Thermodynamics and The Universe

I can only guess that you're referring to thermodynamics origins with Boltzmann and his statistical approach. This is a kind of micro view of thermodynamics that I'm not that familiar with, I'm more familiar with a higher level view. Statistical approaches always have probabilistic error bars, but even at higher levels of abstraction we still have error bars, so even if we've measured some system to have maximal entropy, we could never be certain that was the case. Like absolute zero, maximal entropy is probably a state we'll never achieve in any practical terms.--Percy

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.I have no idea why Schrodinger chose to portray the cell's maintenance of organization as a puzzling thermodynamic mystery, but today his characterization seems both quaint and naive. Even when he said this back in the 1940's it might have sounded so, but I think such comments were just lead-in to his more serious speculations about cell organization, in some ways anticipating the discovery of the structure of DNA by Crick and Watson. If I were to translate his comments into modern terms, he was saying that a self-organizing/replicating molecule like DNA (in the sense of the way the nucleotides always choose the same partner) *had* to exist, even though at the time we had no idea what it was.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.--Percy

You're missing my point. I wasn't trying to cast Prigogine's work in a negative light. I was saying it was a long time ago and doesn't seem to have any particular relevancy today. In Schrodinger and Priogine's day they didn't know what we know today about the chemistry within the cell and especially the nucleus. The puzzles about how life managed to obey thermodynamic laws have long since been answered.As I said earlier, viewing life as dissipative structures does not appear to have had any particularly visible influence on modern biology. 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, for example believing that being far from thermodynamic equilibrium indicates high entropy, and that's why I think your efforts would be better focused on understanding thermodynamics than on contemplating Prigogine. Me too. So what. There's no excuse for becoming irrelevant while still able to think. If anything, I find greater experience provides an advantage.--Percy

Any evolutionist who says 2LOT does not apply to open systems is beyond extreme - he's wrong! Closed systems more often come up in discussions of 2LOT because regardless of what is happening within the closed system, it is absolutely known that entropy can never decrease. This makes closed systems much simpler to talk about. Open systems are much more complicated since entropy can both increase and decrease depending upon what energy and matter crosses the system boundary.Planets are extremely complex open systems, and in many cases it likely isn't practical to calculate whether entropy is increasing or decreasing for them. We know less about our oceans than we do about outer space, and even less than that about the solid portions of our planet beneath the surface. The best we could do in calculating whether earth's entropy is increasing or decreasing is draw some informed approximations that could easily be wrong. Of course if some well known overriding factor were identified that would be a different matter, but I'm not aware of one.Repeating your last sentence again: The middle ground between two incorrect positions is still unlikely to be correct. The best way to identify the correct position is to learn and understand the applicable science. I'm not sure whether this is just loosely phrased or if it represents a misunderstanding. 2LOT is a fundamental law of nature. All natural processes obey 2LOT, including evolution. I think you're referring to thermodynamic entropy and information entropy? Anyway, no, they are not both right. As you have stated it they are both wrong, plus this is not an issue of thermodynamic versus information entropy. The two are thought to be different but equivalent perspectives.About Tim Berra's analogy, I don't know that there is really any good way to communicate 2LOT to a lay audience. There seem only two choices, neither of them very attractive. Either you take the approach that Tim Berra does and leave the audience thinking that folding their laundry reduces entropy, or you explain it properly and nobody understands it. I don't think 2LOT is for the masses. Hoot Mon appears to think that systems can be divided into two types of entropy: thermodynamic and informational. This is incorrect. As mentioned above, they are two equivalent ways of looking at the same thing. You can either examine a system from a thermodynamic perspective, or from an information theoretic perspective, but not from both simultaneously. The confusion is analogous to using meters and feet in the same equation.--Percy

I don't think anyone would describe biological processes as being made possible by thermodynamic principles. Rather, like all other natural processes in the universe, biological processes obey the laws of thermodynamics. And Schrodinger knew this, of course ("Life exists, therefore life obeys the laws of thermodynamics."), but scientists were having a difficult time imagining what the actually chemistry would be like. In some ways Schrodinger's speculations anticipated some of the properties of DNA and the surrounding chemical machinery. Well, yes, of course. Prigogine's work is based upon thermodynamics, and you have some things wrong regarding thermodynamics that is causing you to misinterpret his work. Don't you recall that just a few posts ago you were claiming that dissipative structures were high in entropy? And that you were arguing that structures far from thermodynamic equilibrium were high in entropy? If you saw Cavediver's message you noticed that he speculated that Prigogine may have been thinking of dissipative structures as low entropy structures at a local maxima, and you may want to check if that's what Prigogine was actually saying. You were trying to claim that the puzzles facing Schrodinger and Prigogine in the 50's and 60's have relevance to this discussion. They don't appear to as far as we can tell by what you've presented here. Prigogine's work is mentioned in no modern textbooks and may have actually sunk into obscurity. And while Schrodinger's observations about the self-organizing principles of life are an extremely fascinating story in the history of science, especially because of the prescience he demonstrated, they are not particularly relevant today. Science has moved on. Welcome to the 21st century!--Percy

I won't comment too much on a statistical approach to thermodynamics, but I think this is a bit off. I think any measure of entropy includes the statistical possibilities as part and parcel of the concept. I think you probably meant to say "less entropy". I think you've got a contradiction in terms here. Organization and high energy levels (think gasoline) go hand in hand. They would have lower entropy than the same chemicals in a disorganized low-energy state. If protein formation is exothermic then you're probably right about this.--Percy

I'm not trying to set myself up as an expert in thermodynamics, but over the years I have managed to correct enough of my own misconceptions to have become significantly less dangerous than I once was. But that's no immunity from error.I think Cavediver has a much better understanding of the physics than I do and as a consequence has a greater reticence for issuing definitive statements, and I get the feeling that he is cringing at some of the limbs that I am allowing myself to be drawn into venturing upon. But with that said, let me comment anyway.Earlier I was arguing that it is really difficult to make definitive comments about the entropic properties of objects, like manure and rocks in Hoot Mon's example. This is always going to be true of anything as complex as life. Is a living creature gaining or losing entropy? At any given point in time, who knows? Set fire to the creature thereby setting up an overwhelming overriding factor and I can tell you that the creature's entropy is increasing, but otherwise, no, I can't.Populations of organisms are so incredibly complex that I can't imagine anyone approaching the problem from a thermodynamic perspective. It isn't that thermodynamic laws don't apply, it's just that the complexity defies accurate thermodynamic analysis. Perhaps it's similar to why we don't model gas behavior at the molecular level. All true, but a relentless reductionist approach would ultimately break the process down to simple levels amenable to thermodynamic analysis. In other words, processes obeying thermodynamic laws contribute to evolution. But that isn't a practical or I think even useful level of abstraction for thinking about evolution.--Percy

When scientists attempt to put thermodynamics into lay terms they describe entropy as a measure of disorder. While this isn't exactly wrong, it is almost always misunderstood by laypeople. This explanation gives laypeople the sense that neatening up the living room or cleaning up after dinner reduces entropy when this is definitely not the case. That's not the kind of order that entropy measures.Entropy is a measure of a system's potential to do work, and you gave a correct example yourself in an earlier post when you mentioned heat transfer. A steam engine is the clearest example of a heat engine because it uses the heat from steam to do work. Wikipedia describes a heat engine as exploiting the temperature gradient between a hot "source" and a cold "sink" to convert heat energy to mechanical work. A steam engine increases the entropy, the disorder if you prefer, of a system, but as you can see it isn't the kind of disorder you see around the house.When you add heat to a mixture of chemicals it can cause chemical reactions to take place, and in some cases that can result in energy being stored in chemical bonds. The heat did work to create those bonds, and the newly formed chemicals have lower entropy than the original chemicals. They are less disordered now, more organized. Again, this isn't the kind of organization you'll see around the house, but that's what reduced entropy means.So it does not take an energy converter to increase organization and reduce entropy. Where chemical reactions are involved and the right chemicals are present, all it takes is the addition of energy. This is why Miller was able to create complex organic molecules in his experiment, molecules that were more organized with less entropy than the original constituents he began with. This is why we often find complex organic molecules in meteorites. It's an analogy, a device for explaining something unfamiliar by reference to something familiar. There isn't an analogy in the world that can't be stretched to far. This analogy is not addressing anything related to design. It's attempting to explain the principle of entropy. He could as easily have used the example of sea shells on a beach that you gather and place into order by size and color. Or if you prefer an example with no people at all, imagine a gravel bed during an earthquake. The shaking ground will order the gravel by size with the largest pieces on top and the smallest on the bottom. If I've explained this all properly, you now understand why converters are not necessary to use energy to do work.--Percy

I think you mean nuclear fusion. The elements created in the big bang were mostly hydrogen and helium, a little lithium, and I believe a very tiny amount of beryllium, though I could be mistaken about that. All other elements in the universe were cooked up in the furnaces in the centers of stars. This was all worked out by astrophysicists back in the 1930's, Fred Hoyle most prominent among them. The correspondence between observation and theory is extremely close. We see star formation in many places in the universe: Stellar NurseriesThere really can't be any reasonable doubts about stellar birth. Even if by some unlucky happenstance no stellar nurseries were observable from earth, we'd still know they would have to exist since there is nothing to prevent the force of gravity from condensing gas clouds into great spherical bundles where eventually the great compressive forces at the center would ignite the engines of fusion.If we consider a gas cloud in isolation which then condenses into a star, the entropy of the system increases, but quite clearly parts of this system are decreasing in entropy, which would be the portion of the star whose elements are fused into more and more complex elements.--Percy