Mind's Eye Re: Science and religion in modernity

The below is rather long, but physics is returning to some of the
ideas of James Maxwell. My dog is named after him. Years ago, we
were told their were two cultures ( CP Snow) - one knew the 2nd law of
thermodynamics and the other did not (literary types). The 2nd law
involved was a straw man. The following, as Max needs his walk, is
paraphrased from last week's New Scientist.

A few decades after Carnot, the German physicist Rudolph Clausius
explained such phenomena in terms of a quantity characterising
disorder that he called entropy. In this picture, the universe works
on the back of processes that increase entropy - for example
dissipating heat from places where it is concentrated, and therefore
more ordered, to cooler areas, where it is not. That predicts a grim
fate for the universe itself. Once all heat is maximally dissipated,
no useful process can happen in it any more: it dies a "heat death". A
perplexing question is raised at the other end of cosmic history, too.
If nature always favours states of high entropy, how and why did the
universe start in a state that seems to have been of comparatively low
entropy? At present we have no answer, and there is an intriguing
alternative view.

Perhaps because of such undesirable consequences, the legitimacy of
the second law was for a long time questioned. The charge was
formulated with the most striking clarity by the Scottish physicist
James Clerk Maxwell in 1867. He was satisfied that inanimate matter
presented no difficulty for the second law. In an isolated system,
heat always passes from the hotter to the cooler, and a neat clump of
dye molecules readily dissolves in water and disperses randomly, never
the other way round. Disorder as embodied by entropy does always
increase. Maxwell's problem was with life. Living things have
"intentionality": they deliberately do things to other things to make
life easier for themselves. Conceivably, they might try to reduce the
entropy of their surroundings and thereby violate the second law.
Such a possibility is highly disturbing to physicists. Either
something is a universal law or it is merely a cover for something
deeper. Yet it was only in the late 1970s that Maxwell's entropy-
fiddling "demon" was laid to rest. Its slayer was the US physicist
Charles Bennett, who built on work by his colleague at IBM, Rolf
Landauer, using the theory of information developed a few decades
earlier by Claude Shannon. An intelligent being can certainly
rearrange things to lower the entropy of its environment. But to do
this, it must first fill up its memory, gaining information as to how
things are arranged in the first place.

This acquired information must be encoded somewhere, presumably in the
demon's memory. When this memory is finally full, or the being dies or
otherwise expires, it must be reset. Dumping all this stored, ordered
information back into the environment increases entropy - and this
entropy increase, Bennett showed, will ultimately always be at least
as large as the entropy reduction the demon originally achieved. Thus
the status of the second law was assured, albeit anchored in a mantra
of Landauer's that would have been unintelligible to the 19th-century
progenitors of thermodynamics: that "information is physical".
James Joule's 19th century experiments with beer can be used to
illustrate this idea. The English brewer, whose name lives on in the
standard unit of energy, sealed beer in a thermally isolated tub
containing a paddle wheel that was connected to weights falling under
gravity outside. The wheel's rotation warmed the beer, increasing the
disorder of its molecules and therefore its entropy. But hard as we
might try, we simply cannot use Joule's set-up to decrease the beer's
temperature, even by a fraction of a millikelvin. Cooler beer is, in
this instance, a state regrettably beyond the reach of physics.

The question is whether we can express the whole of physics simply by
enumerating possible and impossible processes in a given situation.
This is very different from how physics is usually phrased, in both
the classical and quantum regimes, in terms of states of systems and
equations that describe how those states change in time. The blind
alleys down which the standard approach can lead are easiest to
understand in classical physics, where the dynamical equations we
derive allow a whole host of processes that patently do not occur -
the ones we have to conjure up the laws of thermodynamics expressly to
forbid, such as dye molecules reclumping spontaneously in water.

By reversing the logic, our observations of the natural world can
again take the lead in deriving our theories. We observe the
prohibitions that nature puts in place, be it on decreasing entropy,
getting energy from nothing, travelling faster than light or whatever.
The ultimately "correct" theory of physics - the logically tightest -
is the one from which the smallest deviation gives us something that
breaks those taboos.

There are other advantages in recasting physics in such terms. Time is
a perennially problematic concept in physical theories. In quantum
theory, for example, it enters as an extraneous parameter of unclear
origin that cannot itself be quantised. In thermodynamics, meanwhile,
the passage of time is entropy increase by any other name. A process
such as dissolved dye molecules forming themselves into a clump
offends our sensibilities because it appears to amount to running time
backwards as much as anything else, although the real objection is
that it decreases entropy.

Apply this logic more generally, and time ceases to exist as an
independent, fundamental entity, but one whose flow is determined
purely in terms of allowed and disallowed processes. With it go
problems such as why the universe started in a state of low entropy.
If states and their dynamical evolution over time cease to be the
question, then anything that does not break any transformational rules
becomes a valid answer.

Such an approach would probably please Einstein, who once said: "What
really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of
the world." A thermodynamically inspired formulation of physics might
not answer that question directly, but leaves God with no choice but
to be a thermodynamicist. That would be a singular accolade for those
19th-century masters of steam: that they stumbled upon the essence of
the universe, entirely by accident. The triumph of thermodynamics
would then be a revolution by stealth, 200 years in the making.

While thermodynamics seems to float above the precise content of the
physical world it describes, whether classical, quantum or post-
quantum, its connection with the other pillar of modern physics,
general relativity, might be more direct. General relativity describes
the force of gravity. In 1995, Ted Jacobson of the University of
Maryland in College Park claimed that gravity could be a consequence
of disorder as quantified by entropy. His mathematical argument is
surprisingly simple, but rests on two disputed theoretical
relationships. The first was argued by Jacob Bekenstein in the early
1970s, who was examining the fate of the information in a body gulped
by a black hole. This is a naked challenge to the universal validity
of thermodynamics: any increase in disorder in the cosmos could be
reversed by throwing the affected system into a black hole.

Bekenstein showed that this would be countered if the black hole
simply grew in area in proportion to the entropy of the body it was
swallowing. Then each tiny part of its surface would correspond to one
bit of information that still counts in the universe's ledger. This
relationship has since been elevated to the status of a principle, the
holographic principle, that is supported by a host of other
theoretical ideas – but not as yet by any experiment.

The second relationship is a suggestion by Paul Davies and William
Unruh, also first made in the 1970s, that an accelerating body
radiates tiny amounts of heat. A thermometer waved around in a perfect
vacuum, where there are no moving atoms that can provide us with a
normal conception of temperature, will record a non-zero temperature.
This is an attractive yet counter-intuitive idea, but accelerations
far beyond what can presently be achieved are required to generate
enough radiation to test it experimentally.

Put these two speculative relations together with standard, undisputed
connections between entropy, temperature, kinetic energy and velocity,
and it is possible to construct a quantity that mathematically looks
like gravity, but is defined in terms of entropy. Others have since
been tempted down the same route, most recently Erik Verlinde of the
University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Such theories, which are
by no means universally accepted, suggest that when bodies fall
together it is not the effect of a separate fundamental force called
gravity, but because the heating that results best fulfils the
thermodynamic diktat that entropy in the universe must always
increase.

A possible religious implication of this is that laife after death is
already with us - information does not 'die'.

On 19 Oct, 19:08, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've seen the landscape change too Allan - East Anglia is a prime
> example - one could almost think the soil blows away into the North
> Sea.  I'm with rigsy on the male domination aspect, though increasing
> 'feminisation' has changed little other than making the rooms we
> inhabit look better.   I also agree on the benefits of 'robot heaven'
> on chores and plumbing - we should be extending this into a wider
> quality of work life world-wide too.
> I think science and reasonably scrupulous history has exposed our
> religious texts and national pride ideologies as myth.  The Mecca of
> the Koran is almost certainly in Syria and Numbers 31 is typical of
> much of the disgusting material.  Islam is almost certainly a control
> fraud creation that follows rather than pre-dates the Arab conquests,
> much as Xtianty as we have it was part of the control fraud of Roman
> Empire.
>
> Big Bang or whatever version (such as M-theory collisions of flat
> universes) don't help with reasons why we cling to this rock and
> origin and few understand the science from which these explanatory
> projections are made.  One still ends up (metaphorically) with the
> world supported by a turtle, supported by a turtle and after that
> turtles all the way down.  Not clinging to the lies of organised
> religion and economics does not leave us with new certainty, but
> rather existential plight.  I think this is at the bottom of how
> control frauds work and want to see religious principles that explain
> this instead of exploiting it.
>
> How does the slave ant, stolen as an 'egg', 'know' to rebel and start
> killing the slavers pupae?  Figures of speech no doubt abound in this
> and we do know the trigger is something to do with chemical
> composition of the pupae.  We don't even know our own activities are
> free and what role our big brains play in freeing us from genetic-
> evolutionary determination.  The parasitic life-style is the most
> common on earth and many people are parasitic in the current economic
> model - science is and returns the gifts of its idleness in some form
> of symbiosis - I don't believe the financial system really does this.
>  I want fellowship that doesn't rely on gibberish - probably in a
> limited form that will allow us to make the planet safer.
>
> The science we have is productive but it's also clear most people
> can't learn it and our intellectual models of it are as vapid as
> excellence models in management.  Much science is now being done by
> machines and in some sense they are the only ones that 'know' what is
> going on.  Many religious terms are actually about freedom (from debt
> peonage) and my sense of things is we shy away from discussing key
> implications on structuring freedom, including freedom from domination
> and extremes of tolerance and the desire to be free of totalitarian
> domination and yet have law and order.  Do we really want people free
> to impose black bags and no education on women or daft practices like
> 'churching' or Papal indulgences or Fatwa?  Freedom is, it seems,
> connected with preventing dominance and not something we can bottle.
>
> I would guess the first principles of any religion I would subscribe
> to would have elements of something Andrew Vesey said about a society
> that would relish looking after its 'least competent' (here my blind
> mate is perhaps the most competent man I've met) - but even this is
> complicated by over-population considerations and the choices we can
> make on such matters as which in-vitro eggs to implant when we know
> some are more likely to produce disability than others.
>
> On 19 Oct, 13:48, rigsy03 <rigs...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > Life is lived on the ground versus the ivory tower of male
> > intellectuals and clerics.
>
> > Our state has been invaded by thousands looking for benefits, for
> > instance, which has impacted the quality of life. That is a real issue
> > that has moral questions to ponder.
>
> > Our science has proved its power to also destroy through very
> > sophisticated weapons- to goof up the purity of drugs intended to
> > heal- to fail to consider the impact of chemicals, procedures on the
> > water supply and fertility of the land, etc.- our food supply is
> > periodically recalled as are cars, toys. Ah...but count me as one who
> > is grateful for indoor plumbing, central heating, machines that
> > relieve me from washing the clothes in a river bed among the perilous
> > rocks, beating the rugs of their dust, and so on.
>
> > The mobile will certainly change all areas of life- from print
> > materials to finance to education. It will open up information to
> > billions. But it also may put certain areas at risk- indeed, great
> > risk.
>
> > On Oct 18, 9:43 pm, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > One thing I found impossible to escape as an academic is that a small
> > > amount of initial research always turns up a vast literature that can
> > > only really be used to define a problematic rather than direct
> > > rational action.  As a young man I imagined science could answer a lot
> > > of the issues that prevent us forming a modern culture.  My ideas were
> > > crude and more reading and better teaching would have shown me most
> > > attempts at this had already failed.  The story, as I see it, starts
> > > in ancient Greek philosophy and its disdain for public opinion or
> > > doxa.  The Greek had also realised contradictory argument can be made
> > > on more or less anything and produced much piss-witter on the virtuous
> > > individual produced though education in virtue ethics.  This 'virtue'
> > > was produced within a slave economy they did not seek to change.  Even
> > > Locke managed to justify slavery if the people were taken in the
> > > course of a just war.
> > > Francis Bacon produced a list of Idols that a scientific world-view
> > > needed to avoid.  I say 'list', but in fact eleven of them are dotted
> > > about his work, written in suck-up prose to the authorities of the
> > > day.  Leibniz wanted to produce a language (of Reason) in which social
> > > problems could be worked out as we might do sums.  Various
> > > sociological positivisms attempted to define scientific method and
> > > apply that to social problems.
>
> > > These days I think the turn we need is against control-freakery and
> > > ecocide dressed-up as entertainment and economics.  Perhaps unusually
> > > for a scientist I would like to see religion play a wider role in
> > > social change, but the start here would involve admissions of the
> > > appalling history of organised religion as a control fraud of empire.
> > > The Xtianity of Rome and crusades is no more acceptable than the weird
> > > tale of the Koran in which the religion is in strange relation with
> > > history, geography and time.  Our arguments for 'god' or a way of
> > > living do not have to be based on myths of people meeting the deity or
> > > communing with him/her/it through talking salamanders or on the path
> > > second left after the burning bush.  We need something more modern and
> > > informed, without sexism, 'chosen people' and ludicrous myths about
> > > prophets.
>
> > > We have no idea why we cling to this cosmic rock.  The science that
> > > may allow us to leave and live among the stars  and prepare for
> > > weather catastrophe (man-made or otherwise) is the same that has given
> > > us weapons of mass destruction.  We need universal values against
> > > totalitarianism to allow us to focus our lives in more sensible
> > > spiritualism than we have managed so far.  Thinking of Bill's UFO
> > > experience I watched Promethius (the Alien prequel).  A disappointing
> > > film even in HD, it does put forward the notion we may have been made
> > > by other beings and concludes (after we routinely kill them by ramming
> > > their spaceship) with the odd actress playing the main role and the
> > > head of an android setting off to find who made the aliens.  This is
> > > only slightly more sensible than a world of talking snakes and I read
> > > better stuff in comics as a kid.
>
> > > Slave ants pursue rebellion against their masters with no hope of
> > > saving their own lives.  There is even an 'arms race' in the co-
> > > determination of evolution.  Religion is as much an evolutionary
> > > product as science.  I can point to crude versions of religion amongst
> > > chimps and such matters as insect consensus and science.  Memory is
> > > explainable in evolutionary economics in terms of it role in future
> > > prediction.  With caution on the matter of 'on mice and men', I would
> > > suggest what usefully separates science and pseudo-science are rules
> > > and values that make it difficult to lie.  There is no method.  And
> > > down the line we don't want a world in which only scientists know
> > > enough to tell other people what to do.  Or a set of priests of
> > > mullahs.
>
> > > Anyone any thoughts?

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