The second law of thermodynamics, living organisms and Cosmos
Juan R.
This is a message I promised time ago when 'adman', 'Pastor Dave', and
others posters began to say that second law of thermodynamics goes against
biological evolution theory.
I have delayed posting because the blog technology for rendering of
mathematics has changed. The blog article is available at
http://canonicalscience.blogspot.com/2008/05/second-law-of-thermodynamics-
living.html
I want to revise certain aspects of biology, chemistry, and physics,
correcting some common misunderstandings from a modern canonical
scientific perspective.
For instance, Jonathan Sarfati definition of the second law of
thermodynamics on
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/370.asp
is at best incomplete, and the link with order/disorder is not right.
Notice also that Sarfati has not defined the second law of thermodynamics
for open systems. The well-known expression
dS >= dq/T
one finds in equilibrium and introductory textbooks does not apply to open
systems as living organisms.
And applying the second law we derive the well-known result that the flow
of entropy for a mature living organism compensates the production of
entropy by internal processes.
The second law of thermodynamics is therefore compatible with living
organisms. In fact, the processes of life would be not possible without
the second law of thermodynamics. This the reason that thermodynamics is a
fundamental tool for biologists. In the words of D. T. Haynie:
(\blockquote
Any theory claiming to describe how organisms originate and continue to
exist by natural causes must be
compatible with the first and second laws of thermodynamics.
)
I know of absolutely no violation of the second law of thermodynamics in
specialized literature and of course living organisms are not.
Regarding entropy and disorder I would say that some people confounds
thermodynamics entropy with informational entropy, and then apply
consequences of the later to the former.
I like to use different symbols for (logarithmic) thermodynamic 'entropy'
Ω and 'information' W.
E.g. the W associated to different orderings of coins
FFFFCCCC, FFFCCFCC, FCFCFCFC...
changes whereas the 'entropy' Ω associated to the system of coins is the
same with independence of our orderings.
Also our understanding of nanothermodynamics has advanced a lot in last
years. The advances let us to understand that the thermal laws for the
very small cannot be obtained from a simple scaling of the laws of
macroscopic thermodynamics. The laws for a 1000-atoms system are not just
the laws for a 10000000000-atoms system when introducing the adequate
scale factors in extensive quantities.
New phenomena, not available on the macroscopic formulation, would advance
on our understanding of the mechanisms of life. This is the realm of
nanothermodynamics, often also called the thermodynamics of small objects.
Alternatively, the thermodynamics of large objects subject to
gravitational forces may also differ from a direct scaling of the
macroscopic thermodynamics
A viewpoint on nano and gigathermodynamics may be found on
http://www.canonicalscience.org/en/researchzone/nanothermodynamics.html
One of the more interesting findings when studying thermodynamics at this
scale has been the discovering that non-macroscopic systems generate
spatial structures when arriving at equilibrium. Those special structures
have been found by different people using different approaches to
thermodynamics.
I call them epsilon structures. This structures would be not confused with
dissipative structures, only the latter vanish at equilibrium.
This is still premature to got conclusions but it seem natural to assume
those new laws may play a special role for both the evolution of Cosmos
and the origin of life.
--
http://canonicalscience.org/en/miscellaneouszone/guidelines.html
Juan R.
> For some odd reason your post stumbled into alt.atheism I am wondering
> wether any people here understand what you are talking about:-)
> I personally have a hunch but only a hunch.
I posted to same newsgroups that adman and others did when claiming that
thermodynamics proved (they believed) evolution to be unscientific.
I do not follow most of those newsgroups and do not know people. However
i have tried to maintain the explanation the more simple possible (but
still in scientific terms).
> I reject the idea that a rise in entropy would be in conflict with
> complexity based on a much simpler idea:
>
> A star converts less complex atoms (hydrogin) into more complex atoms
> (helium)
> thereby both increasing complexity and entropy.
Yes, there there exists a local increase of complexity but notice next
important distinction.
If you apply the laws of usual thermodynamics to the star and the rest of
Universe, you predict a 'thermal dead' for Universe as a whole (I mean in
a very large period of time of cosmological order of magnitude).
This is the point of view maintained by Murray Gell-Mann in his famous
book /the Quark and the Jaguar/. Gell-Mann thinks that Cosmos complexity
is something of an 'accident', a fluctuation in a general tendency to
disorder. In that view life would be just an accident, one very
improbable.
This is very difficult to accept in both technical and philosophical
terms.
Some people want to explain the observed tendency to order and complexity
on the cosmological scale. Stuart Kaufman is one. He claims the need for
new laws of thermodynamics. Kaufman introduces a fourth law of
thermodynamics would explain life. In that view, life would be not an
accident but a consequence of the laws of nature. This is the reason
which Kaufman titled his bestseller book with the fantastic title /At
home in the Universe/.
I think that we, living organism, are at home but I try to explain the
observed emergence of cosmological order in basis to recent advances in
thermodynamics.
--
http://canonicalscience.org/en/miscellaneouszone/guidelines.html