Re: The difference between organism and ecosystem...

[Leo Caves <***>]

Dan,

To interweave threads as ever.

CP Snow had a pithy take on the Laws of Thermodynamics, which might (or 
might not) give some insight for those how have not sat through their 
physical chemistry.

1. You cannot win (that is, you cannot get something for nothing, 
because matter and energy are conserved).

2. You cannot break even (you cannot return to the same energy state, 
because there is always an increase in disorder; entropy always 
increases).

3. You cannot get out of the game (because absolute zero is 
unattainable).

(The so-called "Zeroth Law" is a simple statement that any two bodies 
that are in thermal equilibrium with a third body, will themselves be 
at equilibrium, and will be at the same temperature - which establishes 
the notion and validity of a temperature scale)

Just a note, that this is the "classical" view of thermodynamics.  
Boltzmann (and Gibbs) gave us the "modern" statistical thermodynamics, 
which doesn't contradict the classical Laws, but provides the machinery 
to describe the macroscopic phenomena in terms of underlying 
statistical distributions of microscopic states ("ensembles").

On another note:  Ian Stewart [2] has developed ideas of the coexisting 
tendencies for disorder and clumpiness in the universe.  Briefly:  a 
system at thermodynamic equilibrium has a tendency to be stable wrt 
perturbations (Classically, Le Chatelier's Principle); gravitational 
systems however are not stable wrt perturbations (and can become 
unstable).   Both of these tendencies are at work in systems, but the 
their relative effects are dependent on context (different physical 
realms).


Leo

[1] quote attributed to CP Snow, but I cannot find the source.  Here is 
where I lifted the text"  
http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae280.cfm

[2] Ian Stewart "The second law of gravitics and the fourth law of 
thermodynamics" in  From Complexity to Life, Proceedings of Templeton 
Symposium on Complexity, Information, and Design, Santa Fe 1999. (N.H. 
Gregsen, ed.) Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, 114-150.