Re: [Fis] FIS / introductory text / 5 April 2004

From: Pedro C. Mariju�n <[email protected]>
Date: Tue 06 Apr 2004 - 15:40:53 CEST

Dear Michel and colleagues,

Many thanks for the elegant Introduction. Indeed you have laid down an
extense and intense discussion agenda for next months. My personal
preference for these initial exchanges is thermodynamic entropy ---here,
Michael Devereux has brought in a terrific discussion line about Szilard's
engine and information. I much like his speculative directions but being a
humble theoretical biologist I can add very little. (However, about entropy
dependence of time, there could be an interesting paper by Kevin Kirby
--who has just joined the fis list-- where he summarizes Michael Conrad's
views on 'entropy functionals'. See "Biological adaptabilities and quantum
entropies" BioSystems 64, 2002, 33-41).

The historical conceptualization of entropy (and of energy--actually the
first and second laws) introduced an amazing conceptual order and parsimony
into the chaotic disarray existing in that time about motion,
kinetic/potential, work, heat ('caloric'), electricity, electromagnets,
oscillation, sound, waves, light, chemicals, batteries, body chemistry...
Really, one is reminded our contemporary problems with information, that so
clearly are reflected in Michel's landscape.

The popularization of thermodynamic entropy is unfortunately full of vague
stuff. I would like to summarize in a future posting some of the vulgar
notions that (at least for a non physicist) disturb the neat
conceptualization of motion-dispersion in phase space that it centrally
conveys (am I wrong?, the overextension of probabilistic interpretation a
la Eddington does not help much to the neophite). Undoubtedly, as a purely
abstract magnitude, dimensionless, that associated with temperature
captures the 'arrow of time', it has exerted an enormous attraction in
quite many other fields. The recent application in cosmology (black holes,
Calabi-Yau spaces) becomes mind-boggling; fortunately, the 'biologized'
views of Lee Smolin and other parties about that, are a continuous
refreshing for the biologist.

Within our usual mixing of discussion styles in this list, I think we
should keep open at the same time both the speculative views and the very
basic 'pedagogic' themes around entropy. We have plenty of time!

best regards

Pedro

              

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Received on Tue Apr 6 15:12:51 2004

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