In the Beginning was Information

mulated on earth, were also valid on the moon. The laws of energyand of gravity were used to compute the quantities of fuel required,and when man landed on the moon, the assumption of universalvalidity was found to be justified. The law of the unity of nature(the universal validity of laws of nature) will hold until a counterexample is found.N3: The Laws of nature are equally valid for living beings andfor inanimate matter. Any law which is valid according to N2above, includes living beings. Richard P. Feynman (1918 – 1988),Nobel laureate for physics (1965), writes [F1, p 74]:“The law for conservations of energy is as true for life as forother phenomena. Incidentally, it is interesting that every law orprinciple that we know for ‘dead’ things, and that we can test onthe great phenomenon of life, works just as well there. There isno evidence yet that what goes on in living creatures is necessarilydifferent, so far as the physical laws are concerned, fromwhat goes on in non-living things, although the living thingsmay be much more complicated.”All measurements (sensory organs), metabolic processes, andtransfers of information in living organisms strictly obey the lawsof nature. The brilliant concepts realised in living beings, are basedon refined and very ingenious implementations of the laws ofnature. For example, the sensitivity of human hearing attains thephysically possible limits by means of a combination of determiningfactors [G11, p 85 – 88]. The laws of aerodynamics areemployed so masterfully in the flight of birds and insects, that similarperformance levels have not yet been achieved in any technologicalsystem (see Appendix A3.4.4).N4: The laws of nature are not restricted to any one field ofstudy. This theorem is actually redundant in the light of N2 andN3. But it is formulated separately to avoid any possibility of misunderstanding.The energy conservation law was discovered by the German doctorand physicist Julius Robert Mayer (1814 – 1878) during an extendedvoyage in the tropics. He was a medical officer and he formulat-29