Swami Ashokananda once blurted out, “It’s alive. The whole Universe is alive.”

I didn’t understand it then, but I can understand it now.

First, what are the defining characteristics of a living organism? They are three. First, it must have a membrane between inside and outside, between self and not-self. Second, it must be able to direct a stream of negative entropy across this membrane from outside to inside. And finally, if the species is to survive, it must be able to replicate the inside.

So let’s look at the Universe. To a first approximation the Universe consists of hydrogen falling together to stars which convert the gravitational energy to radiation and drive the cosmological expansion, because the radiation loses its energy to redshifting in the expansion. The redshifting drives the cosmic microwave background radiation, because radiation gets thermalized to 3°K by going through the field of low mass particles near the observational border. And finally, through Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the redshifting also drives the recycling of the hydrogen and the negative entropy from the border, because as the uncertainty in the momentum goes down the uncertainty in where the particles are goes up.

So we see that the expanding Universe, with its observational border, not only directs a stream of negative entropy upon itself, but also, by recycling, replicates the hydrogen which  drives the stars.

John L. Dobson

18^th of April, 2007