Entropy and Life
Everything falls apart
Entropy emerges from the fact that the universe tends to move towards a state of maximum disorder. Wikipedia says:
"Entropy is central to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time. As a result, isolated systems evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, where the entropy is highest. A consequence of the second law of thermodynamics is that certain processes are irreversible. "
Britannica puts it this way:
"the measure of a system’s thermal energy per unit temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work."
A system is a particular way of arranging things. The things could be arranged differently and not work as a system. The ways of arranging the things so that they form a system is quite limited and the ways of arranging that don't form a system is unlimited.
Which is more probable?
One example that Penrose used was diffusion in gasses. Release perfume into a room and soon the room is full of the scent by diffusion. Once the room is full of the scent you can't get the scent back in the bottle. The probability of all those scent molecules being back in the bottle again is just too small.
Entropy is a central concept in physics. It can be defined mathematically and treated as a force of nature like gravity. I knew how to do that 50 years ago but I confess that now I use the term in a looser way.
Life is a way of organizing things in systems. It's a pretty complicated system with subsystems and subsubsystems and . . . .
Life seems to go against entropy. It takes disordered stuff and makes it into highly improbable things like us. This isn't strictly true. Life on earth isn't an isolated system because there is a continuous flow of energy from the sun.
People form societies and the concept of entropy applies to societies. There are far fewer ways of people organizing themselves so they can survive than otherwise. We're not approaching this as a blank slate. We have inherited capabilities that enable us to live as social animals that probably pre-date homo sapiens.
But its easy to see that those capabilities can enable many different societies. Heck, there are 195 countries in the world and each of those is subdivided in a sort of fractal way. Each country has "provinces" and each province has "cities" etc
All of these systems evolve. The system may initially emerge from some sort of constitutional convention - but I don't really think of political fora like that as rational as a whole. But they do hammer together a system that works. And then that system evolves.
On a smaller scale we have organizations like companies and clubs and coops. They are all hard to start but then they evolve.
Social systems share with life in general the capability of taking raw material in as a kind of nourishment.
Entropy comes in here because it's hard to build these structures but it's comparatively easy to knock them down. A human social structure can get sick and die.
Death is an essential part of Natural Selection. It's how systems adapt to everchanging conditions.
Canada has been a good place to live for 75 years. I've been lucky. I'm also aware of how precarious things are. Our Conservatives are sounding more Trumpish every day These days I'm dependent on CPP for income and it covers my modest needs. I get free healthcare. The Conservatives are getting ready to break those systems I think and once broken they will be hard to replace.
Sigh - as the Chinese sage said "may you live in interesting times"
What do you think?