What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know

But despite its fundamental importance, entropy is perhaps the most divisive concept in physics. “Entropy has always been a problem,” Lloyd told me. The confusion stems in part from the way the term gets tossed and twisted between disciplines — it has similar but distinct meanings in everything from physics to information theory to ecology. But it’s also because truly wrapping one’s head around entropy requires taking some deeply uncomfortable philosophical leaps.

As physicists have worked to unite seemingly disparate fields over the past century, they have cast entropy in a new light — turning the microscope back on the seer and shifting the notion of disorder to one of ignorance. Entropy is seen not as a property intrinsic to a system but as one that’s relative to an observer who interacts with that system. This modern view illuminates the deep link between information and energy, which is now helping to usher in a mini-industrial revolution on the smallest of scales.

Two hundred years after the seeds of entropy were first sown, what’s emerging is a conception of this quantity that’s more opportunistic than nihilistic. The conceptual evolution is upending the old way of thinking, not just about entropy, but about the purpose of science and our role in the universe.

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Notions of entropy developed in disparate contexts thus fit together neatly. A rise in entropy corresponds to a loss in information about microscopic details. In statistical mechanics, for instance, as particles in a box get mixed up and we lose track of their positions and momentums, the “Gibbs entropy” increases. In quantum mechanics, as particles become entangled with their environment, thus scrambling their quantum state, the “von Neumann entropy” rises. And as matter falls into a black hole and information about it gets lost to the outside world, the “Bekenstein-Hawking entropy” goes up.

What entropy consistently measures is ignorance: a lack of knowledge about the motion of particles, the next digit in a string of code, or the exact state of a quantum system. “Despite the fact that entropies were introduced with different motivations, today we can link all of them to the notion of uncertainty,” said Renato Renner (opens a new tab), a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

However, this unified understanding of entropy raises a troubling concern: Whose ignorance are we talking about?

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In September 2024, a few hundred researchers gathered (opens a new tab) in Palaiseau, France, to pay homage to Carnot on the 200th anniversary of his book. Participants from across the sciences discussed how entropy features in each of their research areas, from solar cells to black holes. At the welcome address, a director of the French National Center for Scientific Research apologized to Carnot on behalf of her country for overlooking the impact of his work. Later that night, the researchers gathered in a decadent golden dining room to listen to a symphony composed by Carnot’s father and performed by a quartet that included one of the composer’s distant descendants.

Carnot’s reverberating insight emerged from an attempt to exert ultimate control over the clockwork world, the holy grail of the Age of Reason. But as the concept of entropy diffused throughout the natural sciences, its purpose shifted. The refined view of entropy is one that sheds the false dreams of total efficiency and perfect prediction and instead concedes the irreducible uncertainty in the world. “To some extent, we’re moving away from enlightenment in a number of directions,” Rovelli said — away from determinism and absolutism and toward uncertainty and subjectivity.

Like it or not, we are slaves of the second law; we can’t help but compel the universe toward its fate of supreme disorder. But our refined view on entropy allows for a more positive outlook. The trend toward messiness is what powers all our machines. While the decay of useful energy does limit our abilities, sometimes a new perspective can reveal a reservoir of order hidden in the chaos. Furthermore, a disordered cosmos is one that’s increasingly filled with possibility. We cannot circumvent uncertainty, but we can learn to manage it — and maybe even embrace it. After all, ignorance is what motivates us to seek knowledge and construct stories about our experience. Entropy, in other words, is what makes us human.

You can bemoan the inescapable collapse of order, or you can embrace uncertainty as an opportunity to learn, to sense and deduce, to make better choices, and to capitalize on the motive power of you. 

- More Here

Grow Up - Enough With the Fireworks Already

Growing up in India, I enjoyed celebrating Diwali because I could play with fire and be macho. 

As time passed, I grew the fuck up. I grew the fuck up. I learned how much fireworks harm animals, ecosystems and the environment. 

So grow the fuck up and stop using fireworks in name of god knows what. Fireworks has nothing to do with you political ideology. 

Margaret Renkl reminds us that same but more politely than I do: 

For 15 straight years, our old dog Clark — a hound-shepherd-retriever mix who was born in the woods and loved the outdoors ever after — spent the Fourth of July in our walk-in shower. He seemed to believe a windowless shower in a windowless bathroom offered his best chance of surviving the shrieking terror that was raining down from the night sky outside.

Did he think the fireworks, with their window-rattling booms, were the work of some cosmic predator big enough to eat him whole? Did he think they were gunshots or claps of thunder spreading out from inexplicable lightning bolts tearing open the sky above our house?

There’s no way to know what he was thinking, but every single year that rangy, 75-pound, country-born yard dog spent the Fourth of July in our shower, trembling, drooling and whimpering in terror.

Clark was lucky. We have friends whose terrified dog spent one Fourth of July fruitlessly trying to outrun the explosions. The next day a good Samaritan found him lying on a hot sidewalk miles away, close to death. Other friends came home from watching the fireworks to discover that their dog had bolted in terror from their fenced backyard and been killed by a car.

And those were all companion animals, the ones whose terror is clear to us. We have no real way of knowing how many wild animals suffer because the patterns of their lives are disrupted with no warning every year on a night in early July. People shooting bottle rockets in the backyard might not see the sleeping songbirds, startled from their safe roosts, exploding into a darkness they did not evolve to navigate — crashing into buildings or depleting crucial energy reserves. People firing Roman candles into the sky above the ocean may have no idea that the explosions can cause seabirds to abandon their nests or frighten nesting shorebirds to death.

Then there’s the wildlife driven into roads — deer and foxes, opossums and skunks, coyotes and raccoons. Any nocturnal creature in a blind panic can find itself staring into oncoming headlights, unsure whether the greater danger lies in the road or in the sky or in the neighborhood yards surrounding them.

And all that’s on top of the dangers posed by fireworks debris, which can be toxic if ingested, or the risk of setting off a wildfire in parched summertime vegetation. Little wonder, then, that fireworks are banned in all national wildlife refuges, national forests and national parks.

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“All flourishing is mutual,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, in her best-selling book, “Braiding Sweetgrass.” This is one of the most repeated lines in contemporary environmental literature, and for good reason. It reminds us that all creation, human and other than human, is interconnected. At a time when life on this planet is faltering in every possible way, Dr. Kimmerer gently points out that our own flourishing depends on the flourishing of planetary systems that we are barely beginning to understand.

Addressing climate change and biodiversity loss on a planet with eight billion human residents won’t be simple. How to grow affordable food without using petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides that poison pollinators, for example, is a challenge. How to build enough housing for human beings without also disrupting natural ecosystems is a challenge. Such things are doable, though they won’t be easy.

But there are easy things we can do at no real cost to ourselves. We can eat more vegetables and less animal protein. We can cultivate native plants. We can seek out products that aren’t packaged in plastic, spend less time in cars and airplanes, raise the thermostat in the summer and lower it in the winter. As Dr. Kimmerer points out in “The Serviceberry,” her forthcoming book, “We live in a time when every choice matters.”

In that context, surely, we can give up fireworks. Of all the little pleasures that give life meaning and joy, surely fireworks don’t come close to the top of the list, and it costs us nothing to give them up. This is one case in which doing the right thing requires no significant sacrifice, one case in which doing the right thing has an immediate, noticeable, undeniably positive effect on a suffering world.

The conflation of selfishness with patriotism is the thing I have the hardest time accepting about our political era. Maybe we have the right to eat a hamburger or drive the biggest truck on the market or fire off bottle rockets deep into the night on the Fourth of July, but it doesn’t make us good Americans to do such things. How can it possibly be American to look at the damage that fireworks can cause — to the atmosphere, to forests, to wildlife, to our own beloved pets, to ourselves — and shrug?

The truly American thing would be to join together to make every change we can reasonably make to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, human and other than human alike. The truly American thing would be to plant a victory garden large enough to encompass the entire natural world.

 

Covid-19 - Origins Of An Outbreak

 The way that we are using the planet as opposed living with the planet. 

What I've Been Reading

Complexity science does study something distinctive - namely the emergent features of systems that are composed of a lot of components that interact repeatedly in a disordered way. The reason why it has been hard to identify what is distinctive about complex systems is that there are many different kinds of emergent properties and products of complex systems, and they are not all found in all complex systems. The common features of complex systems manifest themselves differently in different kinds of systems. 

What is a Complex System? by James Ladyman and Karoline Wiesner. 

This is one of the most important books you will read in your life. Developing even a rudimentary understanding of the complexity and complex systems will make one look at life differently (for good) plus it will help develop a sense of humility and gratitude for what we have without believing in magic and conspiracies. 

The complex system helps in understanding things such as how animals sufferings in factory farms will lead to a pandemic that could wipe out our species. 

Ladyman and Karoline attempt to "unpack" complex systems by avoiding biases put forth by existing researchers and keeping it open-ended as humanely as possible. They have also kept math and technical details to the minimum.  

They have done an enormous favor to a common reader by defining some of the salient features of the complex systems (not all always applies to all complex systems):

1. Numerosity: complex systems involve many interactions among many components. 
2. Disorder and diversity: the interactions in a complex system are not coordinated or controlled centrally, and the components may differ. 
3. Feedback: the interactions in complex systems are iterated so that there is feedback from previous interactions on a time scale relevant to the system's emergent dynamics. 
4. Non-equilibrium: complex systems are open to the environment and are often driven by something external. 
5. Spontaneous order and self-organization: complex systems exhibit structure and order that arises out of the interactions among their parts. 
6. Nonlinearity: complex systems exhibit nonlinear dependence on parameters or external drivers. 
7. Robustness: the structure and function of complex systems is stable under relevant perturbations. 
8. Nested structure and modularity: there may be multiple scales of structure, clustering, and specialization of function in complex systems. 
9. History and memory: complex systems often require a very long history to exist and often store information about history. 
10. Adaptive behavior: complex systems are often able to modify their behavior depending on the state of the environment and the predictions they make about it.

We argue that a system is complex if it has some or all of spontaneous order and self-organization, non-linear behavior, robustness history and memory, nested structure and modularity, and adaptive behavior. These features arise from the combination of the properties of numerosity, disorder and diversity, feedback, and non-equilibrium. We argue that there are different kinds of complex systems because some systems exhibit some but not all of the features. 

Chaos is not always complexity:

Complexity is often linked with chaos, and it may be conflated with it, but the behavior of a chaotic system is indistinguishable from random behavior. It is true that there are systems that exhibit complexity partly in virtue of being chaotic, but their complexity is something over and above their chaotic nature. Furthermore, since chaotic behavior is a special feature of some deterministic systems, any dynamical system that is stochastic is by definition not chaotic, and yet complexity scientists study many such systems. 

Measuring Complexity:

Ideas such as "logical depth" measure not complexity but order. Complexity is a multifaceted phenomenon and that complex systems have a variety of features not all of which are found in all of them. This implies that assigning a single number to complexity cannot do justice. 

A variety of different measures would be required to capture all our intuitive ideas about what is meant by complexity. 

- Physicist Murray Gell-Mann

In summary: 

There are many important theoretical questions on which complexity science bears, the most obvious ones concerned with relationships between life and nonliving matter, and between conscious and non-conscious matter. The general implication of our analysis for these matters is that the dichotomy between atoms and molecules and advanced life forms is a very crude way of seeing the many layers of structure that are found at different scales.  The only way to understand the emergence of life is by studying the processes that occur in self-organizing physical systems not just physical structures. 

Once the complexity of nonliving systems, such as the solar system and the Earth and its climate, is grasped in detail, the difference between life and non-life seems to be less of a mysterious leap and more of a continuum. 

When we think about complex systems in the right way, we can abstract from some of their features and understand the simplicity that underlies the wonderful complexity!

One Health - Linking Human, Animal & Ecosystem Health

 Finally, a splendid initiative to capture the complexities of the life of earth!

This is the must-have knowledge tp make us humble and start to understand the complex interdependencies. The genesis of fake news to conspiracy theories is caused by ignoring these complex interdependencies and forcefully looking for simple answers which don't exist. 

Check out One Health and you can follow them on twitter: 

Definitions of One Health

One Health is a collaborative, multisectoral, and trans-disciplinary approach - working at local, regional, national, and global levels - to achieve optimal health and well-being outcomes recognizing the interconnections between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment.

Scope of One Health

 

Some people misunderstand and think that One Health is about everything therefore if must be about nothing.  But the truth is that One Health thinking (see definition above) and implementation is needed in so many arenas that it just seems to be about 'everything'.

 

Here are a few areas that urgently need the One Health approach, at all levels of academia, government, industry, policy and research,  because of the inextricable interconnectedness of animal, environmental, human, plant and planet health:

• Agricultural production and land use
• Animals as Sentinels for Environmental agent and contaminants detection and response
• Antimicrobial resistance mitigation
• Biodiversity / Conservation Medicine
• Climate change and impacts of climate on health of animals, ecosystems, and humans
• Clinical medicine needs for interrelationship between the health professions
• Communications and outreach
• Comparative Medicine: commonality of diseases among people and animals such as cancer, obesity, and diabetes
• Disaster preparedness and response
• Disease surveillance, prevention and response, both infectious (zoonotic) and chronic diseases
• Economics / Complex Systems, Civil Society
• Environmental Health
• Food Safety and Security
• Global trade, commerce and security
• Human - Animal bond
• Natural Resources Conservation
• Occupational Health Risks
• Plant / Soil health
• Professional education and training of the Next Generation of One Health professionals
• Public policy and regulation
• Research, both basic and translational
• Water Safety and Security
• Welfare / Well-being of animals, humans, ecosystems and planet

Potential Outcomes from the One Health Approach:

• More interdisciplinary programs in education, training, research, and established policy (See http://bit.ly/2Hld7pl )
• More information sharing related to disease detection, diagnosis, education and research 
• More prevention of diseases, both infectious and chronic
• Development of new therapies and approaches to treatments

Wisdom Of The Week

I have been reading Nick Lane's fascinating book The Vital Question; each page is power packed with so much new (to me) information that I am reading it very slowly.

Without a high flux of carbon and energy that is physically channelled over inorganic catalysts, there is no possibility of evolving cells. I would rate this as a necessity anywhere in the universe: given the requirement for carbon chemistry that we discussed in the last chapter, thermodynamics dictates a continuous flow of carbon and energy over natural catalysts. Discounting special pleading, that rules out almost all environments that have been touted as possible settings for the origin of life: warm ponds (sadly Darwin was wrong on that), primordial soup, microporous pumice stones, beaches, panspermia, you name it. But it does not rule out hydrothermal vents; on the contrary, it rules them in. Hydrothermal vents are exactly the kind of dissipative structures that we seek – continuous flow, far-from-equilibrium electrochemical reactors.

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We have established on thermodynamic grounds that to make a cell from scratch requires a continuous flow of reactive carbon and chemical energy across rudimentary catalysts in a constrained through-flow system. Only hydrothermal vents provide the requisite conditions, and only a subset of vents – alkaline hydrothermal vents – match all the conditions needed. But alkaline vents come with both a serious problem and a beautiful answer to the problem. The serious problem is that these vents are rich in hydrogen gas, but hydrogen will not react with CO2 to form organics. The beautiful answer is that the physical structure of alkaline vents – natural proton gradients across thin semiconducting walls – will (theoretically) drive the formation of organics. And then concentrate them. To my mind, at least, all this makes a great deal of sense. Add to this the fact that all life on earth uses (still uses!) proton gradients across membranes to drive both carbon and energy metabolism, and I’m tempted to cry, with the physicist John Archibald Wheeler, ‘Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind for so long!