Is Flame Alive? Balrog Version

I’ve almost finished reading The Mathematics of Life by Ian Stewart. Most of the book discusses things I’m familiar with in the history of science and mathematics. But I personally find it pleasurable to read and be reminded of these vignettes. Chapter 17 asks the perennial question “What is Life?”. Stewart thinks that focusing on structure is less useful than asking the question about process: “What is Living?”

 

He has a list of “features of life” which I’ve reproduced below.

 

·      Possessing an organized structure;

·      Regulating internal behavior in response to short-term changes in the environment;

·      Maintaining both the above by extracting energy from the environment;

·      Responding to external stimuli, say by moving towards a food source;

·      Growing – in a way that does not merely accumulate more and more stuff while doing nothing with it;

·      Reproducing;

·      Adapting to long-term changes in the environment.

 

Stewart emphasizes the distinction between reproduction and replication. Because I’m reading his book digitally, and this blog is being published digitally, could it be that I’m replicating the 0’s and 1’s that constitute his text? (I did not cut and paste, but made a copy by retyping.) Well, not exactly. The font is different. And I allowed to stand the auto-correct of my word processor that switched British to American spelling and auto-capitalized the first letter of each bullet point. The underlying digital structure is different, but you’re reading the same words. Is the meaning or the semantics therefore replicated? I suppose it depends on how we understand or comprehend each of those bullet points.

 

One might ask: What does it mean to be “organized”? What constitutes “short-term” environmental changes? For that matter, what is the boundary between the organism (the organized structure and process!) and its environment? I like his clarification of growing, and I’m in agreement with how he describes the importance of energy extraction – since this is one of my research foci. Stewart is careful to couch his list as “broad-brush”, a useful rule-of-thumb. Then he provides a useful example to illustrate the difficulty of such definitions. I’ll quote his paragraph below.

 

“Flames have a definite physical structure. They change their dynamics in response to their surroundings, growing in the presence of fuel and oxygen, dying down if these are absent. They extract chemical energy from the reaction between fuel and oxygen. They invade adjacent sources of fuel. They grow. They reproduce: a forest fire starts as a single flame. But the chemistry of flames today is the same as it was a billion years ago, so they fall at the final hurdle. With a vivid imagination, you could invent plausible aliens that were complex systems of flames. If their chemistry could change over long periods of time, depending on what the environment can provide, they might evolve. In a way, we are like that… an internalized flame… an exothermic reaction…”

 

This made me think of Balrogs. According to Tolkien, these are powerful spirit-beings (Maiar) that take on the physical form of flames – or at least that is their most distinctive characteristics – and thus they are referred to as fire-demons. Tolkien didn’t draw any, and was generally vague about their physicality although there are hints in his books that they are large (compared to humans) and move like bipeds and wield weapons in their arms. Our image of them is heavily influenced by Peter Jackson’s movies which came from John Howe’s illustrations. (And now we think they must be winged.) They may not be all-flame, but they do seem like living flame, at the very least.

 

Are Balrogs exothermic? How do they keep aflame? Assuming oxygen is in plentiful supply to drive the exothermic reaction, somehow the Balrog must draw in physical material that will combust with oxygen. Perhaps the bodies they take on are hydrocarbons after all – these would certainly lead to highly exothermic combustion. But other elements (in the periodic table) could qualify just as well. The burning of metals can be very exothermic – magnesium is a great example and well-utilized visually in chemistry lab demos and in movies when you need a fuse that leads to a big explosion. Do Balrogs grow and reproduce? I don’t know. Science has made little progress in the behavior of spirit-like beings, for good reason – their immateriality makes it difficult to test, repeat, and confirm scientific hypotheses.

 

Stewart, the mathematician doesn’t go into this, either. He briskly moves along to the story of Ulam’s automaton, Von Neumann’s hypothetical replicator, and Conway’s Game of Life. He does also mention Kauffman’s pithy definition of life: “life is a complex system that can reproduce, and can carry out at least one thermodynamic work cycle”. Students in my second semester General Chemistry class are ankle-deep in thermodynamics now. We’ve covered various forms of enthalpy (and my discussion board prompt next week will be about how to keep all these organized in your head!) but there’s still much more to come. We’ve spent some time evaluating the exothermicity of different fuels and some practical considerations in choosing a fuel. I haven’t brought up Balrogs yet, but maybe there’ll be an opportunity somewhere!