Dear All,
Continuing comments to Stan and Bob...
Stan: Alas, my point was that EVERY culture has had wars and more wars,
and none have been able to explain it to our satisfaction. (For example,
Ghengiz Kahn expressed satidfaction that Samarkand was converted into
grazing land for horses. So he went to war to promote horse farming!) So
I venture the simple explanation that we have been fated to be pulled into
wars because we cannot resist maximizing our energy usage.
Igor: Stan's general metaphor is really suggestive of some real-life
situations. Recently a friend of mine told me that he felt a strong excess
of energy, so he tried to "dissipate" it by a long jogging in the park. It
was, alas, not enough, and he decided to have a coffee in Ljubljana (a town
in nearby Slovenia, 120 km from Zagreb!). So he drove there, had a coffee
and returned back home, his energy finally dissipated (to his great
satisfaction). When I remarked that it made little sense what he has done,
he replied that the urge to expend his energy excess was just unbearable.
Second example: Hitler built the economic strength in the Third Reich mostly
on military industry. He had to dissipate, eventually, this stored energy
and material potential because otherwise it was not possible to continue nor
to sustain the achieved socioeconomic state. He planned to use it to acquire
new material and energy assets (the "New Order" of Europe) in order to
sustain Third Reich. He failed but if he were to succeed, the new political
and economic order would be highly unstable and the second wave of war and
destruction would eventually come. The point is, once he has created such a
high energy potential implicit in the military industry and weaponry stocks,
subsequent destructive processes were simply unavoidable. We could see many
great historic conquests and invasions trough these lenses: human societies
first build high energy gradients and than rush to dissipate them. This
process needs not to be literally inscribed in the Second Law, but it
functions as if it were (I guess that we can view Stan's entropy conceptual
framework also in this way).
The message to take home: perhaps we should be careful (and aware of the
potential consequences) with accumulating high energy gradients in our
modern society ??? For example, the current situation of the North vs.
South, where North is accumulating energy in the form of weapons and
technology and the South in the sheer number of people, but increasingly in
industry and military sector as well. Both may eventually explode
individually and clash mutually....
SS: My take is that this works WITH the Second Law. Indeed, since
> all gradients are unstable to metastable, they all must be dissipated.
> Autocatalysis, and any building-up tendency, is simply parasitic upon
> this necessary dissipation.
Bob's reply: I wouldn't agree. I can conceive of gradients existing for
indeterminate
time without being dissipated. That's why we had fossil fuels. Human
society, which arose out of the solar gradient, for reasons vested in its
own autocatalytic economy, sought out and switched to fossil fuels to
serve those ends. Fossil fuels didn't force themselves upon humans, nor
did they beckon to humans simply to be dissipated (some current wasteful
human activities notwithstanding. :)
Igor: If I recall well, Schr�dinger wrote that "life thrives on low
entropy". In the absence of energy gradients there is no life. On the other
hand, energy gradients by themselves may not necessarily create life to
degrade them. This argument can be seen in the Lee Smolin's book "Life of
the Cosmos", where he points at the astonishing number of improbable
parameter values present in the elementary particles and in the atomic
structure, which, if were slightly different would not allow the formation
of basic, "heavy" elements the life is made of (carbon, hydrogen, phosphorus
etc.). As we happen to live in the Universe where parameters are set right,
so that life is in principle possible, we may expect life to evolve in the
direction of dissipating extant energy gradients (both in terms of faster
and more trough dissipation). If our Universe is definitely heading towards
the heat death, than life may appear as an auxiliary force in the overall
process - as Stan wrote: "Autocatalysis, and any building-up tendency, is
simply parasitic upon this necessary dissipation." However, even if we are
pretty sure today that the Universe is accelerating we are not that much
sure about the final outcome (i.e. the heat death or the Great Crunch),
because of the dark energy and matter effects, which we just stumbled upon
recently. Therefore, it is possible that there may be no Second Law
"ultimate finality" in the processes at the level of the universe.
If we were to live in a different Universe, e.g. consisting of helium only,
if I recall correctly, there would be no stars, no galaxies and, therefore,
no energy gradients to dissipate. In such a Universe the Second Law may have
no relevance at all. It is also possible that the Big Bang would have
produced an Universe with energy gradients but no possibility for life to
evolve. Providing that this universe is accelerating/expanding, these energy
gradients would, eventually, disappear according to the Second Law.
This would be the perspective from the level of the total, closed system, -
the universe. If we look at things from the perspective of the semiclosed
sub-sub-sub system {galaxy, (solar system, (Earth))}, than I agree
completely with Bob and his argument about fossil fuels, which, in
principle, may exist without ever being dissipated until the Sun burns out
the whole solar system. The basic argument in favor of his statement is that
human species was also an improbable event in the evolution of life, so the
chance that there will no species able to dissipate energy bound in fossil
fuels was extremely high.
I don't see Stan's and Bob's argument about the "finality" of life or
entropy as being so irremediably apart, perhaps it is only the question of
scale from which we look at systems and processes, and our preferred focus:
organization vs disorder. On the other hand, if I look at Stan's "entropic
finality" metaphor not in terms of our humanly conceived "finality-
as-purpose", but simply as a statement that there may be a single point
attractor in the evolution of the universe - the heath death - that it
appears to me perfectly acceptable.
PS: you finally made it to distract me from my favorite "earthly themes" ...
The very best
Igor
Dr. Igor Matutinovi�
Managing Director
GfK - Center for market research
Dra�kovi�eva 54,
10 000 Zagreb, Croatia
Phone: 00385 1 49 21 222
Fax: 00385 1 49 21 223
E-mail: igor.matutinovic@gfk.hr
www.gfk.hr
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Received on Wed May 18 17:13:00 2005
