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A New Physics Theory of Life

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Felnik

Felnik

Rising Star
OG Pioneer
Interesting:



Quanta Magazine

www.quantamagazine.org www.quantamagazine.org



At the heart of England’s idea is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the “arrow of time.” Hot things cool down, gas diffuses through air, eggs scramble but never spontaneously unscramble; in short, energy tends to disperse or spread out as time progresses. Entropy is a measure of this tendency, quantifying how dispersed the energy is among the particles in a system, and how diffuse those particles are throughout space. It increases as a simple matter of probability: There are more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be concentrated. Thus, as particles in a system move around and interact, they will, through sheer chance, tend to adopt configurations in which the energy is spread out. Eventually, the system arrives at a state of maximum entropy called “thermodynamic equilibrium,” in which energy is uniformly distributed. A cup of coffee and the room it sits in become the same temperature, for example. As long as the cup and the room are left alone, this process is irreversible. The coffee never spontaneously heats up again because the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against so much of the room’s energy randomly concentrating in its atoms.
 
Thanks for posting this article Felnik. I don't really think this is anything new or revolutionary as biologists/ecologists have been saying similar things for a while. The idea of behaviors emerging within systems that tend toward maximum entropy production sounds like a rehashing of the ecological principal put forward by Odum of maximum power transfer within systems.

"The maximum power principle can be stated: During self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency." Odum, 1995

I might ruffle a few feathers saying this but from my personal understanding and observations I would say life is an anti-entropic, contractive force while entropy could be likened to death as a decaying, radiative force. Death's arch nemesis is Life and visa versa. Energy always flows downhill? So what happens when a big planet (high energy) attracts a smaller planet (small energy). The low potential travelled to the high potential, ball rolled up the hill. No doubt entropic processes exists but it is only one pole of the magnet of the universe, the other pole is the living processes and they continually attract and become each other over and over again so long as the universe exists. If systems ALWAYS tend to highest entropy how does a whole form of a galaxy emerge from space dust. Yes entropy is there but entropy cannot turn to disorder what has not already been turned into order.
 
Entropy is not disorder or order.

Entropy is expansion. More space. More slots for data. More jiggabytes. That's what entropy is. The idea of entropy as 'disorder' has been abused to claim there is no order to the universe. But look around and tell me if things are not orderly. Entropy is order just as much as it is disorder. It is both and neither.

Entropy is not decay either. Decay is that which arises as entropy increases. But something else arises when entropy increases. Birth. That's where we get the cycle of death, rebirth. Death IS rebirth. There are 4 stages to it all, just as there are 4 stages to a sine, cosine, tan wave, whatever. You get the Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. Or if you want to be machine-like you can just say #1#2#3#4 but it's all the same however you look at it.

Old information structures are only "old" because of the new context they are in. What's the new context? More space. In relation to an expanded universe, things "age". The increase of entropy is the increase of 'time'. It's all fundamentally interlinked.
 
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