Mind's Eye Re: Science and religion in modernity

One more point about the mobile shock-wave- eventually it will
obliterate other languages and cultures- do they have a choice in the
matter? Also was thinking perhaps Apple products are constructed by
hand in Asian countries because of the abundance of delicate hands and
special dexterity which I hope is not taken in the wrong way.//Yes-
militant feminism has hurt the feminine principle overall- but that is
another topic.

On Oct 19, 8:06 pm, rigsy03 <rigs...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I took a course on the Snow-Leavis(1959-1962) controversy in the
> mid-'70's. Perhaps we should then conclude scientists do not
> understand humanism? Other works involved included various essays and
> books by Aldous Huxley ("Literature and Science") and Bronowski
> ("Science and Human Values"). Not sure that "incomprehension and
> dislike"(Snow) between the two groups has changed at all when
> considering the gap between rich and poor nations, smart weapons, etc.
> as science and militarism promote the self-interest of various nations/
> political theories and practices. Should we quibble that Nazi
> scientists propelled the USA moon landing? At least the moon survived.
>
> On Oct 19, 1:37 pm, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > 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
>
> ...
>
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