After billions of years of monotony, the universe is waking up

Theoretical physicist David Deutsch delivers a mind-bending meditation on the "great monotony" -- the idea that nothing novel has appeared in the universe for billions of years -- and shows how humanity's capacity to create explanatory knowledge could be the thing that bucks this trend. "Humans are not playthings of cosmic forces," he says. "We are users of cosmic forces."

I'm thrilled to be talking to you
by this high-tech method.

Of all humans who have ever lived,

the overwhelming majority
would have found what we are doing here

incomprehensible, unbelievable.

Because, for thousands of centuries,

in the dark time
before the scientific revolution

and the Enlightenment,

people had low expectations.

For their lives,
for their descendants' lives.

Typically, they expected

nothing significantly new
or better to be achieved, ever.

This pessimism
famously appears in the Bible,

in one of the few biblical passages
with a named author.

He's called Qohelet,
he's an enigmatic chap.

He wrote, "What has been is what will be,

and what has been done
is what will be done;

there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there something of which it is said,
'Look, this is new.'

No, that thing was already done
in the ages that came before us."

Qohelet was describing a world
without novelty.

By novelty I mean something new
in Qohelet's sense,

not merely something that's changed,

but a significant change
with lasting effects,

where people really would say,

"Look, this is new,"

and, preferably, "good."

So, purely random changes aren't novelty.

OK, Heraclitus did say
a man can't step in the same river twice,

because it's not the same river,
he's not the same man.

But if the river is changing randomly,

it really is the same river.

In contrast,

if an idea in a mind
spreads to other minds,

and changes lives for generations,

that is novelty.

Human life without novelty

is life without creativity,
without progress.

It's a static society, a zero-sum game.

That was the living hell
in which Qohelet lived.

Like everyone, until a few centuries ago.

It was hell, because for humans,

suffering is intimately
related to staticity.

Because staticity isn't just frustrating.

All sources of suffering --

famine, pandemics, incoming asteroids,

and things like war and slavery,

hurt people only until we have created
the knowledge to prevent them.

There's a story in Somerset Maugham's
novel "Of Human Bondage"

about an ancient sage

who summarizes the entire
history of mankind as,

"He was born,

he suffered and he died."

And it goes on:

"Life was insignificant
and death without consequence."

And indeed, the overwhelming majority
of humans who have ever lived

had lives of suffering and grueling labor,

before dying young and in agony.

And yes, in most generations

nothing had any novel consequence
for subsequent generations.

Nevertheless, when ancient people
tried to explain their condition,

they typically did so
in grandiose cosmic terms.

Which was the right thing to do,
as it turns out.

Even though their actual
explanations, their myths,

were largely false.

Some tried to explain

the grimness and monotony of their world

in terms of an endless cosmic war
between good and evil,

in which humans were the battleground.

Which neatly explained why their own
experience was full of suffering,

and why progress never happened.

But it wasn't true.

Amazingly enough,

all their conflict and suffering

were just due to the way
they processed ideas.

Being satisfied with dogma,
and just-so stories,

rather than criticizing them

and trying to guess better explanations
of the world and of their own condition.

Twentieth-century physics
did create better explanations,

but still in terms of a cosmic war.

This time, the combatants
were order and chaos, or entropy.

That story does allow
for hope for the future.

But in another way,

it's even bleaker than the ancient myths,

because the villain, entropy,

is preordained to have the final victory,

when the inexorable laws of thermodynamics
shut down all novelty

with the so-called
heat death of the universe.

Currently, there's a story
of a local battle in that war,

between sustainability, which is order,

and wastefulness, which is chaos --

that's the contemporary take
on good and evil,

often with the added twist
that humans are the evil,

so we shouldn't even try to win.

And recently,

there have been tales
of another cosmic war,

between gravity,
which collapses the universe,

and dark energy, which finally shreds it.

So this time,

whichever of those cosmic forces wins,

we lose.

All those pessimistic accounts
of the human condition

contain some truth,

but as prophecies,

they're all misleading,
and all for the same reason.

None of them portrays humans
as what we really are.

As Jacob Bronowski said,

"Man is not a figure in the landscape --

he is the shaper of the landscape."

In other words,

humans are not playthings
of cosmic forces,

we are users of cosmic forces.

I'll say more about that in a moment,

but first, what sorts
of thing create novelty?

Well, the beginning
of the universe surely did.

The big bang, nearly 14 billion years ago,

created space, time and energy,

everything physical.

And then, immediately,

what I call the first era of novelty,

with the first atom, the first star,

the first black hole,

the first galaxy.

But then, at some point,

novelty vanished from the universe.

Perhaps from as early
as 12 or 13 billion years ago,

right up to the present day,

there's never been any new kind
of astronomical object.

There's only been what I call
the great monotony.

So, Qohelet was accidentally
even more right

about the universe beyond the Sun

than he was about under the Sun.

So long as the great monotony lasts,

what has been out there

really is what will be.

And there is nothing out there

of which it can truly be said,
"Look, this is new."

Nevertheless,

at some point during the great monotony,

there was an event --
inconsequential at the time,

and even billions of years later,

it had affected nothing
beyond its home planet --

yet eventually, it could cause
cosmically momentous novelty.

That event was the origin of life:

creating the first genetic knowledge,

coding for biological adaptations,

coding for novelty.

On Earth, it utterly
transformed the surface.

Genes in the DNA
of single-celled organisms

put oxygen in the air,

extracted CO2,

put chalk and iron ore into the ground,

hardly a cubic inch of the surface
to some depth has remained unaffected

by those genes.

The Earth became,
if not a novel place on the cosmic scale,

certainly a weird one.

Just as an example, beyond Earth,

only a few hundred different
chemical substances have been detected.

Presumably, there are some more
in lifeless locations,

but on Earth,

evolution created billions
of different chemicals.

And then the first plants, animals,

and then, in some ancestor
species of ours,

explanatory knowledge.

For the first time in the universe,
for all we know.

Explanatory knowledge
is the defining adaptation of our species.

It differs from
the nonexplanatory knowledge

in DNA, for instance,

by being universal.

That is to say,
whatever can be understood,

can be understood
through explanatory knowledge.

And more, any physical process

can be controlled by such knowledge,

limited only by the laws of physics.

And so, explanatory knowledge, too,

has begun to transform
the Earth's surface.

And soon, the Earth will become
the only known object in the universe

that turns aside incoming asteroids
instead of attracting them.

Qohelet was understandably misled

by the painful slowness
of progress in his day.

Novelty in human life
was still too rare, too gradual,

to be noticed in one generation.

And in the biosphere,

the evolution of novel species
was even slower.

But both things were happening.

Now, why is there a great monotony
in the universe at large,

and what makes our planet buck that trend?

Well, the universe at large
is relatively simple.

Stars are so simple

that we can predict their behavior
billions of years into the future,

and retrodict how they formed
billions of years ago.

So why is the universe simple?

Basically, it's because big,
massive, powerful things

strongly affect lesser things,
and not vice versa.

I call that the hierarchy rule.

For example, when a comet hits the Sun,

the Sun carries on just as before,

but the comet is vaporized.

For the same reason,

big things are not much affected
by small parts of themselves,

i.e., by details.

Which means that their overall behavior

is simple.

And since nothing very new
can happen to things

that remain simple,

the hierarchy rule,
by causing large-scale simplicity,

has caused the great monotony.

But, the saving grace is

the hierarchy rule is not a law of nature.

It just happens to have held
so far in the universe,

except here.

In our biosphere,
molecule-sized objects, genes,

control vastly disproportionate resources.

The first genes for photosynthesis,

by causing their own proliferation,

and then transforming
the surface of the planet,

have violated or reversed
the hierarchy rule

by the mind-blowing factor
of 10 to the power 40.

Explanatory knowledge
is potentially far more powerful

because of universality,

and more rapidly created.

When human knowledge
has achieved a factor 10 to the 40,

it will pretty much control
the entire galaxy,

and will be looking beyond.

So humans,

and any other explanation creators
who may exist out there,

are the ultimate agents
of novelty for the universe.

We are the reason and the means

by which novelty and creativity,
knowledge, progress,

can have objective,
large-scale physical effects.

From the human perspective,

the only alternative
to that living hell of static societies

is continual creation of new ideas,

behaviors, new kinds of objects.

This robot will soon be obsolete,

because of new explanatory
knowledge, progress.

But from the cosmic perspective,

explanatory knowledge
is the nemesis of the hierarchy rule.

It's the destroyer of the great monotony.

So it's the creator
of the next cosmological era,

the Anthropocene.

If one can speak of a cosmic war,

it's not the one portrayed
in those pessimistic stories.

It's a war between monotony and novelty,

between stasis and creativity.

And in this war,

our side is not destined to lose.

If we choose to apply our unique
capacity to create explanatory knowledge,

we could win.

Thanks.

(Applause)