Hi RWP! That's really interesting. Yet the two definitions really seem identical in the end. For it seems that if a system does not exchange matter with its surroundings, then it can't exchange energy with it either; for matter and energy transform. And how is a living system to maintain itself over time if all it's got to go on is itself (i.e., its own internal resources exclusively)? This point seems analogous to natural selection; Darwin recognized the "surroundings," the natural environment, as a main driver of biological evolution.
So, somebody please give me an example of a closed system in nature???
The analogy between Shannon entropy and thermodynamic entropy seems "isomorphic." Both sort of seem refer to "negative quantities."
Jeepers, Professor, don't be so hard on Klyce! You don't have to be an enthusiast of panspermia theory to appreciate a thoughtful, well-written essay on a most difficult topic, entropy. I know that for you this term has a very precise and well-defined meaning. But it is the scientific community itself that is propagating all these new "species" of entropy. I just read and try to take it all in.
Thank you so much for writing, Professor!
Much better to reject the divine origin of the texts outright.
1998 Physics Nobel Prize winner Robert B. Laughlin, no friend to creationists, has said it well: "Evolution by natural selection . . . has lately come to function more as an antitheory, called upon to cover up embarrassing experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and at worst not even wrong."
But what does a mere physics professor, even a Nobel Prize winner, know about biology? More than fundamentalist Darwinists are loathe to admit.
Matter and energy are interchangeable only at energies large compared with those of chemical processes. In chemical thermodynamic processes, matter is not converted to energy or vice versa. So unless you think nuclear reactions have some role in evolution, this is a nonissue.
So, somebody please give me an example of a closed system in nature???
Closed in what sense? Matter, or both matter and energy?
You don't have to be an enthusiast of panspermia theory to appreciate a thoughtful, well-written essay on a most difficult topic, entropy. I know that for you this term has a very precise and well-defined meaning. But it is the scientific community itself that is propagating all these new "species" of entropy.
Entropy is not a particularly difficult topic. It only seems difficult when one starts handwaving. Klyce seems to be handwaving mightily.
Relying on people like Klyce for information on chemical thermodynamics is like relying on the daVinci code as a sourcebook for biblical criticism.
It's difficult to have any intuition about scientific things without study. A couple of courses (beyond the freshman level) in chemistry would give you a better grasp of what is meant by isolated systems. Popular writers are very poor at explaining these things (but I'll try anyway, of course.)
There are no true closed systems in the "real world" but one can come close. For example a Dewar flask (the thermos bottle, not the scotch bottle) separates its contents with both a reflective barrier (to keep out radiation) and a vacuum barrier (to keep out matter.) For short times, such a system acts as if it were a closed system (not necessarily true over long time periods; this was a source of some difficulty in the infamous cold fusion experiments.)
A system in a heat bath (like a double boiler but with the working vessel floating) can exchange energy with its surroundings but not matter (if the lid is tight.)
An open system is like a wok.
In various chemistry courses, one gets to work with such systems and develop an intuition for how they differ.