Far From Equilibrium

Dr. Bob used to say you can't talk about illness until you know what life is. So this is the epilogue; we go into physics, metaphysics, and the theories that govern complex systems. Buckle up, this is gonna blow your mind! Think of it as a small reward for putting up with me for this long.

Let's start small, with an experiment first done in 1900.

Imagine a thin layer of oil in a dish that's heated from below. At first the heat just creeps up through it. Turn it up a little more, and the oil sorts itself into hexagons, with warm oil rising in some places and cool oil sinking in others.

And nobody arranged that — billions of billions of molecules started moving together, in a seemingly coordinated fashion, because moving together carries the heat away faster.

Dr. Bob would say,

Now picture a chemical mix in a dish. Once mixed, it should turn one color and stay that way. But instead, rings of blue spread out, fade, and come back for as long as the chemicals keep reacting.

When Boris Belousov sent this to a journal, the editors turned it down as impossible. But the physics they had in mind was written for things settling down, not for things with energy flowing through them.

You are also a chemical mix. Your heartbeat, your breathing, your sleep and waking all keep time. Inside your cells, energy molecules rise and fall in waves.

Too little flow and nothing happens, and too much tears the pattern apart. Life lives in the band between, the same way the whirlpool in Rule One does.

Dr. Bob's big idea was to take this one rule and take it to its logical conclusion. Energy flowing through chemicals in an early ocean organized them, and some of those mixes got good enough to copy themselves. In his view, that was the start of life.

Cells that shared the work became bodies. Bodies became families, then towns, then markets. Each one holds its ‘form’ only while something flows through it: food, money, news, people.

The planet does it too. Sunlight arrives hot and leaves as cooler heat into the dark. Weather, rivers and every living thing are patterns that form along the way.

He called this a dynamic fractal. An ordinary fractal repeats the same shape every time you zoom in. In his version, each repeat changes its surroundings, so the next repeat has to adapt and comes out a little different.

Here's the lock from the beginning back now. Anything that lives on flow has the same problem: the world keeps changing, so it has to keep updating.

In mice, the CB1 lock helps with that. Move the hidden platform in a water maze, and normal mice soon find the new spot. Mice without CB1 learn the first spot fine, but they keep going back to it. They also keep freezing at a tone long after it stopped signaling danger.

Dr. Bob saw the whole history of life through this pattern. He thought the chemistry your body uses to let go and update was one of evolution's main tools for staying far from equilibrium, and that brains with more of it could change more.

He went one step further, and most scientists wouldn't follow him there. He thought people vary in how much of this updating chemistry they have. In his view, people born with less endocannabinoid tone look backward, agree with each other more easily, and end up in charge. He called them backward-looking and forward-looking people, and he believed the future depended on shifting the balance.

Where I've landed is that facing forward is a habit, and anyone can practice it. You don't need the right genes or the right plant. You need to notice when you're swimming to where the platform used to be, and turn around.

Patterns that are far from equilibrium have one more strange habit. Before they transform into a new shape, they wobble. The swings get bigger and take longer to settle. Ecologists have seen it in a lake before it turned green, and climate scientists see it in the records before the ice ages ended.

Dr. Bob saw the fall of the Berlin Wall this way. There were years of pressure, then weeks of wobble, then one confused announcement on a November night, and the whole thing flipped.

He believed the whole world was wobbling like that, in weather, money and politics, and that it could tip toward fear or toward a freer kind of order. And I can't tell you which way it goes.

In this physics, equilibrium is what you call it when the flow stops. A charged battery can still do things, but a dead one has already done them. Dr. Bob described health as how far you are from equilibrium, and aging as the slow drift back.

Dr. Bob died in 2023. By his own physics, the whirlpool that was him stopped turning.

An idea is a whirlpool too, and it only keeps its shape while it moves through people. The water that made him is gone. The pattern is moving through me now, and for the last few minutes it's been moving through you.

So test it. Keep what works and throw out what doesn't, including anything he or I got wrong. In the meantime, stay far from equilibrium.