Re: The difference between organism and ecosystem...

[Dan Fiscus <***>]

Leo,

Thanks, these are great. Do you have an electronic copy of that
Ian Stewart paper, by any chance? If so, please send me one. If
not, I'll try to get the book through library.

I think I understand these "laws" as they have been developed
and given the general assumptions, requirements, etc. I don't
understand what a "gravitational system" is as you talk about
below. Is such a system akin to a n-body system that is famous
for insolubility in mathematics and degrees of freedom problems?
I know Tim has mentioned how Rosen talked of gravitational
systems as well. [RB Fuller and Luigi Fantappie talk of syntropy,
but I'll leave that for another topic/discussion.]

Also, the easiest way to (maybe) sneak out from the laws/rules
below is to focus on "things" that are not conserved, that are
created and destroyed, such as information, relations, life forms,
energy quality (as opposed to quantity), etc. Prigogine deals some
with the creation and destruction of *correlations* in his book The
End of Certainty. I don't understand it yet, not even close. Same
section deals with Poincare resonances.

A catch for the evasive maneuver about non-conservative entities
would be that even non-material "things" like relations must exist
in material form, or *in between* material forms, and so at that
point the laws would all seem to hold again for the material as
necessary complement or context for relational/topological.

Another comment is that while many in ecology and theoretical
biology and related fields talk about life always working to
dissipate gradients (part of being open to high quality energy
input, which allows organizing work to be done locally at the
expense of entropy increase globally/regionally), it seems to me
that any process of dissipating a gradient or degrading energy
quality must be accompanied by the creation of another gradient
or the "doing of work" of some kind. That is, while the usual
law/rule says that you can't do work without degrading energy
(increasing entropy), the converse is also true - you can't
degrade energy (increase entropy) without doing work. I got
this idea from Bob Ulanowicz.

Glen mentioned the issues of the 2nd law only applying to closed
systems yet the solar system is an open system.Thus if life does
major work inside the solar system it would still be less energy
than has been dissipated during the sun's radiation/decay. But if
life could become independent of the solar system - leave and
establish open-ended, living colonies elsewhere - this would seem
to suggest an energy greater than or equal to that of the sun. That
is, life would not be merely dependent on steady input of low
entropy energy from the sun, but would have enough embodied
or internal energy (?) to be able to disconnect from the sun's
forcing across the Earth system boundary. It would maybe be
like a smaller particle ejecting from an atom when excited or
after absorbing added energy. But the energy does not come
from outside the solar system, but inside. In that sense it seems
the solar system is closed to solar/stellar energy of any real
importance. Life does not use or harness energy from beyond
the solar system, does it? Maybe cosmic rays are useful...hmmm...

Matter seems conserved on Earth - no major gains or losses.
Yet life has increased embodied energy, complexity, biomass,
relations, information, knowledge, etc. by iteration of composing
and decomposing, combining and recombining material forms
and processes in evolving configurations.

Thinking out loud...not sure where I am going...but thanks again
for the info and cites.

Dan



Leo Caves wrote:

> 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.