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 ...
Horsecrap.
I like Chesterton. He wrote my tagline!
Are you still fighting these heathens, Marcus Tullius? Don't they understand that Religion is serious while science is just a frivolous hobby
F
LOL! It's not *quite* as bad as Feezelgruber.
Over the past three years I've run into an increasing number of Europeans/Asians/South Americans etc. who are outright scared to travel into the "interior" of the U.S., Texas included. They stay in NYC, LA, SF, Chicago and Miami. At the same time, I've seen a growing phenom of really bright American born kids who think nothing of bouncing from jobs in Paris to Madrid to Berlin and Tokyo/Osaka.
And this means... WHAT?
I take it to mean a bunch of things. Thirty-five years ago if you were a top flight scientist, engineer, banker or in the entertainment industry -- there was no place else but the U.S. Even if you workd for a foreign company, you still worked in the U.S.
Today, you could be working anywhere -- usually a couple dozen key cities. This is a new thing and is creating a new class of people. Once we get into the second or third generation of this class, I can't help but wonder where their loyalties will reside.
Good for you but some of your creationist breatheren do have a problem with any evolution. Some of my evolutionist breatheren have a problem with any form of ID. I do not.
But there is solid evidence that you can touch and see for micro evolution and a fair amount of solid evidence (but not conclusive) for macro evolution. There is zero physical evidence for ID, other than arguments that macro evolution is so unlikely it must be ID.
Never let thermodynamics get in the way of spontaneous generation.
I found these two pieces on Sterling Hayden. He was probably something close to a genius, but deeply self-destructive. He played the role of Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, among others.
The guy probably had the best resume since Kris Kristofferson.
http://www.12gauge.com/people_2003_hayden.html
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001330/
I cannot be held responsible for another man's lack of education. A person who does not understand (and in many cases never heard of) the key concepts required to engage in a meaningful discussion of basic technical subjects underlying the point at hand has no business throwing around random assertions about said point in a huff of righteous indignation. Hiding behind weak credentials is no substitute; one has to address the issues head on. This incorrectness should be easy to prove with rigor if they are so obviously flawed, but rigorous disproof has not been forthcoming.
On the upside, he probably has enough baseline knowledge and skills to learn what he has missed out on over the last fifteen plus years if he wants to. Ignorance is a curable condition, assuming one is not too stupid (an incurable condition) to recognize it.
As would a discussion of WNF and gluons. The flavours ought to turn a few heads.
I also like to throw folks off their Creationism (notice I didn't say ID) horse with a bit of a discussion on morphogenetic resonance and the suppostion that not only does nature have a memory, but also goes through evolutionary changes of her own. Certainly a few seconds before and after the Big Bang the laws of phisics themselves were a bit different than what we assume today. It's a big and fascinating universe out there. It's too big for some simple minded explaination from a book that's been biasedly translated throughout the ages. Can you tell I specialized in the Philosophy of Physics? He he.
Sound of crickets...
Which is why the phrase "pig ignorant" is kind, even generous, when applied to 2nd Law arguments. It is particularly troublesome when a national magazine catering to conservatives can't get this right.
What else can they not be trusted on?
I know someone from the magazine is lurking on this thread. My advice is to wake up and drop this line of argument.
Not for humans. Many other organisms happily consume them.
Gravel, sand and dust don't seem to be too edible.
Not for humans. Many other organisms happily consume them
Obviously neither of you have ever eaten at a Outback steakhouse franchise...
The 2nd law can only be true if one assumes the universe has certain computation theoretic properties. Otherwise, it would not make sense, mathematically. On the upside, the universe does appear to have the properties required for the 2nd law to exist independent of the expression of thermodynamics itself.
Non sequitur in many different places. This makes no sense. Only an isotropic distribution (or nearly isotropic distribution) would create the conditions for evolution to be a useless organizing process. In fact, computation cannot occur in a isotropic environment, and biochemistry clearly does efficient high-order computation.
It looks like you are trying to attribute assertions to me that I never made, and which are opposite of what I actually wrote.
You hit it right on the head. IT IS BIG!
"Reply:
By your 'logic', the Roman Empire never existed. Nobody alive today saw it, there is no way to repeat this history, and the whole idea of Roman legions in Gaul is just from ignorant archeologists and 'anti-Christian' historians.
By your view, you could say that anything that happened 200 years ago never happened. It is a very weird view. And it discounts all the begats in the Bible."
That is just silly.
There were people to observe events in history. They recorded them and we can read those. There are also independent verifications of many events in history.
Please point me to the places in history where people have recorded the process of evolution. I'm not talking about the fossil record, either, I'm talking about actual observations which were written down as other events of history were.
BTW, history is not a theory. Evolution is.
False premise. All existence, including the "machine", has a non-zero description length -- if it exists, it contains algorithms. We are not arguing whether or not there were pre-existing bytes (there were pre-existing bytes by definition), only the number of bytes required to do the bootstrap. As is well established in theory, you need very few bytes worth of machine to get the job done.
The machine and the algorithm and the data are not distinct things in the theoretical abstract. Humans create the distinction as an engineering convenience based on how we fabricate computers in practice.
History is facts (Sherman's march to the sea) and theory (interpretations of those facts).
Just like evolution.
Who in history has actually observed evolution and reported it?
Historical sciences do not require eyewitnesses.
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