Mind's Eye Re: Science and religion in modernity

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 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.
>
> ...
>
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