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Author | Topic: Thermodynamics and The Universe | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fosdick  Suspended Member (Idle past 5530 days) Posts: 1793 From: Upper Slobovia Joined: |
1.6180 wrote:
The metaphor is correct, and I expect Percy would agree. delta s=0 is where the buck stops. So let me ask: If I placed a fresh deck of cards on the ground, and next to it I placed a shuffled deck, which of the two decks comprises (i.e., has) more entropy? The shuffled deck, of course. But there is no delta s in either deck; in both decks delta s = 0. Aside from the energy it took to arrange these decks on the ground, and to organize one of them (in manufacturing) and shuffle the other, the entropy involved has no dynamical function. Its rate of change is zero. Both decks rest at dynamic equilibrium. On the other hand, life involves coordinated activities that never come close to equilibrium. For life, there is no meaning to delta s = 0, unless you included death as part of life. Organisms live so far from equilibrium that measuring an equilibrium s is meaningless, and that only delta s has meaning. Such is the dynamics of a dissipative structure. I would suppose its "macro entropy" production (Prigogine) trumps its "micro entropy" production by at least an order of magnitude. That's why manure, from moment to moment, has a much greater delta s than a rock of equal size, whose delta s approaches zero. ”HM
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Fosdick  Suspended Member (Idle past 5530 days) Posts: 1793 From: Upper Slobovia Joined: |
Ringo wrote:
Becuase entropy = disorder, and the shuffled deck has more disorder than the fresh deck.
I'm not following that at all. Why would one arbitrary sequence of cards have "more entropy" than another? I was under the impression that delta S could only be determined for individual processes. So, unless you can accurately sum delta S for every process, how does delta S for an organism have any meaning?
Because delta macro S is the whole dissipative structure's cost of operating far from equilibrium, and it's more than trhe sum of all the delta micro Ss. ”HM
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Fosdick  Suspended Member (Idle past 5530 days) Posts: 1793 From: Upper Slobovia Joined: |
Percy wrote:
I want to make it clear that I am just a novice student of dissipative structures”only a isolated reader. I come to forums like this one to get my ass kicked into proper alignment and my head corrected for ignorance (and stupidity). If you have a better understanding of Prigogine than I then please educate me. I've tried my best to address all of your issues.
I don't think you have a clear understanding of what Prigogine means by a dissipative structure, and the ambiguity in your understanding is causing you to draw false conclusions. This is as untrue today as it was all the other times you said this. Manure is an open system. In an open field with the sun beating down on it, a recent cowpat that is full of microorganisms will likely have a negative dS, while a rock would have a positive dS. In other words, the rock would have greater dS. If a car burns one gallon of gas per hour to maintain a speed of 30 mph over a period of 48 hours, the rate of fuel burning and entropy production from hour to hour and day to day does not change. However, this was accomplished by burning 48 gallons of fuel, which amounts to a lot of irreversible entropy production over time: dS/dt 0. Prigogine states in the first chapter of his From Being to Becoming (1980):
quote:I hope I've cleared more than muddied the waters. For your part, can you provide something more than mere negation to force your points? I'd appreciate a few relevant quotes from experts to support your argument. ”HM
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Fosdick  Suspended Member (Idle past 5530 days) Posts: 1793 From: Upper Slobovia Joined: |
Percy wrote:
Ilya Prigogine won the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his advances in irreversible thermodynamics and his theory of dissipative structures. I have an article from Science (Procaccia & Ross, Nov. 18, 1977, pp. 716-17) describing Prigogine’s work. I’ll try to summarize it here with relevant excerpts:
I'd never heard of Prigogine until you mentioned him, and if his ideas about viewing life as dissipative structures are influential within biology then it is a rather quiet influence, as I hadn't heard of them before. I'm a little puzzled why you would focus on the ideas of Prigogine instead of just studying up on thermodynamics. quote:Lars Onsager had won the 1968 Nobel Prize in chemistry for proving that thermodynamic methods can be applied to nonequilibrium situations not too far from equilibrium. quote:From there, Prigogine developed his theory of dissipative structures to account for organization occurring in systems operating far from equilibrium. He went on to prove that entropy production is a Lyapounoff function (re: a math model of the stability of stationary states). quote: For a while, at least, back in the ”80s and ”90s, Prigogine was highly regarded for his fresh insight into biological processes, namely evolution.
quote:To me, a biologist pretending to understand evolution, Prigogine’s discoveries seem important. They would seem to answer Schodinger’s question: How does life manage to accomplish self-organization and not disobey the second law? Still, I am left asking, What has Prigogine done for me lately? ”HM
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Fosdick  Suspended Member (Idle past 5530 days) Posts: 1793 From: Upper Slobovia Joined: |
Percy wrote:
1. Nobel Prizes are not usually awarded right away; Watson & Crick didn’t get theirs until 1962. I'm not that familiar with the period when Schrodinger spoke in the 1940's, and Prigogine's work predates his Nobel prize in 1977 by quite a bit. You seem to be going pretty far back in time to find a mystery...Whether scientists really felt the cell's ability at maintaining organizational structure to be puzzling thermodynamically 50 years ago, I can't say, though I tend to doubt it. Today certainly there is no such puzzle. Open systems are free to gain and lose entropy, and loss of entropy is associated with increases in organization. 2. Have you considered the actual principles”the physicochemical ones”that enable biological self-organization? I believe Prigogine is the only scientist to demonstrate convincingly those principles that enable self-organization to occur far from equilibrium. Indeed that's what his theory of dissipative structures is all about. 3. Please keep in mind that I am older than most on this forum. I took my last exams in engineering with a slide rule. That was in 1970-71, three years before the HP-35 came out. If you will open your historical timeframe just a bit more, you could see how scientists back then struggled with how the self-organization of biological life flies, apparently, in the face of the Second Law and its disording principle. We all had copies of Schrdinger’s little orange book What Is Life & Mind And Matter (1958), and we liked the challenge he presented to physicists and chemists (pp. 3 & 4):
quote:He goes on to discuss order, disorder, and entropy in open systems with irreversible processes. Schrdinger could be credited for anticipating the principles of dissipative structures”he and Onsager. But Prigogine brought them around successfully enough to be awarded the 1977 Nodel Prize in chemistry. Mystery solved, I thought. At least now there are known thermodynamic principles that are friendly to biological life. And thus Prigogine became my hero. Sorry for belaboring the history lesson. Old farts will do that. ”HM
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Fosdick  Suspended Member (Idle past 5530 days) Posts: 1793 From: Upper Slobovia Joined: |
Percy wrote:
If that is true then please identify and explain the thermodynamic principles that enable biological self-organization to occur. I've made my shot at it. What do you have to contribute beyond your snooty arrogation?
The puzzles about how life managed to obey thermodynamic laws have long since been answered. Neither Prigogine nor dissipative structures appear in the index of any of my four biology textbooks. You don't appear to have an accurate understanding of his views anyway...
Let me see if I can get this straight: You don't know anything about Prigogine's work, but you think that my understanding of his theory is inaccurate.
There's no excuse for becoming irrelevant while still able to think.
Irrelevant to the topic of 'Thermodynamics and the Universe'? I don't think so, considering the trouble I took to expain the relevancy of Prigogine's principles. Is that your idea of how to counter a principled argument? Your forum is becoming more of a smash-mouth attitude party than an organ of reasonable debate. What is the point of this forum, anyway? ”HM
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Fosdick  Suspended Member (Idle past 5530 days) Posts: 1793 From: Upper Slobovia Joined: |
It seems to be about watching you make hilarious science gaffes...
Speaking of hilarious gaffes: Message 76:
crashfrog wrote:
No code? DNA simply catalyzes...? You didn't mean to say this, did you? Moreover, a code is a rule for converting information into another form, but that's not what DNA does at all. DNA simply catalyzes the formation of specific polypeptide sequences. ”HM
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