Posted on 12/28/2005 3:01:53 PM PST by johnnyb_61820
... the idea that the four fundamental forces of physics alone could rearrange the fundamental particles of nature into spaceships, nuclear power plants, and computers, connected to laser printers, CRTs, keyboards and the Internet, appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics in a spectacular way.
Anyone who has made such an argument is familiar with the standard reply: the Earth is an open system, it receives energy from the sun, and order can increase in an open system, as long as it is "compensated" somehow by a comparable or greater decrease outside the system. S. Angrist and L. Hepler, for example, in "Order and Chaos", write, "In a certain sense the development of civilization may appear contradictory to the second law.... Even though society can effect local reductions in entropy, the general and universal trend of entropy increase easily swamps the anomalous but important efforts of civilized man. Each localized, man-made or machine-made entropy decrease is accompanied by a greater increase in entropy of the surroundings, thereby maintaining the required increase in total entropy."
According to this reasoning, then, the second law does not prevent scrap metal from reorganizing itself into a computer in one room, as long as two computers in the next room are rusting into scrap metal -- and the door is open. In Appendix D of my new book, The Numerical Solution of Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations, second edition, I take a closer look at the equation for entropy change, which applies not only to thermal entropy but also to the entropy associated with anything else that diffuses, and show that it does not simply say that order cannot increase in a closed system. It also says that in an open system, order cannot increase faster than it is imported through the boundary. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
LOL! Been there!
Happy New Year!
Germ Line - sperm or eggs or the cells that lead to the production of said gametes. Somatic cells - everything else.
So does the rest (99+%) of you exist just to produce ganetes?
In the south they do all the time. They even marry. I think you mean that an alligator can't breed with a whale.
Since it would be under the water, you can never know for sure. They just can't reproduce.
The existance of halibut proves that cousins can breed and reproduce since both eyes are on the same side of their heads. (its more rare in the south)
And --- calling it by another name makes it science, not religion.
Can you explain what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is in just a sentence or two?
Unfortunately you're going to be waiting a bit longer. I've been banned from the computer today by She Who Must Be Obeyed so that I can do some "useful work" reducing the entropy in our local habitat.
Uh, for science hypothesis perhaps since it is non-axiomatic. I was talking mathematics and similar, which is axiomatic. Do you have to run an experiment to show that the sum of two arbitrary numbers is what mathematics asserts it is?
LOL. Fortunately my project for the day includes making a database to help my son in his business. I can sneak off to the internet occasionally.
And the knowledge that they will put the right fiction in the book so someone won't mistake it for entertainment.
Their gaps are explained by statements of faith that it will be shown to be true at some time in the future.
They call it science, religionists call it prophecy. (same thing by another name.)
Calling it ID allows for the possibility of universal creation by non-God, alien life-forms, perhaps even extra-dimensional beings that may occupy the other 6 dimensions "discovered" by researchers in quantum mechanics. [Note: the scientists also point out that those other dimensions do intersect and interact with our own dimensions at surfaces called "branes".]
In all cases, what is not known is covered and explained by a statement of faith that the theory is right.
There is nothing wrong with using a statement of faith to explain what cannot be proven. I do it all the time.
This provides a whole new realm for puns!
PH, you could start a new section of the PatrickHenry's List-O-Links titled "This is your Brane on Creationism!"
I can cut and paste like anyone else. But what I can also do is reason pretty well. I can deduce with some certainty that the processes of life -- metabolism, photosynthesis, learning, etc. -- do not violate any physical laws.
I also know that all of the mechanisms required for evolution to work have been observed. I note that evolution is analogous to learning, in that uncoordinated behavior is shaped by consequensess.
Now I am waiting for someone to tell me specifically what biochemical process required for evolution, metabolism, photosynthesis, learning, etc., violates a law of physics.
There are "correct" answers, those that can be formally proven in some axiomatic system like mathematics, and there are "best" answers, which can be proven optimal in non-axiomatic systems but which generally cannot be proven "correct". A feature of "best" answers in mathematics is that there is no requirement that they be the same as "correct" answers for a given question, and in fact this feature accounts for most failure modes of rationality and inductive reasoning. Nonetheless, lacking access to a formally provable "correct" answer, the "best" answer has the highest probability of being the correct answer of any assertion that could be made short of formally proving the correct answer. And while we can prove there are a lot of questions to which we can never prove a "correct" answer, we can always generate a "best" one -- a "soft" proof of unprovable assertions. "rational" is usually defined as selecting the "best" answer (which has a formal selection process) in non-axiomatic reasoning systems.
Every bit of reasoning we do about the real world (not the fake world of mathematics) is non-axiomatic ("inductive") since axiomatic reasoning requires a certain amount of omniscience to work, though we fake a bit of first-order logic using it. For that reason, we cannot prove the correctness of any assertion about the universe we live in. Non-axiomatic reasoning systems have two very useful characteristics that make them superior to axiomatic reasoning systems in the real world. First, they are intrinsically adept at reasoning under uncertain, incomplete, or incorrect information and can rapidly adapt to new information -- because there are no axioms, breaking a single assumption does not collapse the whole system. Second, it is computationally much cheaper to compute the "best" answer than it is to prove the "correct" answer in the general case. This is the old 80/20 rule affect; the "best" answer works out just fine the majority of the time while being vastly cheaper. The cost of occasionally being grossly incorrect is worth the cost savings of not proving correctness.
There has been a lot interesting research lately on the concept of pervasively non-axiomatic computation -- computing with "best" answers instead of axiomatic evaluation. They have a number of provable properties, not the least of which is robustness, adaptability, and non-brittleness, which make them very interesting but wildly counter-intuitive from the perspective of classical computer science. Perhaps more interesting are the proofs that all intelligent systems must have this form.
This has potential. But I think you should do it.
Thanks! It is a corollary to the old aphorisms about "not confusing the map with the territory".
<zombie>BBBBRRRAAAAAANNNNNEEEESSSS!!!!</zombie>
How ironical.
I'm in agreement here. My philosophical point is this is IT. That's why I like the nuclear force as the "starting point".
I'll have to dig up the stuff on "e". It's all in books somewhere.
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