The Idea of Entropy Has Led Us Astray
nautil.us
nautil.us
What is perhaps not appreciated is how the idea of entropy completely transformed our society by unleashing massive amounts of mechanical efficiency. This free energy is derived from contrast -- power comes from flow across a gradient.
I wonder where the analogies work or where they fail. For instance, the importance of contrasts seem to illustrate the value of cultural differences (diversity) and raises concerns about a homogeneous world culture.
Are you talking about cultural differences in the same sense as a temperature gradient?
The basis would be Ronald Burt's idea of "Structural Holes", which describe the phenomenon whereby those people that "bridge" different groups of people are able to gain value from the information arbitrage. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_holes
Does it apply to cultural diversity? Who knows. But somehow, I feel like we want a future where differences are strengths -- and yet at the same time, the value of the differences comes from the bridging of them. Monoculture is dangerous for resilience, in any case.
So yeah, I'm not sure if your analogy works, and if it did I'm not sure if it would be useful.
There's no social analog to the laws of thermodynamics, but we can use the notion of entropy to make statements about information content. In particular, the idea (along with the adjacent subject of Bayesian statistics) has sharpened my thinking about news: there's less information (to me) in otherwise trustworthy headlines/stories that agree with my prior notions.
In an analytic sense this isn't surprising, but it runs against the emotional impulse to seek out affirming information.
And really I wouldn't worry too much about finding some mathematical justification for everything. It's an easy way to get caught up in technicalities for something that you already knew.
1. Monoculture is dangerous
2. Diversity will be celebrated for good political reasons and
3. Unity in diversity is the classical notion of harmony and beauty
...this makes me hypothesize about a theoretical reason why cultural contrasts could be something to value. It suggests that energy can be "harvested" from flows across those cultural contrasts and that cultural contrasts require energy to maintain. I think it would produce net value because... Idk.
(Note, I might be biased on this entire topic simply because I hate Facebook and miss the highly diverse 90s web)
There is a reason to value diversity but it's as far from theoretical as you can get: billions of years of evolution have demonstrated that diversity is the only way for complex ecosystems (civilization, in our case) to exist on any significant timescale. Monocultures are dangerous because the second the environment changes enough, everything dies pretty much all at once instead of transitioning between a mix of cultures best suited to survive the change. I think there's a world of research to be done on how those principles apply to societies, which are driven more by artificial selection, but there's definitely a connection.
I'm not sure that's the takeaway. Diversity ensures change and optimization (in a roundabout way). Stability in cultures is about application of optimization and more often, culling. I guess case in point depends on your time frame reference and what you mean by stability. Rome and the Aztecs wiped out almost as much as they assimilated (and assimilation was generally via enslavement, which is not quite the same).
You can extract work by connecting reservoirs; in the process, the difference is destroyed.
And as you note, if isolation between reservoirs is imperfect, then work is actually required to maintain the difference.
So then, in this metaphor --
1. Monoculture is just the end-state: The exergy has been spent; the Markov Chain has mixed.
2. Diversity is celebrated because it still contains potential; the exergy has not yet been spent. Yet paradoxically, the work is released only via the mixing process that destroys it.
3. Unity in diversity is beautiful either (a) for the same reason we prefer youth to old age -- because it contains potential -- or (b) because it demonstrates the existence of energy flows into the system (without which it would not exist).
To elaborate on (3b): When diversity is sustainable (rather than just harvested), it is a true (costly) sign of an underlying energy flow, and it is really that underlying flow that is beautiful (i.e., life-giving).
Of course, in a larger scheme the flow must itself come from some process of entropy production. For example: We may worship the Sun (and the Void) for pumping through Earth the energy that creates biodiversity, and celebrate that diversity, yet its existence is paid for by the slow death of the Sun (as it equalizes with Void).
Just spitballing here.
Why would a culturally diverse society be better than a homogeneous one? It always comes down to the details. Take a diverse set of cultures, remove the undesirable parts of each culture, and you're left with a less diverse but better set. Unless you think cultures can have no "undesirable" parts....
But each culture will judge different parts of other cultures as being the undesirable ones...
Perhaps a better framing would be for each culture to judge for itself which parts of other cultures are worth copying...
Except that the agents doing the actual copying are individual participants in the various cultures (and subcultures!), so attempts to enforce this sort of judgement uniformly on a culture as a whole is often a recipe for a lot of intra-cultural misery.
> The energy-driven reduction of entropy is easy to demonstrate in simple laboratory experiments, but more to the point, stars, biological populations, organisms, and societies are all systems in which energy is routinely harnessed to generate orderly structures that have lower entropy than the constituents from which they were built. There is nothing physically inevitable about increasing entropy in any of these systems.
is so straightforwardly incorrect that it frankly just should not have been published.
Genetically coded beings are orderly structures with far fewer microstates than their molecular constituents would likely contain otherwise. And we tend to make copies of ourselves, giving order to otherwise chaotic matter.
I think there's a profoundness in there, somewhere. Such a definition also solves the virus conundrum!
In a superficial way, I suppose, but it's still wrong. Another way to look at it is that life actually tends to a more efficient increase of entropy than otherwise would be expected (when compared to non-living processes). For examples, humans are a complex chemical reaction that has reached the point where it can release energy through splitting of atoms - which raises entropy so much higher than it would be been possible otherwise and completely impossible via non-living chemical reactions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
Behaviourally, when you look at a lot of the things we do (e.g. breaking big chunks of metal to tiny coins and distributing them into people's pockets, or turning big clumps of clay and tree and metal into small piles to live in, or retail stores in general), you can see that humans are pretty good distributors, dis-aggregators, disintegrators.
At least so far, we don't disintegrate most things to the point that they are useless. Only to a point where they serve our growth. If one day we were to become a truly spacefaring, or an intergalactic, disintegrator, we might meaningfully hasten the advance of universal disorder as a whole. What better purpose for life, as a function of the universe, than to advance the march of a primary universal trend?
All that said, it's hard to see how our work will meaningfully bring about a true final state any faster, because we're not likely to accelerate proton decay. Maybe protons decay faster in isolation! Maybe we'll find out that we can poke them just the right way, and it'll be surprisingly useful.
Could you expand a bit on this point? What are you talking about, exactly?
By the way, a reaction concerning splitting of atoms is not called a chemical reaction: it's a nuclear reaction.
There is potential energy locked in multitudes of structures (from chemical bonds, to atomic nuclei). A simple chemical reaction may need a relatively small catalyst to free this energy. For example, a mix of oxygen and hydrocarbons will need a small spark - which can be easily provided through a natural process (e.g. lighting).
To release atomic energy, the catalyst that is needed is a highly complex and organized structure that cannot be achieved with a natural process like lighting, but instead required a reaction that lasted billions of years guided by natural selection. Natural selection progressively and incrementally found improved catalytic structures (for lack of a better phrase) to free previously unachievable energies. But because there is no free lunch, as we're accessing these higher energy levels we're actually accelerating global entropy and speeding up the heat death of the universe.
>By the way, a reaction concerning splitting of atoms is not called a chemical reaction: it's a nuclear reaction.
Well ... yes, but in our example, it is a chemical reaction (i.e. us) that serves as a catalyst to start the nuclear reaction.
I agree that this is a typically murky discussion since the concept of entropy for a complex organism gets pretty handwavy...
I'm supposing that an organism in "living" condition has many orders of magnitude fewer valid microstates than the same constituent atoms/molecules would have once life sustaining reactions cease and decomposition begins - there are only so many valid ways to assemble a given living being...
Life can most certainly be viewed as a counterforce to entropy. Certainly at the philosophical level, but why not at the genetic level too, reproduction being the repeated organization and duplications of chemical bonds from smaller constituents.
I certainly see my life as a constant battle against entropy, an adult's life consists pretty much 80% of putting things in things.
Sure, as long as we qualify the terms correctly. That is, you need to decrease the resolution of what you mean by 'entropy' because each one of your examples actually increased entropy moreso than inaction would have.
Regardless, this goes against the author's point, because in each case 'work' needs to be done to reverse the entropy of a local system (e.g. scattered nuts) at the expense of the larger system (squirrel heat emitted into the universe)
>I certainly see my life as a constant battle against entropy, an adult's life consists pretty much 80% of putting things in things.
Sure, with proper qualification that is one way to look at things. This works because of the resolution that we care about. Namely, we don't care about heat generated from our bodies, or smart phones, or nuclear reactors, accelerating global entropy, but we certainly care about dusty rooms.
Again, it seems like the author disagrees with this view.
I submit to you that you did not get the point the article is trying to make because it was exactly this. When considering the animal expending work as the system, it's entropy doesn't decrease because it isn't a closed system. You can then retort that the 2nd law concerns a larger closed system, but you can keep playing that game until the 2nd law essentially becomes a tautology, and becomes useless in understanding the system at hand.
I don't know if the author made this point explicitly (he hinted at it at the end), but one needs to actually know the details of the system under consideration, and very general laws can bring some level of context but will be limited in terms of the actual relevant or useful insight one can glean.
lets consider an amount of non-live matter equal to your mass. That pile of non-live matter wouldn't be able to generate amount of entropy that you will generate during your lifetime. Your actions of "battle against entropy" is a more faster way to increase total entropy. That is the reason of live matter existence - it is a faster way to generate entropy, and thus it is direct result of the 2nd law which states that any system evolves among the entropy maximization gradient. And live matter organizes into more and more complex systems - bodies/colonies/organisms, smarter organisms, societies - because that generates even more entropy than the simple set of constituent parts would generate on their own. Compare entropy generated by a 10 strong tribe in Amazon and 10 regular Americans or Europeans (bonus point - consider that the civilization complexity allows for 100 "civilized" people all actively generating entropy where hardly 10 could barely survive without the civilization). One can notice that intelligence arises as the power multiplier of live matter entropy generation capability.
"The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all energy systems run down like a clock and never rewind themselves. But life not only 'runs up,' converting low energy sea-water, sunlight and air into high-energy chemicals, it keeps multiplying itself into more and better clocks that keep 'running up' faster and faster. Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive? If we leave a chemistry professor out on a rock in the sun long enough the forces of nature will convert him into simple compounds of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and small amounts of other minerals. It's a one-way reaction. No matter what kind of chemistry professor we use and no matter what process we use we can't turn these compounds back into a chemistry professor. Chemistry professors are unstable mixtures of predominantly unstable compounds which, in the exclusive presence of the sun's heat, decay irreversibly into simpler organic and inorganic compounds. That's a scientific fact. The question is: Then why does nature reverse this process? What on earth causes the inorganic compounds to go the other way? It isn't the sun's energy. We just saw what the sun's energy did. It has to be something else. What is it?"
Pirsig's exploration of the answer depends heavily on his own metaphysics. We don't have a grand answer yet. In more modern terms, the question still stands: If quantum logic is completely reversible, then why is chemistry reversible but only with extra energy in one direction?
It doesn't mean that localised systems can't tend towards lower entropy.
The author very explicitly addresses the obvious flaw: all of these examples do, and must, increase total entropy. The point is that all of them produce reduced entropy structures, which is thermodynamically possible because none of them are closed systems.
The author is arguing that the overwhelming common assumption that a system is closed is problematic because it never actually holds.
An organism that is highly drought-adapted tends to not do as well as other organisms during a flood. We are similarly awash in energy: solar, chemical, nuclear, residual core heat, etc. It is worth considering if we are trying to overadapt to the wrong environment.
How can we reconcile this? We can say that the system is not probabilistic, but it is approximately probabilistic. If it is only approximately true, does that mean we can find a loophole in the laws of thermodynamics?
>How can we talk about the uncertainty of a system that is in a single, well known, predictable state.
The system we are usually talking about is orders of magnitude larger than the uncertainty. Think a liter of gasoline in an engine vs the position of a single atom. While we might not know the trajectory of the atom, we have a pretty good idea how the collective atoms that make up the gasoline will function.
Yes, and that idea is based on theories assuming things are probabilistic. Thus bringing us back to my second paragraph. That falsely assuming things are probabilistic works very well in practice. But it may break down under certain conditions, and there may be loopholes.
Edit to add:
I think this whole thing is very related to pseudo random number generators and keystretching. Maybe computability theory too. If you have a 1gig file generated from a 128bit seed, then the apparent uncertainty (1gig) is much higher than the actual uncertainty (128bit). But since it's so very hard to undo the prng, it will behave very closely to something with 1gig of actual uncertainty.
Edit to add again:
A fun thought experiment is someone "encrypting" chemical energy into heat, putting the key in a box, only to later go back and decrypt it back into chemical energy.
Quantum physics is not compatible with determinism, so any dynamical system is only precisely describable in probabilistic terms,
The bigger idea here is that, while it's highly improbable that heat is applied to chalk, we can choose to apply heat to chalk. We have the choice of where to direct our energy. This is, by the Free Will Theorem, the same choice that subatomic particles make about how their energy will be measured. The loophole is precisely that if enough particles choose to synchronize their choices, then they can make highly structured choices with rich data for a long period of time; they can integrate information.
When we crumble the chalk, we lose the specific information about the shape of the chalk, and it would be very hard to recreate; this is entropy. But we also gain the specific information about the shape of the cement, and this would be very hard to determine from the prior context of the universe; this is choice and integrated information.
Melt a piece of ice and it will turn into water. Cool it and it will turn back into ice. The bigger idea here is that, while it's highly improbable that heat is applied to ice, we can choose to apply heat to ice. (...)
When you are heating the ice, energy and entropy from the environment is stored in the ice. When you are freezing it, energy and entropy from the water is transferred away to the environment.
This is a different thing from what I was talking about.
More than that, since you also need to specify the algorithm used for the prng. Your true entropy is the 128-bit key plus the Kolmogorov complexity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity) of the generating algorithm.
This is also a good example of how information-theoretic entropy can change based on our prior knowledge. If we already know the generating algorithm, then the entropy is just the 128-bit key.
> But since it's so very hard to undo the prng, it will behave very closely to something with 1gig of actual uncertainty.
No, not really. A one-time pad with 1Gb of actual uncertainty is not made weaker by disclosing 128 bits of entropy. However, 1Gb of PRNG data is made weaker (broken) by disclosing the 128-bit key if the algorithm is known.
We can practically equate the two because inverting the 128-bit system is just as impossible (absent a quantum computer large/fast enough to take 2^64 operations) within the age of the universe as inverting the 1Gb system.
Unfortunately, I think it's less like encryption and more like compression. And it's actually less like compression and more like deletion. It's impossible to compress information past a certain point (right?), and the amount left in heat seems like it's just been outright deleted.
The Universe wants to debloat its codebase of information: https://youtu.be/8N1BxHgsoOw?t=119
But if you have "illusory heat" that seems to contain a lot of information, but it's actually just a tiny amount of information (say 128 bit) that has been used stretched into a lot (say 1gig), then with the right key you can see that it actually is not a lot of information. And then you should, in theory, be able to go back to chemical energy.
It is indeed probabilistic based on your existing knowledge of the system. The idea that (say) a roulette wheel evolves according to deterministic laws of physics is not useful to you since you do not know the current micro-state necessary to make the prediction.
This is similar to the difference between frequentist and Bayesian interpretations of statistics. Bayesian statistics is more comfortable taking probability distributions over notional facts (such as 'is this coin unfair/weighted?') because it treats the experimenter's confidence as the fount of probability.
If you treat entropy in the same way, it makes more sense. The entropy of a system is related to the number of microstates it can occupy consistently with our known macrostate (e.g., measurement of temperature and pressure -- inherently averaged quantities).
Assume for instance there is a macrostate with a huge amount of energetically favourable microstates. But our little microstate could be destined never to enter any of them.
Typically there is an assumption right, that any state could transition into any state at a probability given only by the energies but that isn't really true.
Entropy is best thought of as a two-parameter function.
Not entropy(system), but rather entropy(system, your knowledge of system).
The system is in a microstate, but you don't know which one. If you did, it would have zero entropy. Since you only have a few general measurements like "one litre of gas at room temperature and one atmosphere of pressure", the entropy is much higher, because many microstates meet that description.
If you think of entropy as an objective property of the system regardless of a given observer's state of knowledge, you'll likely get confused.
No, the laws of thermodynamics are not based on sociology.
You don't need the second law of thermodynamics to make human beings shortsighted fools. We've been doing that for millennia.
The basic idea is that the theory was worked out in a certain time and space where the social conditions were suitable to it. And that they form a feedback loop where the theory will reinforce those social conditions. It doesn't mean that the theory is somehow "wrong", or that the equations don't make useful predictions about observable systems. It really not that esoteric. Nor a threat to any of the science itself.
Really, anyone throwing up their arms in disgust at this article would do well to read up on some basic philosophy of science. Pick up an entry-level college textbook. Hell, just look up the definition of "theory" and really think about it for a few minutes.
No, physics is always there, and it doesn't matter if the original science was done by cutthroat capitalists or gulag-exiling communists. If you want a decent sociological perspective of the realities of physics, I would instead suggest building on just how uncomfortable a given reality seems to make some, everything else is window dressing and justifications.
It's important to remember that all models are approximations.
Imagine taking a picture puzzle that you'd completed, putting it in your clothes dryer, and turning on the tumbler. I think you and I can both safely say that you'd get out a jumbled mess of pieces with little to no resemblance to the completed puzzle.
Now imagine taking a disassembled picture puzzle and putting it in your tumbler. You and I would both be very surprised if what came out was a correctly completed puzzle.
Mathematically, there is only one way that the pieces of the puzzle can all position themselves correctly to solve that puzzle. There are a huge number of ways those pieces can position themselves that don't solve the puzzle.
This is, mathematically, what is meant by "order" and "disorder." It means the system is in a configuration that is more– or less-constrained state.
A more classical version of this is to say that if you have a divided box with oxygen on one side and nitrogen on the other, this has a lower entropy than the same box where the oxygen and nitrogen are intermixed. Removing the divider from a box where they're separate will lead to them mixing, but removing the divider from a box where they're mixed will not lead to them separating. There are more configurations where the gases are mixed than where they are separate.
There are some subtleties when you look deeper at what it really means to be in a constrained state and how this interacts with quantum mechanics, but this is a reasonably accurate picture of how entropy works.
It feels like he doesn't like the idea of entropy for political and ideological reasons. Reminds me of Soviet support for Lamarckianism.
I take his point about misapplying scientific theories to socio-economic policies, and entropic thinking certainly can be misapplied in domains where it doesn't make sense ... but is that our problem today? Entropy is not part of the cultural and mainstream consciousness like Darwinism is. If anything, we don't take the idea of entropy seriously enough.
It's a pretty ridiculous way of looking at things since any human activity is still an exceedingly insignificant entropy gain, even if looking only at our solar system.
Taking advantage of this to drop one of my favorite book series (though I'm a few books behind): _Young Wizards_ [0], where wizards exist in-universe to fight entropy, so that the universe can continue to exist as long as possible. The series is possibly best known by the name of the first book, _So You Want to Be a Wizard_, which for a long time I thought was the name of the series.
(Another interesting thing about this series is that magic is treated as a programming language for reality, a few books in going so far as referring to subroutines, variables, and so on)
Kelvin and Darwin are presented as equally consequent of a Victorian worldview, whereas they seem to propose opposing tendencies. Darwin describes a world of growth, and creation ex nihilo, whereas Kelvin describes a world of cooling and decay. The social implications of the Darwinian thesis seem to involve preferencing the creators and inventors of the world, while accepting the loss of those who stagnate as not only inevitable, but necessary towards producing growth. Kelvin's theory states that there is a limited amount of free energy in the world, which we might take to imply that those with a disproportionate share of resources are hoarding them and keeping them away from others. This seems to promote a world of redistribution and socialization.
An agrarian worldview would seem to preference a hotter world, since plants rely on a high outside temperature to grow. We also know that photosynthesis can be performed more efficiently at high CO2 concentrations. An entropic worldview prefers colder external temperature, since efficiency of a heat engine increases with temperature difference. I've seen proposed, as a resolution to the fermi paradox, that certain civilizations are waiting for the universe to cool down in order to perform computations more efficiently. Such a proposal could only arise out of a worldview informed by entropy, of waiting in order to more efficiently use the finite resources we have available. The evolutionary worldview, by way of contrast, suggests that waiting entails to stagnation, and ultimately destruction, that success goes to whoever is most nimble.
I would percieve a congruency between a worldview informed by entropy and modern liberalism, which seems to heavily favour the principles of waiting and of redistribution. Conservatism seems more in favour of an evolutionary worldview, wherever it believes that someone well off deserves what they have, or wherever it perceives a competition between groups.
It should be clear that both worldviews have some relation with the real world, that both decay and growth are happening around us constantly. I, personally, would highlight the evolutionary thesis as more hopeful, in that it imagines still greater things to come, rather than the slow decay characteristic of the entropic model. I would also point out it likely has stronger relevance for the foreseeable future, since the death of the sun, much less of the universe, remains an inordinately long way off still. I would therefore tend to agree with the thesis of the author, though for none of the reasons they set out to defend.