that the second attitude, which does not neglect them, is the more fundamental one, even when we are faced with the regular motion of a clock that is driven by a spring.

The driving mechanism does not do away with the statistical nature of the process.

The true physical picture includes the possibility that even a regularly going clock should all at once invert its motion and, working backward, rewind its own spring - at the expense of the heat of the environment. The event is just ‘still a little less likely’ than a ‘Brownian fit’ of a clock without driving mechanism.