I am not so sure about biological time. According to the second law of thermodynamics entropy should increase in a closed system. But biological evolution goes into the contrary direction, that is towards living systems of greater complexity.
I love this old chestnut.
Here we all are - bathed in warmth from the sun, eating and drinking, clothed, oxygenated, sheltered and generally whacking the rest of the ecosystem over the head - and breaking the laws of thermodynamics? Any entropy decrease is localised at the expense of increases elsewhere through interactions ie. where is the boundary of the 'closed' system drawn?
Of interest is that unfortunately elsewhen is often not mentioned. We have carbon and other 'biological' atoms, the manifold bonding between which gives rise to a plethora of complexity that underlies the chemistry of life. However our precursors ( whoever or whatever ) were endowed with these elements by nucleosynthetic reactions in stars, supernovae etc. I think it is clear that those ancient processes dramatically increase entropy, and still do.
Quote:
I don't think you can explain evolution with thermodynamic ideas.
You don't need to. I'm not aware of ( any variant of ) evolutionary theory that invokes, or needs to invoke, that.
Quote:
As a matter of fact, you can't even describe a computer within classical thermodynamics. It is simply a heat producing machine.
Have you included the elsewheres and elsewhens here? How do you think the computer came into existence? It was endowed with complexity before you bought it, but at the expense of a lot of entropy producing processes. Do you run it on electricity? If so, think about how those electrons arrived at your wall plug ready on the top side of the voltage gradient and ready to produce that heat!
Cheers
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
tullio:
I am curious to about what you thought of my statement 'we have split time into two unmixable chunks before and after'..
Maybe the split is performed by an observation, that is by a "reduction of wave packets" that changes the state vector (see Penrose). Your observation about computers is correct if you equate Shannon's entropy with negative entropy. This is not accepted by all. As far as I know Shannon gave the name "entropy" to a quantity describing the information transmitted by a source to a receiver on a suggestion by John von Neumann. Giving the same name to two different quantities does not mean that they are the same.quantity, modulo a change of sign. The French evidently believe they are the same modulo a sign change, since they call the computer "ordinateur". Cheers.
Tullio
Mike Hewson , are you kidding ? Anyway it was scientifically elaborated and very "pascalian" because it makes me laugh precisely for 24 hours, perhapas due to the overdose or entropy of nucleosynthetic reactions in stars .
The arrow of time
tullio:
Thank you for your reply you have confirmed I did a bad job with that bit. When I reread my post and suspected I should have been clearer about that point.
What I should have said was that in each example I am merging previously isolated systems. Such mixing introduces a discontinuity into the merged system’s time line (a bit like trying to divide by zero). This is important to the argument in part because it eliminates the possibility of simply assuming the system is symmetric about instant of mixing.
ps the argument works the same in classical and quantum theory.
I am not so sure about biological time. According to the second law of thermodynamics entropy should increase in a closed system. But biological evolution goes into the contrary direction, that is towards living systems of greater complexity.
You don't need to. I'm not aware of ( any variant of ) evolutionary theory that invokes, or needs to invoke, that.
Cheers
IF evolution is simply the result of physical and chemical processes, they MUST obey the laws of thermodynamics, including of course the "dissipative structures" described by Prigogine and coworkers, that is modern thermodynamics. Cheers.
Tullio
Now we reached the edge of material world : we have before us these tiny and strange essences we called quarks. These are the ultimate witness of "something" which is already related to a "particle". But what we can find beyond that ?
The observation shows us that the behavior of quarks is regular and organized. Why ? What is this invisible influence behind the observable matter ?
What we will see is not energy, neither force , but something immaterial which is called "field" by physics.
We find ourselves before the ultimate limit : the realm of spirit begins here and the physical support to bear this Intelligence, this deep order we see around us is no more necessary . I think the essence of truth is exactly this, this "almost nothingness"...
We live in a tortuous world, and we like give a meaning to everything around us.We want to know the nature of the Universe and our location on it, also where are we from and why the World is so ?
We try responding to these questions, so we choose some explanations : the endless tower of tortoises bearing a plain earth, or the theory of ultra-strings ? Both are an image of the World, although the second "hypothesis" is more mathematical and more accurate than the first. But there is not any experimental proof for each. No one has ever seen yet the "huge tortoise", neither the ultra-string.
The first endeavours to explain the Universe were based on this thought that natural events and phenomena are controlled by spirits who have human feelings and like them their reactions are unpredictable. But progressively it becomes obvious that the natural events are independent of the will and desire of spirits.The sun rises always from the east and on the west, the sunset.Sun, moon and planets traverse paths which are predictable with accuracy.
At first the observation of the Universe , the regularity, the order and the laws had only meaning for few astronomers. Nowadays, by compounding quantum mechanics and general relativity , a new perspective displays itself : is it probable that Space-Time constitute totally a complete and quadrudimension space without any border like the earth surface but in huge dimensions ?...
In fact, the quantum knowledge we have of matter, lets us perceive that at fundamental level, nothing is in a state of stagnation : everything is in motion and everything during this indescribable irregular dance which produces strange turbulences in fundamental particles, changes and is transformed. In reality what we imagine stable, actually displays innumerable movements : irregular curve collapses or expansions.
Ultimately the things which surround us are nothing but vaccum, atomic delirum and dispersion. For example by observing a rose, we can assume what ancien philosophers called "forms", exist. I mean forms of equilibrium which justify that things are so and not otherwise. Then none of elements of an atom, or what we know about fundamental particles can explain why and how such equilibrium exists. These balances are based on a cause which literally doesn't belong to physical world. What we call "field" is nothing but an open window over a very strange scenery on the background...
The earth atmosphere is a gamma ray detector and can discover the first "black holes". The encounter of a quantum of gamma ray bearing huge energy with the atmosphere's atoms, creates pairs of electrons and positrons (anti-electrons) which, after encountering other atoms, make appear pairs of new electrons and positrons , and so an electron current is created. The outcome is a sort of light called "Cerenkov radiation". So we can , by detecting rays of light at night sky, search for gamma ray explosions.
If actually the chaos and irregularities prevailed in primordial world, we can expect that the number of black holes are much more than what our observation of gamma ray shows.
Anyway and on the other hand if we keep our distance from this sort of data, many questions could touch our mind. Which part of what we can perceive is really "real"(the concept of "real" we understand usually)? What we imagine about the causality of events in cosmos , is not a kind of huge and continual illusion which veils the "truth" ? A strange and deep truth which is not some sort of matter but a "spirit" and an "Intelligence" ?
RE: I am not so sure about
)
I love this old chestnut.
Here we all are - bathed in warmth from the sun, eating and drinking, clothed, oxygenated, sheltered and generally whacking the rest of the ecosystem over the head - and breaking the laws of thermodynamics? Any entropy decrease is localised at the expense of increases elsewhere through interactions ie. where is the boundary of the 'closed' system drawn?
Of interest is that unfortunately elsewhen is often not mentioned. We have carbon and other 'biological' atoms, the manifold bonding between which gives rise to a plethora of complexity that underlies the chemistry of life. However our precursors ( whoever or whatever ) were endowed with these elements by nucleosynthetic reactions in stars, supernovae etc. I think it is clear that those ancient processes dramatically increase entropy, and still do.
You don't need to. I'm not aware of ( any variant of ) evolutionary theory that invokes, or needs to invoke, that.
Have you included the elsewheres and elsewhens here? How do you think the computer came into existence? It was endowed with complexity before you bought it, but at the expense of a lot of entropy producing processes. Do you run it on electricity? If so, think about how those electrons arrived at your wall plug ready on the top side of the voltage gradient and ready to produce that heat!
Cheers
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
tullio: I am curious to about
)
tullio:
I am curious to about what you thought of my statement 'we have split time into two unmixable chunks before and after'..
RE: tullio: I am curious to
)
Maybe the split is performed by an observation, that is by a "reduction of wave packets" that changes the state vector (see Penrose). Your observation about computers is correct if you equate Shannon's entropy with negative entropy. This is not accepted by all. As far as I know Shannon gave the name "entropy" to a quantity describing the information transmitted by a source to a receiver on a suggestion by John von Neumann. Giving the same name to two different quantities does not mean that they are the same.quantity, modulo a change of sign. The French evidently believe they are the same modulo a sign change, since they call the computer "ordinateur". Cheers.
Tullio
Mike Hewson , are you kidding
)
Mike Hewson , are you kidding ? Anyway it was scientifically elaborated and very "pascalian" because it makes me laugh precisely for 24 hours, perhapas due to the overdose or entropy of nucleosynthetic reactions in stars .
Ariane
The arrow of
)
The arrow of time
tullio:
Thank you for your reply you have confirmed I did a bad job with that bit. When I reread my post and suspected I should have been clearer about that point.
What I should have said was that in each example I am merging previously isolated systems. Such mixing introduces a discontinuity into the merged system’s time line (a bit like trying to divide by zero). This is important to the argument in part because it eliminates the possibility of simply assuming the system is symmetric about instant of mixing.
ps the argument works the same in classical and quantum theory.
RE: RE: I am not so sure
)
IF evolution is simply the result of physical and chemical processes, they MUST obey the laws of thermodynamics, including of course the "dissipative structures" described by Prigogine and coworkers, that is modern thermodynamics. Cheers.
Tullio
Now we reached the edge of
)
Now we reached the edge of material world : we have before us these tiny and strange essences we called quarks. These are the ultimate witness of "something" which is already related to a "particle". But what we can find beyond that ?
The observation shows us that the behavior of quarks is regular and organized. Why ? What is this invisible influence behind the observable matter ?
What we will see is not energy, neither force , but something immaterial which is called "field" by physics.
We find ourselves before the ultimate limit : the realm of spirit begins here and the physical support to bear this Intelligence, this deep order we see around us is no more necessary . I think the essence of truth is exactly this, this "almost nothingness"...
Ariane
We live in a tortuous world,
)
We live in a tortuous world, and we like give a meaning to everything around us.We want to know the nature of the Universe and our location on it, also where are we from and why the World is so ?
We try responding to these questions, so we choose some explanations : the endless tower of tortoises bearing a plain earth, or the theory of ultra-strings ? Both are an image of the World, although the second "hypothesis" is more mathematical and more accurate than the first. But there is not any experimental proof for each. No one has ever seen yet the "huge tortoise", neither the ultra-string.
The first endeavours to explain the Universe were based on this thought that natural events and phenomena are controlled by spirits who have human feelings and like them their reactions are unpredictable. But progressively it becomes obvious that the natural events are independent of the will and desire of spirits.The sun rises always from the east and on the west, the sunset.Sun, moon and planets traverse paths which are predictable with accuracy.
At first the observation of the Universe , the regularity, the order and the laws had only meaning for few astronomers. Nowadays, by compounding quantum mechanics and general relativity , a new perspective displays itself : is it probable that Space-Time constitute totally a complete and quadrudimension space without any border like the earth surface but in huge dimensions ?...
Ariane
In fact, the quantum
)
In fact, the quantum knowledge we have of matter, lets us perceive that at fundamental level, nothing is in a state of stagnation : everything is in motion and everything during this indescribable irregular dance which produces strange turbulences in fundamental particles, changes and is transformed. In reality what we imagine stable, actually displays innumerable movements : irregular curve collapses or expansions.
Ultimately the things which surround us are nothing but vaccum, atomic delirum and dispersion. For example by observing a rose, we can assume what ancien philosophers called "forms", exist. I mean forms of equilibrium which justify that things are so and not otherwise. Then none of elements of an atom, or what we know about fundamental particles can explain why and how such equilibrium exists. These balances are based on a cause which literally doesn't belong to physical world. What we call "field" is nothing but an open window over a very strange scenery on the background...
Ariane
The earth atmosphere is a
)
The earth atmosphere is a gamma ray detector and can discover the first "black holes". The encounter of a quantum of gamma ray bearing huge energy with the atmosphere's atoms, creates pairs of electrons and positrons (anti-electrons) which, after encountering other atoms, make appear pairs of new electrons and positrons , and so an electron current is created. The outcome is a sort of light called "Cerenkov radiation". So we can , by detecting rays of light at night sky, search for gamma ray explosions.
If actually the chaos and irregularities prevailed in primordial world, we can expect that the number of black holes are much more than what our observation of gamma ray shows.
Anyway and on the other hand if we keep our distance from this sort of data, many questions could touch our mind. Which part of what we can perceive is really "real"(the concept of "real" we understand usually)? What we imagine about the causality of events in cosmos , is not a kind of huge and continual illusion which veils the "truth" ? A strange and deep truth which is not some sort of matter but a "spirit" and an "Intelligence" ?
Ariane