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Author Topic:   Thermodynamics and The Universe
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 151 of 186 (388074)
03-04-2007 2:38 PM
Reply to: Message 147 by ringo
03-04-2007 1:18 PM


Re: where in the universe is the universe?
Ringo writes:
Hoot Mon writes:
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.
I'm not following that at all. Why would one arbitrary sequence of cards have "more entropy" than another?
AbE: Let me quickly add a comment that I actually deleted before posting this. After seeing that Cavediver's message it's probably important to note that Hoot Mon seems to move back and forth freely in questionable ways between an information theoretic approach to entropy and a traditional thermodynamic approach.
Good question. You're of course absolutely right that both orderings are arbitrary and equally unlikely. Hoot Mon's example does not state that the information about whether a deck is sorted or not is communicated to the person examining the decks. Without this information, both decks have equal entropy.
If you change the example so that before examining a deck the person is told whether or not it is sorted, then he receives no information from actually examining the sorted deck because he already knows the order of the cards. All the necessary information was already communicated when he was told the deck was sorted. Once he was told it was sorted he already knew the order of the cards. Since he learns nothing from examining the order of cards in the sorted deck, in other words, no information is communicated, the entropy in the sorted deck is low. In information theory, low entropy is associated with communicating little information.
On the other hand, in examining the shuffled deck the person examining it learns something new about the order of cards with every next card he examines. He is, of course, learning less and less information with each card. For example, the first card has 52 different possibilities, and so by examining the first card he learns a great deal. The last card has only one possibility, since by process of elimination there's only one card that could be left, so once 51 cards have been examined there is no point in actually examining the last card since it is a virtual certainty what it is. But the random deck has very high entropy since something is learned with every card but one.
So if we change Hoot Mon's example to assume we're told which deck is sorted, then this is consistent with what Hoot Mon claimed.
--Percy
Edited by Percy, : Add brief clarification.

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Fosdick 
Suspended Member (Idle past 5500 days)
Posts: 1793
From: Upper Slobovia
Joined: 12-11-2006


Message 152 of 186 (388094)
03-04-2007 3:51 PM
Reply to: Message 149 by Percy
03-04-2007 2:08 PM


Re: Dissipative structures
Percy wrote:
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.
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.
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:
The second law then implies the existence of a function S, the entropy, which increases monotonically until it reaches it maximum value at the state of thermodynamic equilibrium:
dS/dt 0.
This formulation can be extended to systems that exchange energy and matter with the outside world (see Figure 1.2).
Figure 1.2. An open system in which diS represents entropy production and deS represents entropy exchange between system and environment.
We must distinguish two terms in the entropy change, dS; the first, deS, is the transfer of entropy across the boundaries of the system; the second, diS, is the entropy produced within the system. According to the second law, the entropy production inside the system is positive:
dS = deS + diS,
diS 0.
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

This message is a reply to:
 Message 149 by Percy, posted 03-04-2007 2:08 PM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
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JustinC
Member (Idle past 4843 days)
Posts: 624
From: Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Joined: 07-21-2003


Message 153 of 186 (388105)
03-04-2007 4:41 PM
Reply to: Message 149 by Percy
03-04-2007 2:08 PM


Re: where in the universe is the universe?
Just a question from the sideline...you write:
Thermodynamic equilibrium is not defined as dS=0, but rather is defined as a system in a state where dS cannot be anything but 0.
is the "cannot" too strong? According to the probabalistic interpretation of entropy, isn't it just very likely that the system will remain in a state of maximum entropy (by definition)? There's still a chance (Vanishingly small as it may be) that entropy will decrease, right?

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 Message 149 by Percy, posted 03-04-2007 2:08 PM Percy has replied

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Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 154 of 186 (388106)
03-04-2007 4:49 PM
Reply to: Message 152 by Fosdick
03-04-2007 3:51 PM


Re: Dissipative structures
Hoot Mon writes:
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.
Your example is correct, but it's just an example of a different situation, not a counter example, and it isn't equivalent to the manure in your other example. In your car example you're considering the car as a closed system with no energy input (in the form of gasoline fillups). In your manure example, the manure is an open system, not closed, and what I originally said is that it is very difficult to know whether the entropy of the manure is increasing or decreasing. A recent cowpat in the hot sun is likely decreasing in entropy as the microorganisms transform the heat from the sun and the raw materials from the cowpat into methane and other chemicals as well as reproducing more of themselves. An old cowpat, perhaps at the bottom of a pile of old cowpats, with dying or diminishing populations of microorganisms is likely increasing in entropy.
But my main point is that the determination of the direction of entropy changes in something as complex as life is often not a realistic possibility. You can draw broad trends in certain situations as I've tried to do, but there are so many factors involved that it is very difficult to be certain. That's why I keep telling you that you can't make definitive statements such as that manure gains entropy faster than rocks. First it depends upon a lot of factors, and second those factors aren't easy to analyze.
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.
I think the clarifications I've offered you about your manure versus rock example are far more than mere negation. I've explained the same thing a number of times and a number of different ways. I don't have quotes from any experts, just an understanding of thermodynamics that I learned at university, honed over the years through frequent discussions such as this one. I didn't learn thermodynamics by reading quotes from experts, and I don't think I could really name any experts.
Your Prigogine excerpt is just a simple illustration and description of 2LOT, but it is fundamental to this discussion. Anything either of us says must obey 2LOT or it's wrong. But this isn't the tricky part of thermodynamics for this particular discussion. The tricky part is building an understanding of which types of processes tend to increase entropy versus which types decrease entropy. In general, heating that merely causes state changes increases entropy, but once the system heats up it will begin radiating as much heat as it absorbs and entropy will increase no longer. But heating that drives chemical reactions that store energy decrease entropy. In other words, the system has stored the potential to do work in the newly formed chemical bonds.
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. I quick Google reveals that Prigogine is mentioned in some creationist source material, such as Duane Gish's book Creation Scientists Answer Their Critics, but only to dismiss his ideas.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 152 by Fosdick, posted 03-04-2007 3:51 PM Fosdick has replied

Replies to this message:
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Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 155 of 186 (388110)
03-04-2007 5:09 PM
Reply to: Message 153 by JustinC
03-04-2007 4:41 PM


Re: where in the universe is 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

This message is a reply to:
 Message 153 by JustinC, posted 03-04-2007 4:41 PM JustinC has replied

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JustinC
Member (Idle past 4843 days)
Posts: 624
From: Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Joined: 07-21-2003


Message 156 of 186 (388117)
03-04-2007 6:06 PM
Reply to: Message 155 by Percy
03-04-2007 5:09 PM


Re: where in the universe is the universe?
quote:
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.
I am referring to the Boltzmann view, I should have been more explicit.
For example, take the simple case of a box with white gas molecules on one side and black on the other seperated by a partition. Once you remove the partition, the gas becomes homogenous. The statistical approach basically says "there are more ways to be disordered" so that is the most likely state the gas will be in. Or, to flip it around, the state that a system is most likely to be in is defined as "most disordered." The view also says that given enough time it is possible for the gas to once again separate since it's just more probable that is will be in a state of homogeneity.
I'm positive you've heard this before, but that is the angle I was looking at your statement from.

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Chiroptera
Inactive Member


Message 157 of 186 (388119)
03-04-2007 6:18 PM
Reply to: Message 156 by JustinC
03-04-2007 6:06 PM


A little pedantry
quote:
The statistical approach basically says "there are more ways to be disordered" so that is the most likely state the gas will be in.
Actually, the statistical approach says, "there are more ways for white molecules to be more or less evenly distributed throughout the box and for black molecules to be distributed throughout the box than for white molecules to be all on one side and for black molecules to be on the other side." The word disorder isn't really well defined, except that you say:
quote:
Or, to flip it around, the state that a system is most likely to be in is defined as "most disordered."
That's about the best definition for "disordered" that I've seen. I would, though, say that the macroscopic state that is produced by the largest set of microscopic states is the most disordered.

Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

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Fosdick 
Suspended Member (Idle past 5500 days)
Posts: 1793
From: Upper Slobovia
Joined: 12-11-2006


Message 158 of 186 (388153)
03-04-2007 9:09 PM
Reply to: Message 154 by Percy
03-04-2007 4:49 PM


Re: Dissipative structures
Percy wrote:
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.
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:
quote:
Biological systems show a high degree of organization and order. In a remarkable article published in 1952, A. Turing proposed a model for the structural origin of biomorphogenesis based on a set of hypothetical chemical reactions with nonlinearities and feedback loops coupled to diffusion, and showed thereby the possibility of the formation of macroscopic, spatial structures. However, this work was essentially ignored. It was the insight and determination of Prigogine and his co-workers to recognize the potential importance of the subject and to stimulate activity in the scientific community . [He] turned to thermodynamic issues, in particular the extension of thermodynamic theory to include the possibility of creation of order.
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:
This important result, known as Onsager’s reciprocal relations, opened the way for an extensive discussion and application of the thermodynamics of near-equilibrium phenomena. Onsager also made a statement concerning the “principle of least dispersion of energy,” which applies to stationary states in the linear regime. The statement implies that a physical system open to fluxes evolves until it attains a stationary state where the rate of dissipation is minimal. Prigogine proved this implication with great generality in 1945 and called it the principle of minimum entropy production.
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:
As the system is driven far from equilibrium, it may become unstable and then evolve spontaneously to new structures showing coherent behavior. Prigogine refers to the equilibrium and near-equilibrium states as the thermodynamic branch, whereas the new structures are called dissipative structures. The important point is that beyond the instability of the thermodynamic branch, physical systems show a new type of organization relating the coherent space-time behavior to the dynamical processes inside the system.
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:
The general conclusion of Prigogine’s work is that there is only one type of physical law, but different thermodynamic situations: near and far from equilibrium. Destruction of structure is the typical behavior of thermodynamic equilibrium. Creation of structure may occur, when nonlinear kinetic mechanisms operate beyond the stability limit of the thermodynamic branch. All of these various situations obey the dicta of the second law of thermodynamics.
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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Replies to this message:
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Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 159 of 186 (388234)
03-05-2007 10:14 AM
Reply to: Message 158 by Fosdick
03-04-2007 9:09 PM


Re: Dissipative structures
Hoot Mon writes:
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?
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

This message is a reply to:
 Message 158 by Fosdick, posted 03-04-2007 9:09 PM Fosdick has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 161 by Fosdick, posted 03-05-2007 9:00 PM Percy has replied

  
JustinC
Member (Idle past 4843 days)
Posts: 624
From: Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Joined: 07-21-2003


Message 160 of 186 (388337)
03-05-2007 5:39 PM
Reply to: Message 157 by Chiroptera
03-04-2007 6:18 PM


Re: A little pedantry
quote:
That's about the best definition for "disordered" that I've seen. I would, though, say that the macroscopic state that is produced by the largest set of microscopic states is the most disordered.
Pedantry gratefully accepted.

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Fosdick 
Suspended Member (Idle past 5500 days)
Posts: 1793
From: Upper Slobovia
Joined: 12-11-2006


Message 161 of 186 (388386)
03-05-2007 9:00 PM
Reply to: Message 159 by Percy
03-05-2007 10:14 AM


Re: Dissipative structures
Percy wrote:
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.
1. Nobel Prizes are not usually awarded right away; Watson & Crick didn’t get theirs until 1962.
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:
How can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry? . enough is known about the actual material structure of organisms and about their functioning to state that, and to tell precisely why, present-day physics and chemistry could not possibly account for what happens in space and time within a living organism.
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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 Message 159 by Percy, posted 03-05-2007 10:14 AM Percy has replied

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Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 162 of 186 (388410)
03-05-2007 10:35 PM
Reply to: Message 161 by Fosdick
03-05-2007 9:00 PM


Re: Dissipative structures
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.
3. Please keep in mind that I am older than most on this forum.
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

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cavediver
Member (Idle past 3643 days)
Posts: 4129
From: UK
Joined: 06-16-2005


Message 163 of 186 (388463)
03-06-2007 5:11 AM
Reply to: Message 162 by Percy
03-05-2007 10:35 PM


Re: Dissipative structures
for example believing that being far from thermodynamic equilibrium indicates high entropy
I must admit I've never seen Prigogine's work before - or not that I can recall. However, at first glance he is possibly talking about local maxima of entropy, stable points in entropy space that are far away from the true maximum. Relative to the true maximum, they are low entropy but are trapped by surrounding lower entropy states.
We do have the physics of local minima of energy, which give rise to solitons and related entities. It sounds like he tried to do something similar with biological entities. I have no idea how useful such as idea would be, and this ties in with some of the comments I have read concerning his science, which suggest that it was all well and good but had little to no useful nor predictive value...

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Hyroglyphx
Inactive Member


Message 164 of 186 (388497)
03-06-2007 8:43 AM
Reply to: Message 158 by Fosdick
03-04-2007 9:09 PM


Re: Dissipative structures
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:
The general conclusion of Prigogine’s work is that there is only one type of physical law, but different thermodynamic situations: near and far from equilibrium. Destruction of structure is the typical behavior of thermodynamic equilibrium. Creation of structure may occur, when nonlinear kinetic mechanisms operate beyond the stability limit of the thermodynamic branch. All of these various situations obey the dicta of the second law of thermodynamics.
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?
We'd first have to ask whether or not 2LoT is even applicable to terrestrial, biological systems, such as evolution would be. Some creationists are apt to assign everything to 2LoT and some evolutionists are apt to dismiss by saying that earth is an open system, and therefore, does not qualify in practical terms. Both versions are extreme, so I generally take the middle ground on this one. Plus, there are two different meanings when either side employs 2LoT in trying to make a point. Often, when creo's are talking about it, they are talking about the inherent breakdown of any system because there is no such thing as perpetual motion. Any energy used at first dissipates with time unless new energy is introduced. So if we had an oscillating universe, they say that oscillation will eventually cease because their will not be as much useful energy as it had when it began oscillating. On the other hand, when evo's talk about 2LoT, they are often referring to things like heat and heat transfer. And so they often say that since earth has a constant source of energy, namely, the Sun, that 2LoT does not effect things like evolution.
In a sense, both are right, but they are talking about two different kinds of entropy-- classical and logical-- which have been distinguished.
The problem here, as you are relaying with Priogine and evolution, is that he's apt to simply ascribe everything in simple terms with the introduction of energy as almost this magical qualifier. Consider the worst example I've ever heard by Tim Berra. He once said:
[list]

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Hyroglyphx
Inactive Member


Message 165 of 186 (388498)
03-06-2007 8:45 AM
Reply to: Message 158 by Fosdick
03-04-2007 9:09 PM


Re: Dissipative structures
Double post
Edited by nemesis_juggernaut, : No reason given.

"He has shown you, O man, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. -Micah 6:8

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