Download PDF The Second Law of Life Energy, Technology, and the Future of Earth As We Know It by John E. J. Schmitz

Download PDF The Second Law of Life Energy, Technology, and the Future of Earth As We Know It  by John E. J. Schmitz

Sinopsis

Let’s begin with a few, seemingly unrelated questions: Why does heat always flow from hot to cold? We see this phenomenon every day and consider it unremarkable, so we never wonder why it’s so. But consider a cup of hot tea sitting on a table. We all know that the tea eventually will cool down to room temperature, but why doesn’t the opposite ever happen? Why doesn’t a cold cup of tea ever become hot spontaneously, without being actively heated? Now, imagine that we place the hot cup of tea in a box whose walls do not allow any heat or material to pass in or out (we’re creating an isolated system, discussed more fully in Chapter 2), see Figure 1.1. If we wait long enough, the tea will assume the same temperature as the air in the box, and the temperature of the air in the box will go up slightly. However, the total amount of heat energy inside the box, including the cup of tea, will remain the same. Why does this happen?

Next question: Why don’t our cars get better gas mileage? Everyone knows that a lot of the energy (about 70%) contained in gasoline is wasted in the form of heat, rather than being converted into useful mechanical work that drives the wheels. That heat waste requires our cars to have extensive cooling systems, the most visible component of which is the radiator. The answer to the question of why the energy enclosed in gasoline cannot be converted entirely into mechanical energy is not obvious to us at this point.

Another question: Why does time, unlike many other circumstances of life, only go forward? Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could go backward in time and change history – our own, or the world’s? (Unfortunately, as we’ll find out, there’s a fundamental reason why we can’t.)

Essay question: Is nature chaotic, or orderly? Look at the world around you, and note how nature seems to possess two contradictory properties – the tendency to disintegrate, and the drive to organize. On one hand, it seems that everything you put in order begins to degenerate into chaos as soon as you leave it on its own. For example, let’s say you build a wall in your back yard from loose rocks or un-mortared bricks.

Then you head off for five years to study archeology in Greece and Egypt. When you come home, chances are good that your carefully constructed wall resembles the archeological ruins you’ve been studying: your structure is gone and only scattered building materials remain. Or, imagine that your son holds a can full of marbles. Suddenly he drops the can, and all the marbles tumble onto the floor. Certainly you don’t expect the marbles to somehow arrange themselves into a perfect pattern, but instead to go all over the room. So what’s the fundamental reason behind this natural tendency towards chaos? Why don’t the stones remain on top of one another indefinitely, and why don’t marbles ever form a nice pattern when they drop on the floor? Why is there always this creation of a mess?

On the other hand, nature is also a builder. Millions of years of evolution have created living organisms that are the epitome of organization – consider the genetic code in DNA, for example. It’s hard to understand how nature, which tends to be chaotic, can also exhibit such well-organized behaviors.

Bonus questions: What is energy? What is heat, and how does it relate to energy? Everybody uses these words almost daily. But can you explain the difference between heat and energy?

These questions seem simple at first, but answering them turns out to be tougher than we thought. Fortunately, we don’t have to do it ourselves. Over the last 150 years, brilliant people making similar observations, and asking like-minded questions, have actually found the answers. These answers have come together to form the concept of entropy, as explained in the theory of thermodynamics, a word derived from the Greek words thermos (“heat”) and dynamos (“force”). Thermodynamics studies the relationship among energy, heat, and work. The birth and development of thermodynamics were driven by economics – namely, the need to better understand the efficiency of steam engines. After many centuries of using the laws of mechanics to study the movement of objects in the sky6, scientists finally turned to work on more terrestrial pursuits, notably improving the performance of steam engines. While the direction of heat flows had been well known to humanity for thousands of years, the underlying description of that phenomenon – that is, the theory of thermodynamics – began taking shape only 150 years ago7. As we’ll see in Chapter 2, steam engines were among the most important drivers of the Industrial Revolution, and the new theory of thermodynamics helped explain how they really worked. That improved understanding led to better engines, which helped lower production costs and created cheaper goods, and so had a tremendous influence on history and on the quality of people’s lives.

One of the most intriguing concepts emerging from the thermodynamic theory is entropy. As a relatively abstract concept, entropy has received considerable attention since its conception in 1865 by Rudolf J.E. Clausius, a German physicist; yet it usually has been associated with mystical and esoteric thinking and has sometimes been used and interpreted in questionable ways. The fact is, entropy has a major impact in many areas of our daily lives, from the relationship of heat and labor that leads to machines which can transform heat into mechanical work, to philosophical discussions on the creation of the earth and the universe and the passing of time.

When I ask my friends and neighbors what they know about entropy, most of them admit they don’t know anything. Some vaguely remember something about chaos, but don’t know exactly how chaos relates to entropy. That’s why I wrote this book – to show you some of the truly breathtaking results of the theory of entropy – and to do it so you don’t need to know much more than high school math to understand it all.

Content

1. The Birth of a Beautiful Theory: Thermodynamics
2. So What Is All This Talk About Entropy?
3. The Science of Heat and Work: Classical Thermodynamics
4. Heat, energy, and mechanical work
5. Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
6. Perpetual motion and engines
7. Entropy and the direction of time
8. Much More About Entropy
9. Do we really understand what entropy is all about?
10. History of the acceptance of the existence of the atoms in physics
11. Statistical Thermodynamics: macroscopic and microscopic views
12. It’s all about probability
13. Connecting entropy with atoms and molecules
14. The Second Law when the systems become real
15. Entropy and the direction of time: reprise
16. Point of zero entropy and of zero absolute temperature
17. Boltzmann’s struggle with the scientific community
18. Energy efficiency and some conclusions
19. Link of Thermodynamics to Modern Physics
20. Three men and thermodynamics
21. Why couldn’t Newton’s mechanics explain everything?
22. Dark clouds for classical physics
23. Black body radiation
24. The photoelectric effect
25. The Michelson-Morley Experiment
26. The connection between the classical mechanics of Newton, the Quantum Mechanical Theory, and the Special Theory of Relativity
27. Thermodynamics at the birth of modern physics
28. Boltzmann’s heritage
29. What Planck thought about thermodynamics
30. What Einstein thought about thermodynamics
31. What Erwin Schrödinger thought about thermodynamics
32. The interpretation of time and its direction
33. Einstein’s interpretation of time
34. The influence of modern physics on thermodynamics: does relativity change entropy?
35. Entropy and Our Society, Our Culture, Our Planet, and Our Universe
36. Entropy, the Economic Process, and the World’s Environmental Problems
37. General environmental trends
38. How entropy plays a role in the economic process and re-defines concepts such as efficiency and sustainability
39. Relationship between thermodynamics and economic processes
40. Example of an economic process and the Entropy Law
41. A plea for a redefinition of efficiency and sustainability
42. Transformation of terrestrial resources from available to nonavailableSummary of entropy and economy
43. Summary of entropy and economy
44. Energy, Entropy, Life, and Heat Death
45. The contradiction between the thermodynamic push for chaos and the tremendous degree of molecular and biological organization
46. Chaos and life
47. The statistical nature of physical laws; or, to make something happen, atoms and molecules need to work together in large groups
48. Life and entropy
49. Entropy and the food chain
50. Entropy and the planet
51. Energy and Entropy of the food chain
52. Heat Death
53. The Use of the Concept of Entropy in Other Sciences
54. Entropy and electrical communication
55. A brief history of electrical communication
56. Claude Shannon, the “inventor” of modern electronic communication network theory
57. Maxwell’s demon
58. Use of the concept of entropy in other nonscientific fields
59. Entropy in the discussion of Christianity
60. The concept of Entropy and art
61. Two More Laws of Thermodynamics?
62. Another Way of Looking at Entropy
63. How Does the Gas Heat Up in the Air Pump?
64. Will Reshuffling a Deck of Cards Change the Entropy?
65. How Much Does the Entropy Change in a Case of Gas Expansion and Gas Mixing?
66. Thermodynamic Timeline
67. Can the Human Body Be Considered a Heat Engine?
68. Ways to Concentrate Energy: Nuclear Energy, Photovoltaic Cells, and Fuel Cells
69. Nuclear energy
70. Can photovoltaic cells provide the earth with a sustainable energy source?
71. How do solar cells work?
72. Fuel cells
73. Qualitative Definitions and Descriptions of Entropy
74. Some Simple Calculations and Interesting Numbers

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Download PDF FUTURE MINDS How the digital age is changing our minds, why this matters, and what we can do about it by Richard Watson

Sinopsis

This book is partly a sequel and partly a prequel to my previous book, Future Files. It’s about work, education, time and space, books, baths, sleep, music, and other things that influence our thinking. It’s also about how something as physical, finite, and flimsy as a 1.5kg box of proteins and carbohydrates can generate something as infinite and valuable as an idea. Most of all, it’s a book of concepts and conversation starters, with 10 key trends as the unifying force, including what I call constant partial stupidity, digital isolation, and a return to the real. It delves into the implications of living in a digital age.

Cellphones, computers, and iPods have become a central feature of everyday life in hundreds of millions of households, offices, and schools around the world. Children as young as 5 spend an average of six hours every day in front of some kind of screen, teenagers and many adults probably more. In the US, for example, adults were spending double the amount of time online in 2009 as they were in 2005. In Europe, the amount of time adults were online grew by around a third over the same time; in the UK, nonworking women are passing almost half their leisure time online, and the average person spends 45 percent of their waking hours on media and communication. Or there’s the finding in 2010 that 8–18 year olds in the US spend an average of 11 hours a day in front of a screen, be it a television, a computer, a cellphone, an iPod, or two or more simultaneously.

We are increasingly communicating via text message and email rather than face to face, we have hundreds of online “friends” yet we may not know the people next door, and the first place we look for information is Google.

This technological ubiquity and electronic flood are resulting in significant shifts in both attitudes and behavior, which is what this book sets out to explore. It’s about how the digital era is changing our minds—about what’s happening now, and what comes next.

But can something as seemingly innocent as a cellphone or a Google search really change the way people think and act? This is a very important question. It is also one that is actively engaging the minds of a number of eminent scientists, particularly those who study the physiology of the brain, because implicit in the question is the thought that the digital age may be changing our brains too.

Michael Merzenich is a pioneering neuroscientist who discovered through experiments that the human brain is “plastic”: it responds to any new stimulus or experience. Our thinking is therefore framed by the tools we choose to use. This has always been the case, but we have had millennia to consider the consequences. Arguably, this has now changed, and Merzenich has argued that the internet has the power to lead to fundamental change in our brain, leading it to be “massively remodeled.” We are already so connected through digital networks that a culture of rapid response has developed. We are currently so continually available that we have left ourselves no time to think properly about what we are doing. We have now become so obsessed with asking whether something can be done that we leave little or no time to consider whether it should be done.

For example, according to Professor Susan Greenfield, a brain researcher at the University of Oxford, when kids do something they like, such as playing an electronic game, the brain receives a blast of dopamine in the prefrontal cortex. However, if too much dopamine is produced—if they play too often—the parts of the prefrontal cortex associated with reasoning can be compromised. Electronic euphoria thus creates fewer possibilities and less opportunity to develop an original mind.

The digital era is chipping away at our ability to concentrate too. The quality of our thinking and ultimately of our decisions is suffering. Digital devices are turning us into a society of scatter brains. If any piece of information can be recalled at the click of a mouse, why bother to learn anything? We are becoming Google-eyed, scrolling through our days without thinking deeply about what we are really doing or where we are really going.

Reading on a computer screen is fast and is suited to foraging for facts. In contrast, reading on paper is reflective and is better suited to trying to understand an overall argument or concept. Both forms of reading—both forms of technology—ought to be able to live alongside each other. Since digital books are becoming instantly available and inexpensive, there is a danger that we will start to view them as just another disposable product, something to be consumed quickly and then thrown away. But if we keep the words and throw away the physical books, we are losing something of great significance, because physical books engage our senses in ways that digital artifacts do not. Reading a physical book is a highly tactile experience that delivers a sense of progression, and printed books give physical and metaphorical weight to the reading experience.

Furthermore, our attention and our relationships are getting atomized. We are connected globally, but our local relationships are becoming wafer thin and ephemeral. We are in danger of developing a society that is globally connected and collaborative, but one that is also impatient, isolated, and detached from reality. A society that has plenty of answers but very few good questions. A society composed of individuals who are unable to think by themselves in the real world.

It is the right kind of thinking—what I call deep thinking—that makes us uniquely human. This is the type of thinking that is associated with new ideas that move the world forward. It is the type of thinking that is inherent in strategic planning, scientific discovery, and artistic invention. It is thinking that is rigorous, focused, deliberate, considered, independent, original, imaginative, broad, wide, calm, relaxed, attentive, contemplative, and reflective, where the flow of information is limited and the medium matters—what you might call “slow flow.” It is not shallow, narrow, hurried, cursory, fractured, or distracted.

But deep thinking like this can’t be done in a hurry or an environment full of interruptions or hyperlinks. It can’t be done in 140 characters. It can’t be done when you’re in multitasking mayhem. What happens to the quality of our thinking when we never truly sit still or completely switch off? Modern life is indeed changing the quality of our thinking, but perhaps the clarity to see this only comes with a certain distance or detachment—like when you are sitting quietly to read a book, for instance.

You might think that none of this really matters; but it does. The knowledge revolution has replaced human brawn with human brains as the primary tool of economic production. Intellectual capital—the product of human minds—is now what matters most. And we are on the cusp of another revolution, too. In the future, our minds will compete with smart machines for employment and even affection. Machines are becoming adept at matching stored knowledge to patterns of human behavior, so we are shifting from a world where people are paid to accumulate and distribute fixed information to a fluid innovation economy, where people will be rewarded for being conceptual thinkers. Yet this is the type of thinking that is currently under attack.

So how should we as individuals and organizations be dealing with our changing way of thinking? How can we harness the potential of the digital age while minimizing its downsides? That’s what this book is about.

We need to do a little less and think a little more. We need to slow down—not all the time, but occasionally. We need to stop confusing movement with progress and get away from the idea that all communication and decision making have to be done instantly.

Try as I might, I find it difficult not to be sucked into the vortex of change. To me it feels as if time itself is being compressed. Having even an hour during the day just to think or write, uninterrupted, is becoming a luxury, mainly due to digital technology. I never quite feel as though I am in control, and when I do get a chance to think I usually end up mentally commuting back to an era when things were simpler and more certain.

A study by the University of California (San Diego) has found that in 2008 the average person’s daily intake of information was 300 percent greater than in 1960. I don’t know about the exact percentage, but I am certainly faced with an avalanche of information every day and I’m on a digital diet of continual deletion. But like any slimming diet it’s difficult to stick to for long, so the digital binging goes on and the megabytes keep building up. And while the vast amount of information at our disposal gives us all the appearance of being more intelligent, we’re making more and more silly mistakes, what I term constant partial stupidity.

I can read newspapers and websites from all over the world, at a time and a place of my choosing, and I can communicate with their authors, too. But I miss old-fashioned conversations and serendipitous encounters. Even when I do see people, the chances are that our chat will be fleeting or else the pudding of chilled berries will be interrupted by Apples and BlackBerries, at which point any interesting ideas will be frozen out.

But enough about me—over to you. Why, in an age of too much information and too little time, should you read this book?

Whether you want to find out about the benefits of boredom, mental privacy, the rise of the screenager, the sex life of ideas, or how digital objects and environments are changing our minds, you’ll find thought-provoking discussion and practical suggestions about what’s happening and what we can do about it. This is a book for anyone who’s curious about rethinking their thinking or about unleashing the extraordinary creative potential of the human mind.

Content

1. HOW THE DIGITAL ERA IS CHANGING OUR MINDS
2. The Rise of the Screenager
3. Pre-Teens: An Apple for Every Teacher
4. WHY THIS MATTERS
5. Thinking About Thinking
6. The Sex Life of Ideas
7. Thinking Spaces
8. WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT
9. How to Clear a Blocked Brain
10. Future Minds

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