Thermodynamics, Information, and Life.

Jim Menegay <[email hidden]> wrote or quoted:

Quoted message said:

There has been considerable discussion in this group of
the ideas of Lotka, lately recast and championed by Kay
and Schneider, that ecosystems evolve so as to maximize
their utilization of free energy. By the ideas proposed
here, this tendency, which certainly cannot be denied,
should be seen not as a manifestation of the second law of
thermodynamics. Instead, it should be seen as a
manifestation of the same phenomenon that causes a free
market economy to evolve so as to make the most efficient
use of the technology available to it, and to drive the
evolution of the technology in the most productive
directions.

I don't believe the "biological thermodynamicists"
(e.g. me) think the second law has much to do with it.

[OK - Kay and Schneider's paper excepted :-)].

What we are mostly proposing is *new* laws of
thermodynamics.

Kauffman - for example - makes this explicit - *entirely*
new laws to deal with the dynamics of complex systems are
required - and at their most fundamental level they will
have a thermodynamic expression not covered by the existing
thermodynamic laws.

I agree completely - with the principle (though not the
details): new laws of thermodynamics are on the books to
deal with complex systems - and a significant task is to
attempt to clearly elucidate them.

Economic metaphors and thermodynamic metaphors are not
mutually exclusive. You can look as many complex systems
/either/ as though they are economies /or/ by considering
their thermodynamics. Which description is better will
depend on your system and why you are looking at it.

I think many complex systems are *not* best regarded as
economies. Turbulent fluid flow is one example.
Crystallisation is another. I think economic metaphors are
next-to-useless in those domains - whereas the thermodynamic
descriptions are still highly applicable.

So - I think the thermodyamic description is the more
general one - and it underlies - and is responsible for -
the dynamics of economies.

However economic metaphors do have their virtues, through
being a higher-level, more holistic description of the
phenomena.

A thermodynamic description of the stock exchange may be
/technically/ correct - but is - perhaps - not necessarily
very useful or practical, through being a description on too
low a level.

Quoted message said:

The followers of Adam Smith have never been tempted to
describe this direction of economic evolution as a
manifestation of the laws of physics.

...though obviously it is just that ;-)

Quoted message said:

Neither should the followers of Darwin be tempted to do
so. IMHO.

Physics explains biology and economics but - perhaps - not
in a very useful way.

Anyway, we are not /really/ talking about physics. The
second law of thermodynamics isn't /really/ a law and is
isn't /really/ physics.

Its a statement about statistical tendencies among systems
with large numbers of components.

It is not a "law" - since it can be broken - especially on
small scales - and it has more to do with statistics than it
does to do with physics.

So it will be with the thermodyamic characterisations of
complex systems: not /really/ laws - and more statistics
than physics.
--
__________
|im |yler timtyler.orgtimtyler.orgOpen ↗ [email hidden] Remove
lock to reply.

Hi Jim,

I appreciate the view you described in this post (most of
which I snipped for simplicity), however I think that you
are either missing the point of the thermodynamic argument
or you are dismissing it without a sufficiently explained
justification.

[snip]

in article [email hidden], Jim Menegay at
[email hidden] wrote on 3/22/04 9:30 AM:

Quoted message said:

There has been considerable discussion in this group of
the ideas of Lotka, lately recast and championed by Kay
and Schneider, that ecosystems evolve so as to maximize
their utilization of free energy. By the ideas proposed
here, this tendency, which certainly cannot be denied,
should be seen not as a manifestation of the second law of
thermodynamics. Instead, it should be seen as a
manifestation of the same phenomenon that causes a free
market economy to evolve so as to make the most efficient
use of the technology available to it, and to drive the
evolution of the technology in the most productive
directions.

The followers of Adam Smith have never been tempted to
describe this direction of economic evolution as a
manifestation of the laws of physics. Neither should the
followers of Darwin be tempted to do so. IMHO.

Interestingly, another Nobelist, Eugene Stanley (physicist),
has been making quite a splash with the advent of the new
discipline of econophysics. His argument for the
thermodynamics of the economy is the same as the argument
for the thermodynamics of biology (and evolution in
particular). Although I appreciate the confusion you
described over the term (and concept) "entropy", I don't see
any reason to allow that confusion to get in the way of
studying the context-specific implications of
thermodynamics. There are, after all, no limitations to the
concept of universality.

Cheers,

Guy

Guy Hoelzer <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

Hi Jim,

I appreciate the view you described in this post (most of
which I snipped for simplicity), however I think that you
are either missing the point of the thermodynamic argument
or you are dismissing it without a sufficiently explained
justification.

[snip]

in article [email hidden], Jim Menegay
at [email hidden] wrote on 3/22/04 9:30 AM:

Quoted message said:

There has been considerable discussion in this group of
the ideas of Lotka, lately recast and championed by Kay
and Schneider, that ecosystems evolve so as to maximize
their utilization of free energy. By the ideas proposed
here, this tendency, which certainly cannot be denied,
should be seen not as a manifestation of the second law
of thermodynamics. Instead, it should be seen as a
manifestation of the same phenomenon that causes a free
market economy to evolve so as to make the most
efficient use of the technology available to it, and to
drive the evolution of the technology in the most
productive directions.

The followers of Adam Smith have never been tempted to
describe this direction of economic evolution as a
manifestation of the laws of physics. Neither should the
followers of Darwin be tempted to do so. IMHO.

Interestingly, another Nobelist, Eugene Stanley
(physicist), has been making quite a splash with the
advent of the new discipline of econophysics. His argument
for the thermodynamics of the economy is the same as the
argument for the thermodynamics of biology (and evolution
in particular). Although I appreciate the confusion you
described over the term (and concept) "entropy", I don't
see any reason to allow that confusion to get in the way
of studying the context-specific implications of
thermodynamics. There are, after all, no limitations to
the concept of universality.

Cheers,

Guy

Thanks for the heads-up on Stanley and Econo-physics. I
believe, after considerable searching, that you are wrong
that he is a Nobelist, but he certainly does not appear to
be a lightweight. I look forward to digging into his work
and seeing what he says about "entropy". It seems similar,
so far, to what I have read about what Norm Packard is or
was doing at Los Alamos.

A more detailed statement of why I want to construe
"entropy" narrowly and to limit "thermodynamics" to systems
with a "temperature" will appear in my reply to Tim.

Tim Tyler <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

Jim Menegay <[email hidden]> wrote or quoted:

Quoted message said:

There has been considerable discussion in this group of
the ideas of Lotka, lately recast and championed by Kay
and Schneider, that ecosystems evolve so as to maximize
their utilization of free energy. By the ideas proposed
here, this tendency, which certainly cannot be denied,
should be seen not as a manifestation of the second law
of thermodynamics. Instead, it should be seen as a
manifestation of the same phenomenon that causes a free
market economy to evolve so as to make the most
efficient use of the technology available to it, and to
drive the evolution of the technology in the most
productive directions.

I don't believe the "biological thermodynamicists"
(e.g. me) think the second law has much to do with it.

[OK - Kay and Schneider's paper excepted :-)].

If Lotka had first studied desert ecosystems, he might have
proposed that they develop so as to maximize the utilization
of water. If he had then moved on to potassium starved
ecosystems, then to ecosystems deficient in soluble iron,
and only then to rich, well watered ecosystems that get only
12 hrs of sunlight per day, then he might have generalized
that law to the "optimal utilization of scarce resources".
And we would probably not be having this discussion.

Quoted message said:

What we are mostly proposing is *new* laws of
thermodynamics.

I have to quibble! What you guys are proposing are new laws
of dynamics. These laws should properly be called
"thermodynamic" laws only if you expect to test them using a
thermometer! More on this below.

Quoted message said:

Kauffman - for example - makes this explicit - *entirely*
new laws to deal with the dynamics of complex systems are
required - and at their most fundamental level they will
have a thermodynamic expression not covered by the
existing thermodynamic laws.

I agree completely - with the principle (though not the
details): new laws of thermodynamics are on the books to
deal with complex systems - and a significant task is to
attempt to clearly elucidate them.

Economic metaphors and thermodynamic metaphors are not
mutually exclusive. You can look as many complex systems
/either/ as though they are economies /or/ by considering
their thermodynamics. Which description is better will
depend on your system and why you are looking at it.

I think many complex systems are *not* best regarded as
economies.

I only suggest economic models when there is inevitably
teleology involved in the description of the low-level
units, but the details of what those low-level units
"desire" is laced with variation and contingency.

Quoted message said:

Turbulent fluid flow is one example. Crystallisation is
another. I think economic metaphors are next-to-useless in
those domains - whereas the thermodynamic descriptions are
still highly applicable.

Crystalization is adequately explained, AFAIK, by classical
thermodynamics. No new laws are needed. Turbulence is
unexplained, and the eventual explanation will have to make
contact with thermodynamics. And, it will certainly be
reductionistically based on statistical mechanics. But it
won't be "thermodynamics", IMO. Again, more below.

Quoted message said:

So - I think the thermodyamic description is the more
general one - and it underlies - and is responsible for -
the dynamics of economies.

However economic metaphors do have their virtues, through
being a higher-level, more holistic description of the
phenomena.

A thermodynamic description of the stock exchange may be
/technically/ correct - but is - perhaps - not necessarily
very useful or practical, through being a description on
too low a level.

Quoted message said:

The followers of Adam Smith have never been tempted to
describe this direction of economic evolution as a
manifestation of the laws of physics.

...though obviously it is just that ;-)

Quoted message said:

Neither should the followers of Darwin be tempted to do
so. IMHO.

Physics explains biology and economics but - perhaps - not
in a very useful way.

The extreme philosophy of reductionism espoused in the last
few paragraphs just calls out for a response, even though it
is off-topic. I will limit myself to pointing out that both
economics and evolutionary theory can lay claim to being
independent of physics - the theory of economics applies to
any intelligent, aquisitive species - even if they inhabit a
universe where the laws of physics are entirely different.
Similarly, natural selection should also apply in other
universes. In both cases, the theories reduce to axioms that
are independent of physics. Neither reduces to physics. Our
universe's physics only happens to be one way of
implementing entities that satisfy the axioms.

Quoted message said:

Anyway, we are not /really/ talking about physics. The
second law of thermodynamics isn't /really/ a law and is
isn't /really/ physics.

Its a statement about statistical tendencies among systems
with large numbers of components.

It is not a "law" - since it can be broken - especially on
small scales - and it has more to do with statistics than
it does to do with physics.

So it will be with the thermodyamic characterisations of
complex systems: not /really/ laws - and more statistics
than physics.

I am not sure whether our disagreement is purely
terminological, or whether it is deeper. I would say that
the second law of thermodynamics really is a law and that OF
COURSE it is a law of physics. It cannot be broken in the
situations where it applies - namely systems in which a
"temperature" can be defined and which are close to thermal
equilibrium. If you can't define a temperature, then you
can't define entropy - the definition of entropy is based on
a particular kind of heat capacity.

Now it is true that the second law can be
reductionistically explained by statistical mechanics,
based on the work of Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Gibbs. And, it
is also true that Einstein and others have explored the
implications of that reduction at scales where a well-
defined temperature no longer exists. They find
fluctuations. Big deal. The second law is only
approximately true when you try to apply it to situations
where it is no longer applicable. It is still as much a law
as Newton's gravitation, or, for that matter, quantum
mechanics or Einstein's gravitation, both of which are
expected to fail at the Planck length and/or Planck mass.

It is worth looking at the reduction of the second law to
statistical mechanics in more detail. The first law -
conservation of energy - is a required assumption. From the
first law, we can derive Liouville's theorem - that
microscopic phase space volume is conserved as any ensemble
moves through phase space. But the log of the ratio between
microscopic phase space volume and macroscopic phase space
volume (i.e. the entropy, in Shannon's sense) is not a
constant. With probability one, entropy is non-decreasing.

So, you want to claim that your favorite new macro-level
"law" is an extension of the second law of thermodynamics?
You want to call some new non-decreasing quantity a new kind
of "entropy"? I will bless this enterprise, only if you
satisfy four requirements.

1. You need an analogue of energy, that is conserved
and supports a Liouville theorem. Energy itself
would do nicely.
2. You need an analogue of temperature, which is itself
proportional to the "kinetic" portion of your energy
analogue. There must be a fairly rapid equipartition of
the kinetic "energy" so that there is a rapid approach to
thermal equilibrium.
3. It must be the case that "entropy" times "temperature"
has the dimensions of "energy".
4. Your "entropy" is the log of a ratio between micro and
macro phase space volumes.

Or you can proceed without my blessing. ;-( However ... I
would prefer that you announce your results as a new law of
nature, rather than further overloading the term "entropy"
and claiming to have merely extended the second law. It will
create less confusion.

Which is not to say that second law extensions or second law
analogues that meet my criteria are impossible. I am myself
working on an idea that has the mutation rate in the role of
temperature and fitness in the role of enthalpy. Will it pan
out? Who knows! It may well pan out, but without sustaining
the analogy with chemical thermodynamics. If that turns out
to be the case, then I hope that I will refrain from
increasing the confusion by claiming that my measure of gene
information really IS entropy, and that its increase over
time is an application of the second law of thermodynamics.

Long post alert :-|

Jim Menegay <[email hidden]> wrote or quoted:

Quoted message said:

Tim Tyler said:

Jim Menegay <[email hidden]> wrote or quoted:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

There has been considerable discussion in this group
of the ideas of Lotka, lately recast and championed by
Kay and Schneider, that ecosystems evolve so as to
maximize their utilization of free energy. By the
ideas proposed here, this tendency, which certainly
cannot be denied, should be seen not as a
manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics.
Instead, it should be seen as a manifestation of the
same phenomenon that causes a free market economy to
evolve so as to make the most efficient use of the
technology available to it, and to drive the evolution
of the technology in the most productive directions.

I don't believe the "biological thermodynamicists"
(e.g. me) think the second law has much to do with it.

[OK - Kay and Schneider's paper excepted :-)].

If Lotka had first studied desert ecosystems, he might
have proposed that they develop so as to maximize the
utilization of water. If he had then moved on to potassium
starved ecosystems, then to ecosystems deficient in
soluble iron, and only then to rich, well watered
ecosystems that get only 12 hrs of sunlight per day, then
he might have generalized that law to the "optimal
utilization of scarce resources". And we would probably
not be having this discussion.

A hypothetical I feel I can pass over.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

What we are mostly proposing is *new* laws of
thermodynamics.

I have to quibble! What you guys are proposing are new
laws of dynamics. These laws should properly be called
"thermodynamic" laws only if you expect to test them using
a thermometer! More on this below.

These are laws of thermodynamics as much as the second law
is. They involve "heat" - but they /also/ involve "order".

If you also want to rename the second law - since that
doesn't deal solely with temperature either - then that's
fine with me - but I think this is a bit of a different
discussion.

It's a discussion about the *naming* of things - and it's
not really an argument with me, it's an argument with the
scientific community.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Kauffman - for example - makes this explicit -
*entirely* new laws to deal with the dynamics of complex
systems are required - and at their most fundamental
level they will have a thermodynamic expression not
covered by the existing thermodynamic laws.

I agree completely - with the principle (though not the
details): new laws of thermodynamics are on the books to
deal with complex systems - and a significant task is to
attempt to clearly elucidate them.

Economic metaphors and thermodynamic metaphors are not
mutually exclusive. You can look as many complex systems
/either/ as though they are economies /or/ by
considering their thermodynamics. Which description is
better will depend on your system and why you are
looking at it.

I think many complex systems are *not* best regarded as
economies.

I only suggest economic models when there is inevitably
teleology involved in the description of the low-level
units, but the details of what those low-level units
"desire" is laced with variation and contingency.

There it makes sense.

What about the case of a single individual - the man on the
desert island?

It seems like he as still doing some dissipation of low-
entropy sources and acting as a dissipative structure -
but it is not so easy for me to see him as a player in
an economy.

We could see him as the product of a previous economy,
perhaps - but economies can make all sorts of stuff - and
we need more information to say anything about how the
man behaves.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Turbulent fluid flow is one example. Crystallisation is
another. I think economic metaphors are next-to-useless
in those domains - whereas the thermodynamic
descriptions are still highly applicable.

Crystalization is adequately explained, AFAIK, by
classical thermodynamics. No new laws are needed. [...]

Crystalization isn't explained by thermodynamics.

It's explained by the laws of physics.

The results are consistent with existing "laws" of
thermodynamics.

Of course this is also true of biological systems.

Imagine for a moment that the second law had not yet
been created.

Crystalization is consistent with the Zeroth and First laws
of thermodynamics - what need is there for a "second law"?

The answer is that the second law provides more information
about the behaviour of the system. It doesn't change the
temporal evolution of the system, but rather represents an
observation about its behaviour.

In this case, one area which the existing laws don't address
is the question of what happens to the entropy of a super-
saturated solution when you introduce a self-organising
system into it - in the form of a crystal seed.

The answer is that often the rate of entropy rise will
increase substantially.

Laws 0-2 don't have anything to say about the subject.
That's one of the reasons more rules are needed.

Self organising systems are an important part of the world -
and are the subject of fairly general thermodynamic laws.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

So - I think the thermodyamic description is the more
general one - and it underlies - and is responsible for
- the dynamics of economies.

However economic metaphors do have their virtues,
through being a higher-level, more holistic description
of the phenomena.

A thermodynamic description of the stock exchange may be
/technically/ correct - but is - perhaps - not
necessarily very useful or practical, through being a
description on too low a level.

Quoted message said:

The followers of Adam Smith have never been tempted to
describe this direction of economic evolution as a
manifestation of the laws of physics.

...though obviously it is just that ;-)

Quoted message said:

Neither should the followers of Darwin be tempted to
do so. IMHO.

Physics explains biology and economics but - perhaps -
not in a very useful way.

The extreme philosophy of reductionism espoused in the
last few paragraphs just calls out for a response, even
though it is off-topic. I will limit myself to pointing
out that both economics and evolutionary theory can lay
claim to being independent of physics - the theory of
economics applies to any intelligent, aquisitive species -
even if they inhabit a universe where the laws of physics
are entirely different. Similarly, natural selection
should also apply in other universes. In both cases, the
theories reduce to axioms that are independent of physics.
Neither reduces to physics. Our universe's physics only
happens to be one way of implementing entities that
satisfy the axioms.

I'm rather bemused about where this one came from ;-)

Perhaps you would rather I had said physics, mathematics and
logic explain biology and economics.

If it helps you can pretend I said that.

Don't try and tell me physics can be left out of the
equation, though.

It is a trivial matter to imagine physical universes where
the laws of biology and economics fail to function - or work
totally differently.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Anyway, we are not /really/ talking about physics. The
second law of thermodynamics isn't /really/ a law and is
isn't /really/ physics.

Its a statement about statistical tendencies among
systems with large numbers of components.

It is not a "law" - since it can be broken - especially
on small scales - and it has more to do with statistics
than it does to do with physics.

So it will be with the thermodyamic characterisations of
complex systems: not /really/ laws - and more statistics
than physics.

I am not sure whether our disagreement is purely
terminological, or whether it is deeper. I would say that
the second law of thermodynamics really is a law and that
OF COURSE it is a law of physics. It cannot be broken in
the situations where it applies - namely systems in which
a "temperature" can be defined and which are close to
thermal equilibrium. If you can't define a temperature,
then you can't define entropy - the definition of entropy
is based on a particular kind of heat capacity.

The second law really can be broken - on any scale you care
to mention.

*If* you accept that laws of nature are rules that permit no
exceptions, then statements to the effect that "entropy
always stays the same or increases" are not laws because
they are seen to be broken.

Quoted message said:

Now it is true that the second law can be
reductionistically explained by statistical mechanics,
based on the work of Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Gibbs. And,
it is also true that Einstein and others have explored the
implications of that reduction at scales where a well-
defined temperature no longer exists. They find
fluctuations. Big deal. The second law is only
approximately true when you try to apply it to situations
where it is no longer applicable. It is still as much a
law as Newton's gravitation, or, for that matter, quantum
mechanics or Einstein's gravitation, both of which are
expected to fail at the Planck length and/or Planck mass.

You are arguing that laws of nature can be broken by nature.

I don't think this is the conventional view.

More orthodox would be the view the Newtonian mechanics,
relativity and quantum physics will turn out /not/ to be the
laws of nature, but mere approximations thereof.

Quoted message said:

So, you want to claim that your favorite new macro-level
"law" is an extension of the second law of thermodynamics?

No, I don't. I don't think I ever said that. Indeed in my
last post I said just the opposite.

Not a tweak of the second law.

A whole new set of rules to describe the behaviour of
complex systems in thermodynamic terms.

Quoted message said:

You want to call some new non-decreasing quantity a new
kind of "entropy"?

*Mainly* I want to characterise existing thermodynamic
behaviour of complex systems in terms of the existing -
perfectly conventional - sort of entropy.

*Mainly* I want to say how complex, self-organising systems
are characterised by their effect on making entropy (the
usual sort) increase more rapidly.

However...

I *do* also see evolution as having a (mostly) progressive
character - and also seek to lawfully describe how the
accumulation of technology by ecosystems helps them more
rapidly exploit thier resources.

*If* you liked, you could indeed see this "state of
technological" development of a system as an *analogous*
quanity to entropy.

It would also be subject to continuous increase. Local
decreases would be allowed - e.g. as particular species
with a significant invention were destroyed; or as planets
were wiped out in collisions - but overall progress would
be ensured.

However I never referred to this quanity as remotely
"entropy like" until after you did (above).

When I have said entropy, on previous occasions I have
always meant it in the completely conventional sense.

Quoted message said:

I will bless this enterprise, only if you satisfy four
requirements.

1. You need an analogue of energy, that is conserved and
supports a Liouville theorem. Energy itself would do
nicely.
2. You need an analogue of temperature, which is itself
proportional to the "kinetic" portion of your energy
analogue. There must be a fairly rapid equipartition of
the kinetic "energy" so that there is a rapid approach
to thermal equilibrium.
3. It must be the case that "entropy" times "temperature"
has the dimensions of "energy".
4. Your "entropy" is the log of a ratio between micro and
macro phase space volumes.

Or you can proceed without my blessing. ;-(

Your requirements are too taxing for me.

This may be straining the analogy you seem to think I am
proposing very greatly.

The connection I see between the conventional entropy and my
"state of development of an ecosystem" are that both are
(statistically speaking) increasing quantities.

However I don't see all the requirements above as being very
relevant. I'm not suggesting it is "entropy writ large" or
"entropy for complex systems". It might be a different sort
of thing with its own laws, and an analogy with entropy
might be quite inappropriate.

I still see the notion as fundamentally thermodynamic
- since it deals with the rate at which ecosystems can
increase the entropy of their environments changes
with time.

However I am *not* calling them thermodynamic because of the
existence of some sort of new-fangled "meta-entropy" that
also happens to be increasing most-of-the-time.

I am calling them thermodynamic because they are a statement
about common or garden entropy. The second law of
thermodynamics is /also/ a statement about what this common
or garden entropy does - and so a similar name seems
appropriate.

Quoted message said:

I would prefer that you announce your results as a new law
of nature, rather than further overloading the term
"entropy" and claiming to have merely extended the second
law. It will create less confusion.

I agree.

This whole analogy between the state of development of
ecosystems and entropy is your suggestion as far as I am
concerned.

I had never even considered the analogy between my "state
of technological development" - or - "ability to rapidly
exhaust resources" notions and entropy until you
mentioned it.

As for "Extending the second law" - that isn't the
idea at all.

New laws of thermodynamics to characteries the behaviour of
complex systems.

No messing with the existing laws ;-)

The title of Kay and Schnier's paper is unfortunate - in
that it might give this impression.

Quoted message said:

Which is not to say that second law extensions or second
law analogues that meet my criteria are impossible. I am
myself working on an idea that has the mutation rate in
the role of temperature and fitness in the role of
enthalpy. Will it pan out? Who knows! It may well pan out,
but without sustaining the analogy with chemical
thermodynamics. If that turns out to be the case, then I
hope that I will refrain from increasing the confusion by
claiming that my measure of gene information really IS
entropy, and that its increase over time is an application
of the second law of thermodynamics.

This is like a straw man to me. It seems to me to be a great
distance from anything I've thought or written.

Re: your idea of fitness increasing. You haven't explained
this - but - IMO - it would translate into organisms having
more and more surviving offspring as time passed.

I believe you need a continuously-expanding - environment to
pull that trick off for very long ;-)
--
__________
|im |yler timtyler.orgtimtyler.orgOpen ↗ [email hidden] Remove
lock to reply.

in article [email hidden], Jim Menegay at
[email hidden] wrote on 3/23/04 4:44 PM:

Quoted message said:

Thanks for the heads-up on Stanley and Econo-physics. I
believe, after considerable searching, that you are wrong
that he is a Nobelist, but he certainly does not appear to
be a lightweight.

I may be wrong about his Nobel-ness, but you are right that
he could not possibly be considered a lightweight. I though
he was one of three theoretical physicists who won the Nobel
prize for development of renormalization group analysis. If
you are not familiar with this method you might find it very
interesting. The claim for the method, which has been deemed
valid by the theoretical physics community, is that it can
prove with certainty that all systems with a particular,
small set of rules will have certain characteristic
tendencies regardless of the other details of the systems.
In other words, it claims to be a proof of inductive
validity, which was previously thought to be impossible
based in part on Popper's philosophy.

Quoted message said:

I look forward to digging into his work and seeing what
he says about "entropy". It seems similar, so far, to
what I have read about what Norm Packard is or was doing
at Los Alamos.

As I understand it, Stanley and Packard (not to mention
other notable theoreticians like Stuart Kauffman and Doyne
Farmer) have been applying thermodynamics to economics
aiming to solve similar problems, but they have been
developing somewhat different approaches.

Quoted message said:

A more detailed statement of why I want to construe
"entropy" narrowly and to limit "thermodynamics" to
systems with a "temperature" will appear in my reply to
Tim.

I look forward to reading it.

Cheers,

Guy

in article [email hidden], Jim Menegay at
[email hidden] wrote on 3/23/04 10:43 PM:

Quoted message said:

Tim Tyler <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

Jim Menegay <[email hidden]> wrote or quoted:

Quoted message said:

There has been considerable discussion in this group of
the ideas of Lotka, lately recast and championed by Kay
and Schneider, that ecosystems evolve so as to maximize
their utilization of free energy. By the ideas proposed
here, this tendency, which certainly cannot be denied,
should be seen not as a manifestation of the second law
of thermodynamics. Instead, it should be seen as a
manifestation of the same phenomenon that causes a free
market economy to evolve so as to make the most
efficient use of the technology available to it, and to
drive the evolution of the technology in the most
productive directions.

I don't believe the "biological thermodynamicists"
(e.g. me) think the second law has much to do with it.

[OK - Kay and Schneider's paper excepted :-)].

If Lotka had first studied desert ecosystems, he might
have proposed that they develop so as to maximize the
utilization of water. If he had then moved on to potassium
starved ecosystems, then to ecosystems deficient in
soluble iron, and only then to rich, well watered
ecosystems that get only 12 hrs of sunlight per day, then
he might have generalized that law to the "optimal
utilization of scarce resources". And we would probably
not be having this discussion.

It has always seemed to me that Lotka worked hard to break
free of local details in his theorizing. You might be
selling him short in this expectation. I can tell you that
Lotka's work was considered fully applicable to desert
ecosystems by the Ecology faculty at the University of
Arizona, where I did my dissertation work.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

What we are mostly proposing is *new* laws of
thermodynamics.

I have to quibble! What you guys are proposing are new
laws of dynamics. These laws should properly be called
"thermodynamic" laws only if you expect to test them using
a thermometer! More on this below.

This is a pretty blunt statement. I agree that it will be
important to take the temperatures of dynamical systems, and
to study how they change as their temperatures change, but
this shouldn't define the limits of empirical research on
complex systems any more than taking temperatures has
limited previous research in thermodynamics.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Kauffman - for example - makes this explicit - *entirely*
new laws to deal with the dynamics of complex systems are
required - and at their most fundamental level they will
have a thermodynamic expression not covered by the
existing thermodynamic laws.

I agree completely - with the principle (though not the
details): new laws of thermodynamics are on the books to
deal with complex systems - and a significant task is to
attempt to clearly elucidate them.

Economic metaphors and thermodynamic metaphors are not
mutually exclusive. You can look as many complex systems
/either/ as though they are economies /or/ by considering
their thermodynamics. Which description is better will
depend on your system and why you are looking at it.

I think many complex systems are *not* best regarded as
economies.

I only suggest economic models when there is inevitably
teleology involved in the description of the low-level
units, but the details of what those low-level units
"desire" is laced with variation and contingency.

This all seems logical to me. Very interesting. IMHO we
don't yet know of any simple (not dynamical or composed of
interacting parts) "low-level units." We don't yet know, for
example, whether quarks or photons are decomposable. Perhaps
the requirements for teleology of the parts go beyond
complexity. Do you have an objective way of assessing the
teleology of parts, or a theoretical basis for the minimal
aspects of a thing that would imbue it with teleology?

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Turbulent fluid flow is one example. Crystallisation is
another. I think economic metaphors are next-to-useless
in those domains - whereas the thermodynamic descriptions
are still highly applicable.

Crystalization is adequately explained, AFAIK, by
classical thermodynamics. No new laws are needed.

What is it in classical thermodynamics that predicts
crystallization will generically result in geometric
patterns? And can classical thermodynamics predict which
pattern will be formed based on extensive knowledge of the
qualities of the parts? As I understand classical
thermodynamics, it only guides us in interpreting the self-
organized patterns that result from crystallization. I would
argue that a key aspect of the "new thermodynamics" is that
it extends the classical framework to include a deeper
understanding of pattern formation, including predictions
about generic tendencies are not contingent upon
externalities (note my comments on renormalization group
analysis in my previous post).

Quoted message said:

Turbulence is unexplained, and the eventual explanation
will have to make contact with thermodynamics. And, it
will certainly be reductionistically based on statistical
mechanics. But it won't be "thermodynamics", IMO. Again,
more below.

I would expect that statistical mechanics will be an basis
for mean field models predicting turbulent patterns in
particular contexts, but it's reductionistism will prevent
this approach from effectively characterizing the generic
(non-contingent, inductively valid) features of turbulence.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

So - I think the thermodyamic description is the more
general one - and it underlies - and is responsible for -
the dynamics of economies.

However economic metaphors do have their virtues, through
being a higher-level, more holistic description of the
phenomena.

A thermodynamic description of the stock exchange may be
/technically/ correct - but is - perhaps - not
necessarily very useful or practical, through being a
description on too low a level.

Quoted message said:

The followers of Adam Smith have never been tempted to
describe this direction of economic evolution as a
manifestation of the laws of physics.

...though obviously it is just that ;-)

Quoted message said:

Neither should the followers of Darwin be tempted to do
so. IMHO.

Physics explains biology and economics but - perhaps -
not in a very useful way.

The extreme philosophy of reductionism espoused in the
last few paragraphs just calls out for a response, even
though it is off-topic. I will limit myself to pointing
out that both economics and evolutionary theory can lay
claim to being independent of physics - the theory of
economics applies to any intelligent, aquisitive species -
even if they inhabit a universe where the laws of physics
are entirely different. Similarly, natural selection
should also apply in other universes. In both cases, the
theories reduce to axioms that are independent of physics.
Neither reduces to physics. Our universe's physics only
happens to be one way of implementing entities that
satisfy the axioms.

How can you know this? I don't think it is even a question
you can address until economic or evolutionary theory find
their links to physical theory in this universe. Then you
could try to change the assumed physical laws and look for
changes in the emergent economies or life.

The other point I want to make here is that while the
origins of theoretical economics and evolution were not
based on physical theory, it does not mean that manifested
economics and biology are not physical or controlled by
physical laws. One of the primary goals of extending
thermodynamics theory is IMHO to build a conduit for linking
these historically unlinked bodies of theory. Thermodynamics
is, after all, the branch of theoretical physics dealing
explicitly with macroscopic phenomena.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Anyway, we are not /really/ talking about physics. The
second law of thermodynamics isn't /really/ a law and is
isn't /really/ physics.

Its a statement about statistical tendencies among
systems with large numbers of components.

It is not a "law" - since it can be broken - especially
on small scales - and it has more to do with statistics
than it does to do with physics.

So it will be with the thermodyamic characterisations of
complex systems: not /really/ laws - and more statistics
than physics.

I am not sure whether our disagreement is purely
terminological, or whether it is deeper. I would say that
the second law of thermodynamics really is a law and that
OF COURSE it is a law of physics.

I agree in principle, but we may disagree on technicalities.
I would say that there is a physical law (Tim and some
others would argue more than one) that has been articulated
as the second law of thermodynamics. This view allows for a
degree of mismatch between the nature of real physics and
our articulation of the law, which is consistent with the
tortured history of alternative articulations of the law,
including the definition of entropy.

Quoted message said:

It cannot be broken in the situations where it applies -
namely systems in which a "temperature" can be defined and
which are close to thermal equilibrium. If you can't
define a temperature, then you can't define entropy
- the definition of entropy is based on a particular kind
of heat capacity.

This is certainly the biggest challenge right now for
theoretical physicists working on the thermodynamics of far-from-
equilibrium systems. I see this as enormously important,
because real physical systems (e.g., economics and biology)
may be universally far from equilibrium.

Quoted message said:

Now it is true that the second law can be
reductionistically explained by statistical mechanics,
based on the work of Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Gibbs.

I will be rather picky here and take issue with your use of
the word "explained," which implies a sort of mechanical
truism in the reductionistic paradigm. I would say that
these folks did a great job of reductionistically modeling
the effects of the second law, but that their models are
ultimately insufficient as explanations because they fail to
consider the top down effects that drive self-organization.

Quoted message said:

And, it is also true that Einstein and others have
explored the implications of that reduction at scales
where a well-defined temperature no longer exists. They
find fluctuations. Big deal. The second law is only
approximately true when you try to apply it to situations
where it is no longer applicable. It is still as much a
law as Newton's gravitation, or, for that matter, quantum
mechanics or Einstein's gravitation, both of which are
expected to fail at the Planck length and/or Planck mass.

If laws are not meant to reflect universalities, then I
suggest that they get a different term indicating that they
are contingent. I would also suggest that the search for non-
contingent universalities (at least for our universe) is
very important, and that I suspect we are on track with our
current understanding of thermodynamics. This is why I am
keen on continuing to refine the way we articulate the
second law.

Quoted message said:

It is worth looking at the reduction of the second law to
statistical mechanics in more detail. The first law -
conservation of energy - is a required assumption. From
the first law, we can derive Liouville's theorem - that
microscopic phase space volume is conserved as any
ensemble moves through phase space. But the log of the
ratio between microscopic phase space volume and
macroscopic phase space volume (i.e. the entropy, in
Shannon's sense) is not a constant. With probability one,
entropy is non-decreasing.

This result is entirely consistent with the proposed
expansion of the second law to say something like all
macroscopic systems emerge because they serve to increase
the rate of universal entropy increase.

Quoted message said:

So, you want to claim that your favorite new macro-level
"law" is an extension of the second law of thermodynamics?

Are you implying that classical thermodynamics is not
fundamentally about macroscopic phenomena?

Quoted message said:

You want to call some new non-decreasing quantity a new
kind of "entropy"?

I, for one, am not proposing any new kind of entropy. This
is a sticky issue, and I see no need to get into that
quagmire in order to address these issues.

Quoted message said:

I will bless this enterprise, only if you satisfy four
requirements.

1. You need an analogue of energy, that is conserved and
supports a Liouville theorem. Energy itself would do
nicely.

I am sure you are aware of the ongoing debate among
physicists about the distinction, or lack thereof, to be
made between energy and information. This debate often, but
not always, centers around the leap Shannon made with use of
the term entropy.

Quoted message said:

2. You need an analogue of temperature, which is itself
proportional to the "kinetic" portion of your energy
analogue. There must be a fairly rapid equipartition of
the kinetic "energy" so that there is a rapid approach
to thermal equilibrium.
3. It must be the case that "entropy" times "temperature"
has the dimensions of "energy".
4. Your "entropy" is the log of a ratio between micro and
macro phase space volumes.

I don't feel comfortable judging the usefulness of your
requirements, but they strike me as possibly requiring
maintenance of artificial aspects of past models, rather
than more fundamental theoretical considerations.

Quoted message said:

Or you can proceed without my blessing. ;-( However ... I
would prefer that you announce your results as a new law
of nature, rather than further overloading the term
"entropy" and claiming to have merely extended the second
law. It will create less confusion.

I have had plenty of discussions on this issue, and I have
an issue with your position (with which I think Tim agrees)
that nobody has answered to my satisfaction. What would be
the point of articulating a fourth law that completely
implies the second law? It would be like having a law
against murder and a second law against murder with a knife.

Quoted message said:

Which is not to say that second law extensions or second
law analogues that meet my criteria are impossible. I am
myself working on an idea that has the mutation rate in
the role of temperature and fitness in the role of
enthalpy.

I will have to think of the fitness=enthalpy part, but the
mutation rate as temperature has occurred to me and at least
a few others I know of.

Quoted message said:

Will it pan out? Who knows! It may well pan out, but
without sustaining the analogy with chemical
thermodynamics. If that turns out to be the case, then I
hope that I will refrain from increasing the confusion by
claiming that my measure of gene information really IS
entropy, and that its increase over time is an application
of the second law of thermodynamics.

Fair enough.

Regards,

Guy

Tim Tyler <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

It IS getting long. In an attempt to wrap this one up, let
me just say that I wasn't trying to attack your ideas on
thermo, but rather some rather wooly ones that are "out
there" - particularly those of Brooks and Wiley.

Responses to just a couple more points:

Quoted message said:

[snip] Imagine for a moment that the second law had not
yet been created.

Crystalization is consistent with the Zeroth and First
laws of thermodynamics - what need is there for a
"second law"?

The answer is that the second law provides more
information about the behaviour of the system. It doesn't
change the temporal evolution of the system, but rather
represents an observation about its behaviour.

I have to disagree. Without the second law, there would be
no reason not to expect a crystal to dissolve (absorbing
heat) in a supersaturated solution. No reason not to expect
a crystal to grow in an unsaturated solution. It is the
second law that provides an "arrow" to the temporal
evolution of the system.

Without the second law, there would be no "tendency to seek
the state of lowest energy". After all, following the first
law, energy is conserved, so all states have the same
energy. The zeroth law doesn't provide an arrow either, for
anything except temperature.

But you HAVE TO have already known this. So, I must be
misinterpreting what you wrote. But how?

Quoted message said:

[snip] Re: your idea of fitness increasing. You haven't
explained this - but - IMO - it would translate into
organisms having more and more surviving offspring as
time passed.

I believe you need a continuously-expanding - environment
to pull that trick off for very long ;-)

Nope. Just a continuously deteriorating environment.
Fisher's "fundamental theorem" says that the genetical
component of fitness is non-decreasing. But he avoids having
continuously increasing populations by claiming that the
environment is continually deteriorating. Only recently have
theorists realized that Fisher was including the average
fitness of competing conspecifics as a component of the
environment. So, we have a "Red Queen" race - fitness
continually increases, but number of offspring do not.

Tim Tyler <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

[snip]

Quoted message said:

I am myself working on an idea that has the mutation
rate in the role of temperature and fitness in the role
of enthalpy. [snip]

Re: your idea of fitness increasing. [snip]

Not my idea. Darwin's and Fisher's. My idea is that fitness
corresponds to enthalpy, not entropy. I defend Fisher in my
other response.

Guy Hoelzer <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

in article [email hidden], Jim Menegay
at [email hidden] wrote on 3/23/04 4:44 PM:

Quoted message said:

Thanks for the heads-up on Stanley and Econo-physics. I
believe, after considerable searching, that you are
wrong that he is a Nobelist, but he certainly does not
appear to be a lightweight.

I may be wrong about his Nobel-ness, but you are right
that he could not possibly be considered a lightweight. I
though he was one of three theoretical physicists who won
the Nobel prize for development of renormalization group
analysis.

I believe, after more searching, that Kenneth Wilson is the
only person to receive a Nobel prize based on the
renormalization group.

Quoted message said:

If you are not familiar with this method you might find it
very interesting.

I'm familiar with Wilson's work from Paul Davies' book, "The
New Physics".

Quoted message said:

The claim for the method, which has been deemed valid by
the theoretical physics community, is that it can prove
with certainty that all systems with a particular, small
set of rules will have certain characteristic tendencies
regardless of the other details of the systems. In other
words, it claims to be a proof of inductive validity,
which was previously thought to be impossible based in
part on Popper's philosophy.

But this is new to me. References would be appreciated.

Gee, those physicists are busy and clever people. Solving
problems in economics, theology, and now philosophy.
Someday, maybe, they will crack turbulence. And they have so
much insight into the issues in other fields! The one
econophysics paper I have read so far (It was listed on the
WEB site as paper-of-the-month.) was more of a critique of
classical economics than a positive contribution. It
expressed horror that the supply and demand curves that the
author had encountered in textbooks were drawn without error
bars. Now THAT is a helpful suggestion!

I begin to understand the reaction of psychologists,
anthropologists, and sociologists when Sociobiology was
published.

Guy Hoelzer <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

in article [email hidden], Jim Menegay
at [email hidden] wrote on 3/23/04 10:43 PM:

Quoted message said:

Tim Tyler <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

Jim Menegay <[email hidden]> wrote or quoted:
[snip much throughout] [TT] What we are mostly
proposing is *new* laws of thermodynamics.

I have to quibble! What you guys are proposing are new
laws of dynamics. These laws should properly be called
"thermodynamic" laws only if you expect to test them
using a thermometer! More on this below.

This is a pretty blunt statement. I agree that it will be
important to take the temperatures of dynamical systems,

Agree with who? Not me. What I said is that it is essential
to take the temperature of a "thermodynamic" system. You can
leave thermometer at home if you are studying a generic
dynamical system, for all I care.

Quoted message said:

and to study how they change as their temperatures change,
but this shouldn't define the limits of empirical research
on complex systems [I agree] any more than taking
temperatures has limited previous research in
thermodynamics.

But I would claim that taking temperatures DELIMITS
thermodynamics, based as it is on three key concepts -
temperature, heat, and entropy. I'm pretty sure heat and
entropy cannot even be defined at the macro level without
invoking temperature. [snip]

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

I only suggest economic models when there is inevitably
teleology involved in the description of the low-level
units, but the details of what those low-level units
"desire" is laced with variation and contingency.

This all seems logical to me. Very interesting. IMHO we
don't yet know of any simple (not dynamical or composed of
interacting parts) "low-level units." We don't yet know,
for example, whether quarks or photons are decomposable.
Perhaps the requirements for teleology of the parts go
beyond complexity. Do you have an objective way of
assessing the teleology of parts, or a theoretical basis
for the minimal aspects of a thing that would imbue it
with teleology?

Talking about "decomposability" misses the point, IMO.
The real question is whether we (as scientists and
theorists) want to decompose beyond a particular point.
The same applies to whether to use teleology in the
description of the part.

Example: John likes popcorn. For that reason, he buys it. An
economist needs a little more information than this - for
example, how much is he willing to pay? But the economist
doesn't need and doesn't want a reductionist explanation of
John's desires, nor does the economist feel that progress
has been made if the reductionist explanation removes the
teleology. The economist has all the information he needs
about popcorn, and is ready to move on to other commodities
such as poppyseed rolls, pornography, and post-hole diggers.
A reductionist explanation would not economize on the data
required to construct or apply the theory.

Was teleology even required? Maybe not for the pornography
and the foodstuffs, but some economists will point out that
no one really wants a post-hole digger - what they really
want are postholes, and that the desire for a post-hole
digger is merely instrumental. Hence, teleology is
necessary here.

Second example: Rabbits eat grass. Cows eat grass. Foxes eat
rabbits but not cows. An ecologist does not need to
understand WHY foxes don't eat cows to model this ecology.
Nor does he need to understand why this particular ecosystem
doesn't contain wolves. [snip]

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Now it is true that the second law can be
reductionistically explained by statistical mechanics,
based on the work of Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Gibbs.

I will be rather picky here and take issue with your use
of the word "explained," which implies a sort of
mechanical truism in the reductionistic paradigm. I would
say that these folks did a great job of reductionistically
modeling the effects of the second law, but that their
models are ultimately insufficient as explanations because
they fail to consider the top down effects that drive self-
organization.

In criticising the reductionistic explanation of the second
law because it doesn't deal with self-organization, you are
making the (unwarranted IMO) assumption that the second law
OUGHT to deal with self-organization. Geez! Will you give
that poor overworked law a breather? The second law doesn't
have to help explain everything.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

And, it is also true that Einstein and others have
explored the implications of that reduction at scales
where a well-defined temperature no longer exists. They
find fluctuations. Big deal. The second law is only
approximately true when you try to apply it to
situations where it is no longer applicable. It is still
as much a law as Newton's gravitation, or, for that
matter, quantum mechanics or Einstein's gravitation,
both of which are expected to fail at the Planck length
and/or Planck mass.

If laws are not meant to reflect universalities, then I
suggest that they get a different term indicating that
they are contingent.

I am not aware of any non-contingent laws. Could you give
an example? AFAIK, the energy and momentum conservation
laws are also suspected to fail at Planck scales, and they
are limited by the Heisenberg principle at the atomic
scale. [snip]

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

So, you want to claim that your favorite new macro-level
"law" is an extension of the second law of
thermodynamics? [snip] I would prefer that you announce
your results as a new law of nature, rather than further
overloading the term "entropy" and claiming to have
merely extended the second law. It will create less
confusion.

I have had plenty of discussions on this issue, and I have
an issue with your position (with which I think Tim
agrees) that nobody has answered to my satisfaction. What
would be the point of articulating a fourth law that
completely implies the second law? It would be like having
a law against murder and a second law against murder with
a knife.

You raise an interesting point. I have two points to make in
response that I hope will be equally interesting. But first
let me say that I generally agree with your position. Your
hypothetical fourth law is better described as an extended
second law.

My first (hopably interesting) point: In axiomatic
developments of thermodynamics, you will find something
called the Zeroth Law. It states that two bodies in contact
will eventually come to thermal equilibrium. The odd thing
is that the Zeroth Law is apparently implied by the Second.
After all, isn't heat flow from hot to cold bodies
frequently given as one example of the Second Law? So why
did the axiomatizers feel the need to invent a Zeroth law?

I'm not sure whether the answer should be classified as
pedagogical or as philosophical. It turns out that you can't
define temperature without the prior notion of thermal
equilibrium. And, as I have stated, you can't define entropy
without first defining temperature. So, a watered down
Second law - called the Zeroth law - is a prerequisite to
even understanding what the Second law, in its current
generality, says.

It may turn out that your hypothetical Fourth law will say
that the "superentropy" of the universe is always
increasing, but the new concept of "superentropy" cannot
even be defined without prior understanding of the classical
Second law. In which case, the axiomatizers may want to keep
the Second and Fourth laws separate.

Second (hopably interesting) point: Instead of defining a
new concept like "superentropy", it seems more likely that
your fourth law will simply extend the current definition of
entropy to cover cases in which entropy cannot currently be
defined. As I understand it, these cases are those in which
temperature is ill-defined, that is, cases in which the
Zeroth law fails. But statistical mechanics already tells us
quite a bit about the nature of the unavoidable fluctuations
in local RMS kinetic energy. This suggests what the new
definition of entropy should look like. It will be classical
entropy plus a fluctuation term (which goes to zero in the
classical case).

It might work. Think the physicists will appreciate the help
of an ecologist and an ex-computer-programmer? ;-)

in article [email hidden], Jim Menegay at
[email hidden] wrote on 3/25/04 8:49 AM:

Quoted message said:

Guy Hoelzer <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

in article [email hidden], Jim Menegay
at [email hidden] wrote on 3/23/04 4:44 PM:

Quoted message said:

Thanks for the heads-up on Stanley and Econo-physics. I
believe, after considerable searching, that you are
wrong that he is a Nobelist, but he certainly does not
appear to be a lightweight.

I may be wrong about his Nobel-ness, but you are right
that he could not possibly be considered a lightweight. I
though he was one of three theoretical physicists who won
the Nobel prize for development of renormalization group
analysis.

I believe, after more searching, that Kenneth Wilson is
the only person to receive a Nobel prize based on the
renormalization group.

Quoted message said:

If you are not familiar with this method you might find
it very interesting.

I'm familiar with Wilson's work from Paul Davies' book,
"The New Physics".

Quoted message said:

The claim for the method, which has been deemed valid by
the theoretical physics community, is that it can prove
with certainty that all systems with a particular, small
set of rules will have certain characteristic tendencies
regardless of the other details of the systems. In other
words, it claims to be a proof of inductive validity,
which was previously thought to be impossible based in
part on Popper's philosophy.

But this is new to me. References would be appreciated.

The only readable (for me) thing I know of on
renormalization group analysis
is:

Stanley, E. 1999. Scaling, universality, and
renormalization: Three pillars of modern critical phenomena.
Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 71, No. 2

Quoted message said:

Gee, those physicists are busy and clever people. Solving
problems in economics, theology, and now philosophy.
Someday, maybe, they will crack turbulence.

It is interesting that you mention turbulence, because I
think many feel it is an aspect of the same problem, and
that the physics of complexity will address if not explain
all of these phenomena.

Quoted message said:

And they have so much insight into the issues in other
fields! The one econophysics paper I have read so far (It
was listed on the WEB site as paper-of-the-month.) was
more of a critique of classical economics than a positive
contribution. It expressed horror that the supply and
demand curves that the author had encountered in textbooks
were drawn without error bars. Now THAT is a helpful
suggestion!

I begin to understand the reaction of psychologists,
anthropologists, and sociologists when Sociobiology was
published.

That is a nice analogy.

Best Wishes,

Guy

in article [email hidden], Jim Menegay at
[email hidden] wrote on 3/25/04 8:49 AM:

Quoted message said:

Guy Hoelzer <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

in article [email hidden], Jim Menegay
at [email hidden] wrote on 3/23/04 10:43 PM:

Quoted message said:

Tim Tyler <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:<[email hidden]>...
> Jim Menegay <[email hidden]> wrote or quoted:
> [snip much throughout] [TT] What we are mostly
> proposing is *new* laws of thermodynamics.

I have to quibble! What you guys are proposing are new
laws of dynamics. These laws should properly be called
"thermodynamic" laws only if you expect to test them
using a thermometer! More on this below.

This is a pretty blunt statement. I agree that it will be
important to take the temperatures of dynamical systems,

Agree with who? Not me.

You wrote:

"These laws should properly be called "thermodynamic" laws
only if you expect to test them using a thermometer!"

I agreed with YOU, and went on to point out that for this
reason "it will be important to take the temperatures of
dynamical systems" to study them as thermodynamic phenomena.

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What I said is that it is essential to take the
temperature of a "thermodynamic" system. You can leave
thermometer at home if you are studying a generic
dynamical system, for all I care.

You seem to have lost the thread of my point. My claim is
that all dynamical systems are thermodynamic phenomena (and
I think this claim is consistent with the views of the
founders of thermodynamics theory). You responded that it
would then be important to be able to take their
temperatures, and I agreed.

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and to study how they change as their temperatures
change, but this shouldn't define the limits of empirical
research on complex systems [I agree] any more than
taking temperatures has limited previous research in
thermodynamics.

But I would claim that taking temperatures DELIMITS
thermodynamics, based as it is on three key concepts -
temperature, heat, and entropy. I'm pretty sure heat and
entropy cannot even be defined at the macro level without
invoking temperature.

This is why I agreed that it will be important to take the
temperatures of complex dynamical systems if they are to be
understood as thermodynamic phenomena.

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I only suggest economic models when there is inevitably
teleology involved in the description of the low-level
units, but the details of what those low-level units
"desire" is laced with variation and contingency.

This all seems logical to me. Very interesting. IMHO we
don't yet know of any simple (not dynamical or composed
of interacting parts) "low-level units." We don't yet
know, for example, whether quarks or photons are
decomposable. Perhaps the requirements for teleology of
the parts go beyond complexity. Do you have an objective
way of assessing the teleology of parts, or a theoretical
basis for the minimal aspects of a thing that would imbue
it with teleology?

Talking about "decomposability" misses the point, IMO. The
real question is whether we (as scientists and theorists)
want to decompose beyond a particular point. The same
applies to whether to use teleology in the description of
the part.

While I disagree with this view, it would seem to support
the point I was making because it permits me to assume that
the parts of any system are teleological. This would then
lead to the conclusion that any system, including those that
you include as thermodynamic, are not different (as you
presumed above) from economics or biology.

Quoted message said:

Example: John likes popcorn. For that reason, he buys it.
An economist needs a little more information than this -
for example, how much is he willing to pay? But the
economist doesn't need and doesn't want a reductionist
explanation of John's desires, nor does the economist feel
that progress has been made if the reductionist
explanation removes the teleology. The economist has all
the information he needs about popcorn, and is ready to
move on to other commodities such as poppyseed rolls,
pornography, and post-hole diggers. A reductionist
explanation would not economize on the data required to
construct or apply the theory.

That is a fine example of the limits to reductionism, which
I argue applies to every phenomenon in the universe with the
possible exception of non-decomposable, fundamental
particles (if they exist).

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Was teleology even required? Maybe not for the pornography
and the foodstuffs, but some economists will point out
that no one really wants a post-hole digger - what they
really want are postholes, and that the desire for a post-
hole digger is merely instrumental. Hence, teleology is
necessary here.

Second example: Rabbits eat grass. Cows eat grass. Foxes
eat rabbits but not cows. An ecologist does not need to
understand WHY foxes don't eat cows to model this ecology.
Nor does he need to understand why this particular
ecosystem doesn't contain wolves.

This is another nice example that I think reflects a
universal law.

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Now it is true that the second law can be
reductionistically explained by statistical mechanics,
based on the work of Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Gibbs.

I will be rather picky here and take issue with your use
of the word "explained," which implies a sort of
mechanical truism in the reductionistic paradigm. I would
say that these folks did a great job of
reductionistically modeling the effects of the second
law, but that their models are ultimately insufficient as
explanations because they fail to consider the top down
effects that drive self-organization.

In criticising the reductionistic explanation of the
second law because it doesn't deal with self-organization,
you are making the (unwarranted IMO) assumption that the
second law OUGHT to deal with self-organization. Geez!
Will you give that poor overworked law a breather? The
second law doesn't have to help explain everything.

I explained why my view (not that I am the source of this
view) is more parsimonious than adding an additional law
below. I would say "Geez" to those who want to unnecessarily
add more and more laws to the list.

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And, it is also true that Einstein and others have
explored the implications of that reduction at scales
where a well-defined temperature no longer exists. They
find fluctuations. Big deal. The second law is only
approximately true when you try to apply it to
situations where it is no longer applicable. It is still
as much a law as Newton's gravitation, or, for that
matter, quantum mechanics or Einstein's gravitation,
both of which are expected to fail at the Planck length
and/or Planck mass.

If laws are not meant to reflect universalities, then I
suggest that they get a different term indicating that
they are contingent.

I am not aware of any non-contingent laws. Could you give
an example? AFAIK, the energy and momentum conservation
laws are also suspected to fail at Planck scales, and
they are limited by the Heisenberg principle at the
atomic scale.

You may know more about the arguments/evidence than me on
this front, and I would like to know if I am missing
something that could alter my view. However, at the moment I
am under the impression that the laws of thermodynamics are
argued to be universal and without any contingencies, at
least in this universe. Suspicions that they may "fail at
Planck scales" are not enough to undermine my current view,
given what I consider to be its extraordinary explanatory
power and logical support. It also seems to me that the
Heisenberg principle is about uncertainty and the
availability of information, and I don't see how it is in
any way inconsistent with my current view.

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So, you want to claim that your favorite new macro-level
"law" is an extension of the second law of
thermodynamics? [snip] I would prefer that you announce
your results as a new law of nature, rather than further
overloading the term "entropy" and claiming to have
merely extended the second law. It will create less
confusion.

I have had plenty of discussions on this issue, and I
have an issue with your position (with which I think Tim
agrees) that nobody has answered to my satisfaction. What
would be the point of articulating a fourth law that
completely implies the second law? It would be like
having a law against murder and a second law against
murder with a knife.

You raise an interesting point. I have two points to make
in response that I hope will be equally interesting. But
first let me say that I generally agree with your
position. Your hypothetical fourth law is better described
as an extended second law.

My first (hopably interesting) point: In axiomatic
developments of thermodynamics, you will find something
called the Zeroth Law. It states that two bodies in
contact will eventually come to thermal equilibrium. The
odd thing is that the Zeroth Law is apparently implied by
the Second. After all, isn't heat flow from hot to cold
bodies frequently given as one example of the Second Law?
So why did the axiomatizers feel the need to invent a
Zeroth law?

Good point. Maybe it is reasonable to be less than
parsimonious in enumerating the list of thermodynamic laws
for the sake of reflecting the rational basis for the
conceptualization of the roots of the laws.

Quoted message said:

I'm not sure whether the answer should be classified as
pedagogical or as philosophical. It turns out that you
can't define temperature without the prior notion of
thermal equilibrium. And, as I have stated, you can't
define entropy without first defining temperature. So, a
watered down Second law - called the Zeroth law - is a
prerequisite to even understanding what the Second law, in
its current generality, says.

Right.

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It may turn out that your hypothetical Fourth law will say
that the "superentropy" of the universe is always
increasing, but the new concept of "superentropy" cannot
even be defined without prior understanding of the
classical Second law. In which case, the axiomatizers may
want to keep the Second and Fourth laws separate.

Right; although I don't see the fourth law, or extended
second law, as supporting a concept like "super-entropy."
The distinction between rate and direction seems to be
different in kind, although I suppose it is possible that
the most transparent argument will require establishing
direction before rate maximization.

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Second (hopably interesting) point: Instead of defining a
new concept like "superentropy", it seems more likely that
your fourth law will simply extend the current definition
of entropy to cover cases in which entropy cannot
currently be defined. As I understand it, these cases are
those in which temperature is ill-defined, that is, cases
in which the Zeroth law fails. But statistical mechanics
already tells us quite a bit about the nature of the
unavoidable fluctuations in local RMS kinetic energy. This
suggests what the new definition of entropy should look
like. It will be classical entropy plus a fluctuation term
(which goes to zero in the classical case).

As I understand it, entropy cannot be concretely defined for
anything other than a closed system. The closest thing we
know of that satisfies this condition is the universe as a
whole, which is why this is the only level at which I argue
the prediction of the extended second law applies. The
extension of the law (rate maximization as opposed to merely
direction) has great implications for smaller scale
phenomena, which are not implied by the classical
articulation of the law. Indeed, I think the reason many of
"us" arguing for extending thermodynamic laws in one way or
another are driven by our desires for more fundamental
explanations of phenomena within the universe.

Quoted message said:

It might work. Think the physicists will appreciate the
help of an ecologist and an ex-computer-programmer? ;-)

More and more.

Regards,

Guy

Jim Menegay <[email hidden]> wrote or quoted:

Quoted message said:

Tim Tyler <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

[snip] Re: your idea of fitness increasing. You haven't
explained this - but - IMO - it would translate into
organisms having more and more surviving offspring as
time passed.

I believe you need a continuously-expanding -
environment to pull that trick off for very long ;-)

Nope. Just a continuously deteriorating environment.
Fisher's "fundamental theorem" says that the genetical
component of fitness is non-decreasing. But he avoids
having continuously increasing populations by claiming
that the environment is continually deteriorating. Only
recently have theorists realized that Fisher was including
the average fitness of competing conspecifics as a
component of the environment. So, we have a "Red Queen"
race - fitness continually increases, but number of
offspring do not.

I prefer the presentation on:

peregrine.dkFISH.HTMOpen ↗

It says - among other things - that Fisher's "fundamental
theorem" is toast.

;-)
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Jim Menegay <[email hidden]> wrote or quoted:

Quoted message said:

Tim Tyler <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

[snip] Imagine for a moment that the second law had not
yet been created.

Crystalization is consistent with the Zeroth and First
laws of thermodynamics - what need is there for a
"second law"?

The answer is that the second law provides more
information about the behaviour of the system. It
doesn't change the temporal evolution of the system, but
rather represents an observation about its behaviour.

I have to disagree. Without the second law, there would be
no reason not to expect a crystal to dissolve (absorbing
heat) in a supersaturated solution. No reason not to
expect a crystal to grow in an unsaturated solution. It is
the second law that provides an "arrow" to the temporal
evolution of the system.

Without the second law, there would be no "tendency to
seek the state of lowest energy". After all, following the
first law, energy is conserved, so all states have the
same energy. The zeroth law doesn't provide an arrow
either, for anything except temperature.

But you HAVE TO have already known this. So, I must be
misinterpreting what you wrote. But how?

I was talking about a time when a society had discovered the
"Zeroth and First laws of thermodynamics" - but had not yet
discovered the second law.

Crystals would have been behaving much the same way since
the year dot - regardless of their knowledge of
thermodynamics.

You were arguing there was no need for more laws - since the
existing ones had crystal formation covered.

But the same argument in the society I mention would
apparently suggest there was no need for the second law.

Crystal formation is consistent with the second law - but
the second law doesn't tell us all the interesting facts
about the thermodynamics of supersaturated solutions.

In particular existing thermodynamics *doesn't* tell us what
happens to the entropy of the system when you introduce a
self-organising system -
i.e. a crystal seed.

That's what the thermodynamics of complex systems is for.

It will tell us that - when self-organising systems are
introduced:

* the entropy goes up;
* the entropy goes up rapidly;
* the entropy goes up with increasing rapidity as time
passes while the SOS is establishing itself;
* the rapidity of the entropy increase depends on the
sophistication of the complex system in question - with
complex ecosystems being at the top of the scale.

Incidentally, the second law doesn't exactly say there's a
tendency to seek out the lowest energy states. What it says
is that entropy doesn't increase. The second law is quite
happy with entropy sitting still and not doing very much -
and that's rather different from "seeking out the lowest
energy states" - IMHO.

This is one reason why a thermodynamic characterisation of
complex adaptive systems is needed. Dissipative structures
*do* actively encourage entropy to increase. This behaviour
is *not* predicted by the second law. The second law
(perfectly correctly) has nothing to say about the behaviour
of complex systems.
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"Jim Menegay" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
"]news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

I am myself working on an idea that has the mutation rate
in the role of temperature and fitness in the role of
enthalpy.

An interesting and impressive ideation!

"Fitness as enthalpy" --- that might at least give John
Edser - the biggest "absolute fitness" fanatic that
phylogeny has this far forged - a reason to rejoice. ;-)

P

Guy Hoelzer <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

As I understand it, entropy cannot be concretely defined
for anything other than a closed system.

I believe this is correct with respect to classical (pre-
Prigogine) thermodynamics.

Quoted message said:

The closest thing we know of that satisfies this condition
[closed system] is the universe as a whole ...

I believe this is incorrect. Perhaps you are confusing
"closed" systems with "isolated" systems.

A "closed system" is one that does not exchange matter with
its surroundings. It may exchange heat and work with its
surroundings. (We need to measure these flows, which may be
difficult in practice.)

Examples of closed systems are the universe, the solar
system (approximately closed), or the contents of any
stoppered beaker.

In principle, entropy can be measured for any closed system
by integrating dS = dQrev / T.

Qrev is the heat absorbed (reversibly) by the system as the
temperature is raised. The lower end of the range of
integration is at T=0, by the third law. In practice, you
start from any state where the entropy is already known.

There is nothing particularly mysterious or inaccessible
about classical entropy. But its definition does presume
that you can measure heat flow and temperature. This means
that you have to be close to (or at) thermal equilibrium.
You don't need to be close to chemical equilibrium, as long
as no chemical reactions are occuring.

Guy Hoelzer <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

However, at the moment I am under the impression that the
laws of thermodynamics are argued to be universal and
without any contingencies, at least in this universe.

But earlier in this thread said:

Anyway, we are not /really/ talking about physics. The
second law of thermodynamics isn't /really/ a law and is
isn't /really/ physics.

Its a statement about statistical tendencies among systems
with large numbers of components.

It is not a "law" - since it can be broken - especially on
small scales - and it has more to do with statistics than
it does to do with physics.

:-) Guy, I'd like to introduce Tim. Tim, this is Guy. Have
:fun you two,
but play nice. Perhaps you both can find some middle ground
- you are welcome to join my position that the laws of
thermodynamics really are laws, but that they only apply to
the situations that they claim to apply to - that is, in
Guy's language, they have contingencies.

Jim Menegay <[email hidden]> wrote or quoted:

Quoted message said:

But earlier in this thread, Tim Tyler wrote:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Anyway, we are not /really/ talking about physics. The
second law of thermodynamics isn't /really/ a law and is
isn't /really/ physics.

Its a statement about statistical tendencies among
systems with large numbers of components.

It is not a "law" - since it can be broken - especially
on small scales - and it has more to do with statistics
than it does to do with physics.

:-) Guy, I'd like to introduce Tim. Tim, this is Guy. Have
:fun you two,
but play nice. Perhaps you both can find some middle
ground - you are welcome to join my position that the laws
of thermodynamics really are laws, but that they only
apply to the situations that they claim to apply to - that
is, in Guy's language, they have contingencies.

I attribute my charaterisation of the second "law" to
Boltzman:

``Boltzmann resolves the conflict by stating that the Second
Law of Thermodynamics is not really a law at all. It is more
of a statistical recommendation of what is likely to occur.
It is very improbable that a system can go from great
entropy to less entropy, but it is not necessarily
impossible.''

Boltzmann's reinterpretation of the second law is the one
that has become standardly taught as its theoretical
underpinning.

It's best to totally dispense with the idea of the second
law as a law of physics. It is a result of the laws of
physics being reversible. You get the exact same "law" in
any reversible system - regardless of the other details of
the laws of physics.

The second law is thus best seen as primarily statistical
in nature.
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