 Life defies the heat death theory of the Universe |
| Review Date: January 26, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Golden Lion, North Ogden, Ut United States |
1. Murray Gell-Mann stats that is simplicity that underpins complexity and makes life possible.
2. The number of molecules in a box the size of a matchbox is 10 power 23. A type mole at a temperature of 0 Celsius was four million collisions a second. Air is continuous medium. Joseph Loschmidt calculated the number of molecules in one cubic centimeter of gas at temperature 0 Celsius 2.687 X 10 power 19 molecules. The pressure could be calculated from kinetic theory, in terms of free path, the average speed of the molecules, and so on. Fewer large molecules would have a long free path and if there were many small molecules there would be a shorter mean free path. Statistical mechanics is the application of the law of mechanics in a statistical way to describe the behavior of large numbers of atoms and molecules in gases. If every collision of an atom could be predicted and controlled entropy would be in equilibrium. Collision with uncorrelated atoms increases the amount of entropy.
3. Thermodynamics explain why heat flow from a hotter object to a cooler object. Entropy is heat that cannot be turned into mechanical energy. As entropy increases then information describing the entropy increases. Information can be created and not destroyed. Think of entropy as the amount of order in a system. The more disorder in the system the more entropy in the system. Disorder increases in any closed system. Things wear out as time passes. The time arrow is moving from an ordered past to a disordered present.
4. Image a box divided in two halves divided by a partition. Fill one half with gas and the second half is in a vacuum state. Slide the partition up and the gas will spread uniformly and temperature drops because there is less collision between the atoms. You can restore the original state by pushing the gas back into chamber one using a piston then sliding the partition closed. Heat will increase as the atoms are being compressed closer to each other. The Work of the Piston creates heat in the chamber and heat is dissipated as friction. The system is restored but more heat is dissipated, as a result. The machine cannot be 100% efficient and must dissipate heat into the Universe at large.
5. The arrow of time is built into the laws of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. The Universe is operating in an irreversible way. The universe's program does not reverse back to its initial state. Atoms don't retract their path backwards through each Newtonian collision. The gases in the box spread uniformly and settle into equilibrium and maximum entropy is achieved in the system. The final state is said to be an attractor because the system seems to be attracted towards that state. By the time the system reaches equilibrium it has forgotten its initial conditions.
6. Life defies the heat death theory of the Universe where useful energy has been converted into heat. Life creates order and structure out of disorder. Thomson Clausius's equation show that anywhere there is increased order, it does so at the cost of more disorder somewhere else. A refrigerator exchange heat from fluids being pumped around, the compression is cooling down water into ice and reversing entropy while the heat is dissipating into the environment increasing more entropy.
7. When does a system reach equilibrium? There is no isolate system. The system gets close to equilibrium but never settles perfectly. If hydrogen and hydrogen sulfide are at equilibrium in the boxes and one box is made slightly warmer than the other then the light hydrogen will group near the warmer region. A very small deviation from equilibrium has produced order from chaos. A system that is close to equilibrium will be attracted to a state where the rate at which the entropy is being produced is a minimum. Life would be attracted to intelligence demonstrably because of low entropy.
8. Assume 300 billion bright stars and 300 bright galaxies in the Universe would yield 9,000 X 10 power 19 bright stars in the visible Universe. When divided by Loschmidt number in 450 cubic centimeters of cold air there would be more molecules than stars. The molecules free path mean is 13th millionths of a meter traveling at 460 meters a second. The time for all the molecules to congregate on one side of the matchbox is longer than the existence of the Universe.
9. Boltzmann said, the Milkyway must represent a small local fluctuation away from the equilibrium of the bigger cosmos. Is the cosmos an infinite uniformly expanding bubble?
10. Poincare reccurrence time states that every state of gases will be passed through. If entropy goes up for a while, it must come down, later on, and bring the gas back to its original state. N is the number of molecules. The time to wait to run through the states is 10 power N seconds. The time to run through the states of one cubic centimeter of air is 10 power 19 seconds. The age of the known Universe is 10 power 17 seconds. It is probably for entropy to fall.
Complexity from Chaos
1. Nonequilibrium thermodynamics refers to the flow of energy through a system and the dissipation of heat. Dissipative systems are thought to be irreversible when they follow linear rules. The Universe first started with a smooth and uniform distribution of energy and gases. How did the uniiform state characterized by high disorder move towards the formation of ordered galaxies?
2. What happens just before the onset of Chaos? A system can only be held in an interesting state away from equilibrium if it is dissipative and open to its environment. The early Universe was open to its environment and dissipative with energy convection and broken symmetry. Convection caused short-lived patterns to emerge, breakup, and reform. Stable patterns appeared at the edge of chaos. Energy was flowing through the system and the flow of energy must have been external. The flow of energy is the secret of the existence of the Universe.
3. Equilibrium means death and no energy flow.
4. Dynamics is the study of how things change.
5. The Universe could have started as a singularity where the gravitational field was carrying on an equal and opposite amount of energy. Gravity attracts bodies of mass. The Kinetic energy of particles falling together has a gravitational field. Gravity has a negative energy. The negativity of gravity exactly cancels out the mass-energy of matter.
6. Space is stretching between clusters of galaxies. Space is expanding with time. Space and time relate as describe by Einstein's General Theory of relativity.
7. The time arrow starts as energy flows out of the sun, at this point thermodynamic activity occurs on the earth. Gravity tells the time arrow the direction it should point. Earth is bathed in energy from the Sun, a dissipative system. Life makes use of the energy maintaining itself far from equilibrium. Systems organize and use the flow of energy. Complex forms are really quite simple.
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A Top 5 Book of the Decade - Non-Fiction
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| Review Date: January 4, 2010 |
| Reviewer: James East, Orlando, FL |
Upon my second reading of Deep Simplicity, I am of the belief that it is one of the Top 5 non-fiction books of the decade that just closed. This is because the author John Gribbin takes us on a wonderful step-by-step education of the sciences of Chaos, Complexity, Biology, Evolution, Power Laws, and Entropy, to build story on how closed systems can maintain life at the edge of complexity as we know it.
In addition, the UK hardcopy has a wonderful front cover of Katsushika Hokusai's "The Great Wave of Kanagawa" which displays the chaos of the ocean and in the background is the view of the tranquil Mount Fuji. Deep Simplicity: Chaos Complexity and the Emergence of Life (Penguin Press Science) Also, this first hardcopy publication in England has a more accurate sub-title about the story of the book "Chaos, Complexity, and the Emergence of Life" than its sister US publication (see link above).
I decided to reread Deep Simplicity after enjoying reading Complexity - A Guided Tour which is a good introductory start on the subject matter of self-organizing systems, power laws, and stuff of complexity. I would also recommend the following which you may also like: Ubiquity (Very Good), Black Swan (Economic Game Changer), Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics (Introduction to Fractals, Power Laws), and A Matter of Degrees (New Insights).
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The physical foundations for chaos, complex systems, order and life / Mr. Gribbins did me a favor
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| Review Date: October 25, 2009 |
| Reviewer: A. Panda, Guadalajara, Mexico |
This book presents chaos and complexity theory deeply rooted in their mathematical/physical foundations, starting with Newton's laws. Although Mr. Gribbin presents some difficult concepts and formulas in the first part of the book, I would say that with a truly concentrated reading a layperson - like myself - can understand it; the rest of the book reads more smoothly. In this difficult part of the book, the author explains statistical physics and thermodynamics, including entropy and "the arrow of time" (very well explained) as well as fractals and the related maths. He explains that gravity is the essential prerequisite of life, without which there would be no way of temporarily breaking the second law of thermodynamics to reduce entropy. For the brief period of time that comprises the life of an organism, this law is broken; when the organism dies, its energy is released and an equilibrium state takes over. Without gravity, all energy would be dissipated and no life would be possible. In these chapters you can admire Mr. Gribbin's mastery of these concepts as well as his passion for the subject, since astrophysics is his true area of expertise. You can probably find the explanations of the rest of the book in other sources, but Mr. Gribbin's astrophysical background puts them in a different perspective.
Mr. Gribbins did me a great favor by explaining the true "Gaia" concept as well as the scientific work of Mr. Lovelock and his background both in chemistry and in the building of sensitive measuring equipments. I held the wrong and widespread idea that "Gaia" was a term used to define our planet as a truly living organism linked to some New Age philosophical ideas. Reading that it is a term to define a complex system in the thermodynamical sense and which comprises several smaller systems (ecosystems) that interact with Gaia and between themselves, is quite another story. The anecdote of Mr. Lovelock's proposed experiment to find life on Mars by analyzing the chemical composition of its atmosphere (whether its atmosphere is in equilibrium or not, whether the oxygen is bound to other elements, not allowing for chemical reactions and whether you can find compounds that are chemical signs of life - like CO2) was excellent. The NASA team did not follow Mr. Lovelock's recommendation to take samples of Mars' atmosphere, but used several equipments designed by him in the Mars Mission to look for life on the planet's surface. Today, scientists are using an adapted version of his proposal to look for life in distant planets without leaving the earth, using spectrography to obtain the chemical composition of their atmospheres.
In this book you can read about chaotic systems like the weather in which a tiny variation in the initial conditions leads to a radically different outcome (butterfly effect), about systems in perfect equilibrium, as well as about self-sustained criticalities, which are systems at the edge of chaos, where life emerges. I would like to share the best and most simple explanation of entropy and thermodynamics, as well as of complex adaptive systems and self-sustained criticalities that I have read - intended for truly lay audiences, (read cero math or physics, but not lacking depth) Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics. For an excellent explanation of statistical physics and power laws read Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another. In my opinion Chaos: Making a New Science is still the broadest and best explained book on the topic. Another fascinating take at it is Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life, written by a mathematician who somehow managed to write an easy and accessible book without any maths (this book contains the best explanation of strange attractors that I have read). |
logical and scientific integration is profound
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| Review Date: June 28, 2008 |
| Reviewer: James C. Reynolds, south carolina |
| without doubt, this nears limits of ability of man to integrate and articulate possible (?probable) sequence of events from origen of universe to origen of life, as it may be recognized by man. A scientific background and prior understanding of physics/biochemistry/universal law and concept of power laws makes reading "easier on the brain." A second or third reading of this wonderful book is truly worthwhile. For those "spiritual seekers" the author provides a potential platform for the Creators' activities. |
Good update of chaos theory
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| Review Date: June 16, 2008 |
| Reviewer: J. Frakes, Milwaukee, Wisconsin |
| I had just finished reading James Gleick's Chaos (yes, finally got around to it) and found it well written and deserving of the praise it has received. It is an in depth look at the modern founding of chaos theory and left me wondering about the quickly evolving advances in more recent times. Deep Simplicity was the right choice for me to extend that search. I enjoyed the longer look back at non-linear systems investigations where the mathematics was simply too tedious to carry out by hand. The many iterations necessary to see patterns in results was not practical until the advent of the computer, all 4k of Lorenz' processing power! Gribbon does a commendable of summarizing Gleick's work and moving on to the present. He also expands the effort into a cosmic overview at the end which illustrates nicely the interaction of life and the galactic processes that sustain it. Ultimately, then, if all the parts are necessary, isn't it in some larger sense all alive? Maybe necessary but not sufficient? Gribbon states that the boarder between living and nonliving systems becomes blurred as a result. Nice. My only reservation is that had I not read Chaos first, I think I'd have had less success with Deep Simplicity on its own. As for chaos theory, it is an exciting new descriptive tool, but I'm waiting to see concrete application. Gribbon is a good writer, and I'm looking forward to reading more work by him in the future. |
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