Part of de Chardin's ability to anticipate many of the ideas and concepts with which sciences like physics and biology are dealing with, stem from the fact that he uses evolution as the vehicle and not the tenor of his argument. Unlike so many biologists of his time, who argue evolution to prove it, de Chardin took evolution as an inarguable fact. Consequently, he was able to fit into a larger context. He didn't just dwell on single transformations. He provided a description of evolution, particulary of organic life from unicellular organisms to the phyla that allowed the development of a nervous system. This description was framed within the concepts that physics was dealing with at the beginning of the century: namely, the atom and energy. By doing so, de Chardin does not only provide a feasible synthesis, but enlarges evolution's scope.

The Phenomenon of Man sees evolution as the by-product of the latent energy which matter contains, a phenomena which Einstein codified in his famous equation. The Phenomenon of Man was written after Einstein formulated special and general relativity, after Plank explained black body radiation, Bohr explained atomic body and spectra and Heisenberg postulated his uncertainty principle. Even thouh Teilhard de Chardin was by not means a specialist in either relativity or quantum, the opening discussion in The Phenomenon of Man, where he deals with the atom, shows that he was familiarized enough with both relativity and quantum. De Chardin's was a synthetic mind. Throughout his writing, one can see him not just understanding or exposing what he calls overlaping theories but also synthesizing them, unifying their characteristics to ensue an explanation of the universe. Through his acquaintance with different branches of science and his synthetic mind he was able to deduce that if there was a unifying element in what he calls the plurality of tangible things in their elemental state, if there was a common denominator, this was energy. De Chardin understood that energy was the sine qua non of existance. As we have seen, de Chardin's ideas tread on the heels of Einstein's equation by almost three decades. Yet, while Einstein was reticent to even think, let alone apply an evolutionary model to the cosmos, de Chardin accepted it as a de facto. When Einstein realized that his theory implied our universe was not a static but a changing one, he introduced what is known as a cosmological constant, a repulsive force which countered the expansion. Notated with the Greek letter Lambda, Einstein called the cosmological constant the greatest mistake in his career when Hubbell showed him the evidence that we lived in an expanding universe.

By accepting a constantly evolving universe, de Chardin in many ways predated the Big Bang theory, which might be one of the greatest legitimations of de Chardin's ideas because it allows energy to have primacy over matter. In short, it allows the energy latent in matter to control matter's transformation. By intuiting that matter was transformed by energy and having an understanding of evolution, de Chardin concluded that there were two types of energy. He called them radial and tangential. He understood that all energy was physical in nature but cast energy within a duality.

Tangential energy is measurable and detectable energy. It is the energy we still detect from the background radiation of the big bang as well as the energy from rapid oxidation we call fire. Radial energy on the other hand cannot be detected, or at least not by the same means which we use to detect tangential energy since that would imply coupling both energies. And while like the tangential energy, it is present in all forms of matter, it actually influences its transformations. In other words, radial energy is an evolutionary energy, the energy that determines the growing complexity of matter and eventual development of intelligence. To scientists, de Chardin's idea at first sounded like a rehashed version of Aristotle's elan vital. It is not. If it is akin any concept, it is the one which it precedes by several decades, the one scientists call information.

Medwar points this fact out in the same review I have quoted: Teilhard's radial, spiritual, or physic energy may be equated to information. The equation is not necessarily a precise one. Yes, radial energy resembles the concept of information. But this resemblance is not an exact resemblance. Information is a blanket term applied by cosmologists and computer scientists and neurophysiologist alike. As a term, it originates with computer science and it is codified in bits. For cosmologists, the concept is tightly related to the concept of entropy and has stood at the center of black hole research. For our purposes, it will suffice to understand the concept of information as a codification of what we call knowledge, whether this knowledge is a novel, a symphony, a blueprint, or a poem. Most people may cringe at the concept and regard it as reductionist. And indeed, it is.

As Penrose has so eloquently argued in The Emperor's New Mind, we need a new science of mind in order to understand information since the quantifications of Artificial Intelligence, the discipline where the term holds sway are not broad enough. De Chardin would have probably agreed with Penrose. Radial energy, psychic energy is like information in that it is comulative. If you had a computer with infinite memory, you could store infinite amounts of information. A map of its bank would not necessarily be more complicated than a map of the memory bank on a 1 GB hard disk, it would only fit more ones and zeros. In other words, information, as science defines it, does not account for complexity only for accumulation.

Radial energy, on the other hand, tends towards complexity, towards a higher and higher order. For Teilhard de Chardin, humanity is not the culmination of evolution, just a rung in a ladder that tends first towards the noosphere, a cognitive layer, and then towards a planetization, or the overcoming of the entropy that is the universe's fate as it keeps expanding:

Will be the end and the fulfillment of the spirit of the Earth. The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and centrality. The end of the world: the overthrow of equilibrium, detaching mind, fulfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega.

In his Physics of Immortality, Tippler has argued that Chardin's vision is more poetic than scientific and agreeing with him on philosophical grounds, go on to establish more elaborate guidelines for the planetiztion de Chardin suggests by filling science's gaps with imaginated technology. Tippler's book ends up as nice and hopeful science fiction, offering few new insights as far as cosmology or Teilhard de Chardin go. I believe, his failure stems from his slighting of de Chardin as a scientist. By embracing de Chardin's philosophy and disregarding the model he sets out in The Phenomenon of Men, he overlooks the fact that many of the unanswered questions with which physicists are struggling at the moment would be solved if one considered psychism as a force. It isn't necessary to pad Teilhard de Chardin's work up. On the contrary, we only have revaluate it and relize how many of the things he argued have been validated in the last few decades. As I have stated before, de Chardin predates theorists like David Layzer, who in his book Cosmogenesis has argued quite convincingly that the universe is a product of a creative evolution.

The question that arises is why, if some of Teilhard de Chardin's ideas have proved to be correct, are scientists adamant to integrate his thought within their discourse? Why cannot they consider radial energy a force? I think part of it has to do with politics. Michael Hawkins, in Hunting Down the Universe has portrayed for us a scientific community which is neither generous nor vital, but rather, deep in political feuds and greedy for huge grant money. According to him, money and power have force the community to adopt not ideas, but dogmas.

Dogmatism, of course, has led science into an impasse. If there is Any reason why a great theory like Newton's gravity was able to be revised, it was because scientists like Einstein were willing to question its flaws. In modern science, one of the dogmas that exist is relativity's dictum that nothing in the universe can move faster than light. We have already seen how Bohm's idea of quantum potential has been rejected because the field he argues for would have to travel faster than light. To accept his premise would demote relativity. It would make relativity a law subordinate to quantum potential.

Similary, if scientists would asses radial energy as a force, they would also have to demote relativity. Yet, I would argue that, like Newtonian physics before it, relativity would only be revised, not rejected or demoted. Such revisions are imminent to any scientific principle and do not imply a failure of any kind. The fact that Einstein revised Newton's ideas on gravity does not necessarily means that apples do not fall from trees, or that the earth does not exert its gravitational force upon us. Newton's laws are applicable to us here, but break down when called upon to explain more extreme conditions. General relativity also breaks down when applied to the extreme high densities of the early universe. Relativity's failure to explain the high densities of the early universe should not be interpreted as the theory's lack of validity. On the contrary, its failure could be used as a leeway into establishing the principles of radial energy. A careful reader would note, however, that in order to conduct research to establish the principles of radial energy scientists would need at least an intimation of its existence. Otherwise, their work would be nothing but a stab in the dark. Is there any such intimation? Is there any hint that points towards a fifth force? We have already noted that if there would be such thing as a fifth force, a force wich governs the behavior of the four other forces, this force would necessarily act faster than the speed of light. Is there any intimation that anything has ever traveled or acted at such speed? Surprisingly, the answer is yes and the intimation comes not from some obscure theory or idea, but from one of the most important theories to have emerged en the last years: namely, inflation.

First postulated by Alan Guth, inflation solved two seminal problems with the big bang model. It got reid of the flatness and the horizon problems. At its most basic, the theory argues that between 10-36 and 10-32, the universe doubled its radius over equal intervals of time. At first glance, the claims of inflation might seem irrelevant. After all, how much would the universe really expand within such unimaginably brief moment? The answer is astonishing. The universe expanded more then, than it has in the last 15 thousand million years. Furthermore the consequences of the theory lead to a radical revision of our understanding of the universe. If we are to accept that due to inflation the universe doubled its radius over equal intervals of time, then we have to accept a much larger universe than what we accepted previously. It is due to this astonishing size that the observable universe appears flat. In other words, as observers, we are deceived in the same way than the ancients were deceived when they looked out on the horizon and saw earth as flat.

Inflation also solves another problem inherent to the big bang model. The observable universe is homogeneous and isotropic. In other words matter is distributed evenly and in all directions. When scientists observe the cosmic microwave background radiation, they observe energy which was released when universe was 300,000 years old. However, according to the standard big bang model, the diameter of the universe then was 90 million light years. This appears to be incoherent, since how would the universe grow 90 millions light years only in 300,000 years? The reason is subtle. According to relativity, space is plastic, curved and strechable. According to the big bang, space extended as it expanded. Consecuently, the principle that establishes that nothing can supass the speed of light is not violated. Notwithstanding the horizon distance at that moment was about 900,000 light years, and the ends of the universe come apart 90 millions lights years. In the standard big bang model, given the age of the universe, it would follow that this rift of light years would make it impossible for this radiation to have emerged from the same source, impossible, in other words, for this two points of radiation to exchange information if this can t travel faster than light. As Alan Guth says in his book The Inflationary Universe:

We can imagine, if we wish, that the universe is populated by little purple creatures, each equipped with a furnace and a refrigerator, and each dedicated to the cause of trying to establish a uniform temperature. Even with the help of these creatures, the observed uniformity of the cosmic background radiation could not be established unless the creatures could communicate at 100 times the speed of light.

Inflation as simple and elegant. It gets rid of many of the glitches inherent to the standard Big Bang theory. However, its main premise, the exponential expansion of the universe at equal intervals of time ratifies the possibility that the velocity of light can be exceede. If the universe expanded exponentially it had to exceed the speed of light. Furthermore, throgh subsequent revisions, inflation has adopted the idea of scalar fields as the triggers of inflation. In such models, scalar fields not only spur inflation, but control and end it. While these fields have gone undetected, they are fairly well established in theory. And though they might be ellipses to short-cut the introduction of a fifth force, their characteristics are similar to those propose by radial energy: Namely, they act as agents and catalysts within a process and as such, they rein the outcome of the process. Many argue, however, that while scalar fields are solely theoretical, and yet to be identified, while radial energy is purely speculative and impossible to observe.

Furthermore, particle physicists would point out that the functions of the scalar fields, while operating in the early universe to break down the symetries and to spur or halt inflation, are much more limited than what the functions I will assign to radial energy. Finally, they would point out the fact that the supraluminal velocity of the inflationary universe took place eithin the special conditions of the early universe and was possibly only through vacuum tunneling. To the last argument, I would answer that tunneling might indeed be our laboratory. No necessarily to trace radial energy, but to analyze supraluminal phenomena. I also agree with the first to arguments, if only in part. Scalar fields and radial energy are definitely not the same. Scalar fields, like any fields, exert their influence only upon a narrow array of particles. Radial energy, like Bohm's quantun potential, is a force which governs the behavior of every particle simultaneously. The easiest way to understand this might be by seeing how magnetism, the most visible of fields, exerts its influence only upon negatively or positively charged particles. Radial energy, on the other hand, works more like DNA, as the instruction manual which stores the necessary information for systems to execute their tasks. With this analogy though, I am getting ahead of my argument, so I will only touch upon it briefly for now. Like DNA, radial energy carries necessary information for an organism, in the case of DNA, or for particles, in the case of radial energy, to perform its functions. Later I will argue that DNA might be one of the many manifestations of radial energy. But first, let me address the argument concerning radial energy's intractability.

Again, for many, to pursue a force which is immeasurable, a force that cannot be tabulated, seems chimeric at least, a waste of time and resources at worst. Yet this easy dismissal is in my opinion not just proof that the scientific community has reached a crisis as far as its inquisitiveness and ambition is concerned, but might enter, if it remains there, a detrimental phase which will atrophy one of the main resources of scientific method itself: namely, deduction.

I have already criticized specialization and its narrow focus. This narrow focus is due to the fact that specialization works by means of induction. The field worker gathers evidence piecemeal and draws a partial conclusion which can be verified or refuted on further evidence. In other words, truthful when all possible instances have been examined. Induction has been fruitful. It has given us anatomy, chemistry, particle physics, etc. However, it could be argued that only through deduction has science made its most impressive strides. In other words, Science's advances have often relied on accepting premises which were unproved or improvable. Leon Ledermann has dealt with this in his book The God Particle. In his lighthearted style, Ledermann shows the importance of deduction as he attempts to answer a question, he claims, people always asks him: Have you ever seen an atom?, Ledermann argues that he can visualize the atom's internal structure, its cloudlike bursts of 'electron presence' surrounding the tiny dot nuclus that draws the misty electron cloud toward it. But nevertheless, the only evidence he has of an atom is tens of thousands of sensors that develop an electrical impulse as the particle passes. In admitting such fact, Lederman confirms that the atomic model particle physicists have developed is purely deductive. Furthermore, he shines a light upon the way in which the deductive method can be used to map a territory which at first seems unmappable. We cannot literally see an atom; we cannot photograph one. However, we have deduced a feasible model of the atom by observing the behavior of its particles.

We know the atom because of its effects upon other particles. I would argue that like with the atom and its particles, we can deduct the principles of radial energy from its effects. In other words, radial energy manifests itself through effect. What are the effects? Here we come round to to the core of my formalist argument. Our "evidence" for radial energy, the way we "see" radial energy is through the forms we find in the universe, forms which we have functions and have been "discovered," to use Penrose's word one more, through scientific study: the orbit, the helix, the Fibonacci sequence, the Mandelbrot set. These forms, particulary the last one, are not merely mathematical constructs, but the structures though which nature has model its transformations, from the beginning of time. These structures are the types of structure which have allowed evolution by being what John H. Holland, in his book Emergence, has labeled "emergent. They are structures where what comes out is more than what goes in.

Fractals and chaos, the helix and the orbit all have been staples of the scientific discourse. Some of them have been through centuries, some for a few decades. So, at first, my argument might not seem innovative or productive at all. However, scientists, while using the tools of fractals and chaos to study phenomena, have not attempted to write a universal history which nothing more than a transformation of forms, even though the evidence is certainly there. At the atomic level, we have already touched upon the fact that every atom in the universe was created from the fusion of hydrogen in helium. What these nuclear reactions did, was generate, if not more complex, heavier atoms which replicated the basic structure of the initial hydrogen and helium. This structure, initially postulated by the experimental Physicist Ernest Rutherford in 1911, though revised, can be roughly pictured as a solar system where, in place of planets, there are orbiting electrons and in place of the sun, there is a nucleus. Inherent to this stucture is the capacity for clustering, the capacity for atoms to form molecules. Grade school textbooks will often tell students that the world is full of molecules. To make a minor revision, they should say, the world is them. And the world is them, because the tile-work of atom upon atyom has spiraled towards complexity. Hence, a molecule of water is much less complex than the DNA molecule, though both are based on similar structures.

Scientists would agree that, indeed, these forms replicate themselves throughout the universe. However, many would argue that while these phenomena seem indeed to follow certain formal patterns that allowed for the formation of the universe, the solar system and life itself, in many occasions, the transformations or clustering were accidental. They were the work of chance. Teilhard de Chardin, while attempting to establish the relationship between tangential and radial energy, argued as well that many of these phenomena were, indeed, accidental. He suggested in earnest, and as the good scientist he was, that the earth was probably born by accident. Yet, despite his allowance for chance, arbitrariness and accident, de Chardin also is able to trace the way in which inorganic chemistry augurs organic chemistry, and, in its turn, organic chemistry augurus complex life forms. For him, even when nature runs through accident and indeterminacy, it immediately [makes] use of [it] and recast[s] into something naturally directed. Teilhard de Chardin's use of the verb recast, a verb commonly associated whith sculpture, is telling here: Whatever chance casts, radial energy recasts or reshapes in order that its latent germinal powers be used. What Teilhard de Chardin is suggesting here as he explores the concatenation of the mineral world to the organic world and the organic world to complex life forms is what he and other scientists have referred to as cosmogenesis. Teilhard de Chardin was way ahead of his time in applying Darwin's evolutionary scheme to cosmic history. While the big bang theory confirmed his argument in many ways, scientists like David Layzer in his book Cosmogenesis and most recently, Lee Smolin in The Life of the Cosmos have explored the implications of an evolving universe. Both Smolin and Layzer have argued that the universe evolved just as life has evolved, through the laws of conservation, innovation and selection.

One has to be careful when applying this laws to cosmic history though. Many people have misread cosmic evolution as a misguided attempt at determinism. It isn't. As Layzer puts it, the universe is a world of becoming as well as being, a world in which order emerged from primordial chaos and begot new forms of order. The processes that have created and continue to create order obey universal and unchanging physical laws. Yet, because they generate information, their outcomes are not implicit in their inicial conditions. Layzer argument is, like mine and like de Chardin's, a formalist one. Form is his operative word. The statement, though, also elaborates on the consequences of the complexity which de Chardin saw as one of radial energy's principle: the tendency towards complexity.

This is not really a hard concept to grapple with. We have seen the casual chain linking the big bang to the light atoms, light atoms to heavy ones, atoms to molecules, molecules to organic and complex forms. Each rung on that ladder presents us with a more complex form, or rather, since the forms change only slightly, I should say that the primordial works like a vessel which allows more information.

Continues: The Sentient Force (III)