Jul 3, 2020 07:30 PM
(This post was last modified: Jul 4, 2020 04:50 PM by C C.)
What new evidence could revolutionize all of known physics?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswitha...f4d3d06a58
EXCERPT: . . . If you want to go beyond our current scientific understanding, you have quite a high burden of proof. In particular, you must overcome the following three hurdles:
The idea of entropy has led us astray
http://nautil.us/issue/86/energy/the-ide...-us-astray
EXCERPTS: . . . By returning to the Victorian origins of the laws of thermodynamics, we can see how—and, perhaps, why—those laws have been broadly misconstrued and misapplied...
[...] Phrased frequently—and loosely—in terms of disorder and its tendency to increase, the second law of thermodynamics has been invoked to explain why organisms age, why societies collapse, and why evolution requires divine intervention. Leaving aside the problems with thinking of thermodynamic entropy as disorder, the important and basic point is that input of energy can reduce entropy (or disorder), and energy, as we’ve seen, is absolutely all over the place. The energy-driven reduction of entropy is easy to demonstrate in simple laboratory experiments, but more to the point, stars, biological populations, organisms, and societies are all systems in which energy is routinely harnessed to generate orderly structures that have lower entropy than the constituents from which they were built. There is nothing physically inevitable about increasing entropy in any of these systems.
[...] In almost every erroneous overextension of the first and second laws, one word marks the crux of the error. The laws refer to an isolated system. The idea is that nothing enters or leaves, comes or goes, without being accounted for. We can create models of isolated systems in a laboratory, but even these are only approximations—and not only, as our first thought might be, because a bit of energy is bound to sneak away. They are inevitably approximate also because our world is brimming with energy: There is residual heat that can never be perfectly removed...
[...] For these reasons, we might consider adding a law. The first and second we’ve just seen, and the third slot is taken by the relation between temperature and entropy, so let’s call this the fourth law of thermodynamics: IV. There is no such thing as an isolated system.
Granted, our new law places draconian limits on the strict applicability of the first and second, but they will remain as useful as ever for calculations of the idealized or approximate variety. We’re just keeping in mind that they are never exactly right. This is important, because for all the overextensions of thermodynamics that are flagged by explicit reference to the first or second law, there are others in which our underlying sense of the world, shaped as it is by popularized versions of Victorian science, leads us dangerously astray.
Thinking of energy and order as naturally dwindling scarcities that we must drum up through our ingenuity and hustle -- or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, feeling this way about them -- it is difficult for us to comprehend and respond to a historical moment in which the gravest threat is not scarcity but superabundance. Not that we will run short of energy, but that we will burn ourselves up in various ways.
Climate change is the obvious example [...] What if we had a different ur-myth about energy and order in the universe? ... Imagine, that is, a sense of energy informed not by Victorian science but by more recent physics -- from cosmic background radiation to the quantum effervescence of space itself. And imagine, too, a feeling for order that derived less from loose notions of entropic decline, and more from recent work on physical self-organization or the way organisms adaptively harness tiny changes in entropy to drive productive chemical reactions.
Imbued with such a worldview, moved and directed by it much as the Victorians were influenced by thermodynamics and Darwinism, we might think and act less in the vein of industrial agriculture, with its mining of natural gas and unidirectional spill of energy. We might be more inclined to let the flywheel of ecology get spinning and investigate the potential allowances of regenerative agriculture. More generally, perhaps we would begin to see that part of the solution to our planetary crisis lies not in hustle, but in repose... (MORE - details)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswitha...f4d3d06a58
EXCERPT: . . . If you want to go beyond our current scientific understanding, you have quite a high burden of proof. In particular, you must overcome the following three hurdles:
- you must successfully reproduce all the successes of the prevailing theory where it's relevant and valid,
- you must explain already-observed or measured phenomena that the prevailing theory cannot or does not explain,
- and you must make a novel, testable prediction that differs from the prevailing theory, and then go out and perform the critical test.
The idea of entropy has led us astray
http://nautil.us/issue/86/energy/the-ide...-us-astray
EXCERPTS: . . . By returning to the Victorian origins of the laws of thermodynamics, we can see how—and, perhaps, why—those laws have been broadly misconstrued and misapplied...
[...] Phrased frequently—and loosely—in terms of disorder and its tendency to increase, the second law of thermodynamics has been invoked to explain why organisms age, why societies collapse, and why evolution requires divine intervention. Leaving aside the problems with thinking of thermodynamic entropy as disorder, the important and basic point is that input of energy can reduce entropy (or disorder), and energy, as we’ve seen, is absolutely all over the place. The energy-driven reduction of entropy is easy to demonstrate in simple laboratory experiments, but more to the point, stars, biological populations, organisms, and societies are all systems in which energy is routinely harnessed to generate orderly structures that have lower entropy than the constituents from which they were built. There is nothing physically inevitable about increasing entropy in any of these systems.
[...] In almost every erroneous overextension of the first and second laws, one word marks the crux of the error. The laws refer to an isolated system. The idea is that nothing enters or leaves, comes or goes, without being accounted for. We can create models of isolated systems in a laboratory, but even these are only approximations—and not only, as our first thought might be, because a bit of energy is bound to sneak away. They are inevitably approximate also because our world is brimming with energy: There is residual heat that can never be perfectly removed...
[...] For these reasons, we might consider adding a law. The first and second we’ve just seen, and the third slot is taken by the relation between temperature and entropy, so let’s call this the fourth law of thermodynamics: IV. There is no such thing as an isolated system.
Granted, our new law places draconian limits on the strict applicability of the first and second, but they will remain as useful as ever for calculations of the idealized or approximate variety. We’re just keeping in mind that they are never exactly right. This is important, because for all the overextensions of thermodynamics that are flagged by explicit reference to the first or second law, there are others in which our underlying sense of the world, shaped as it is by popularized versions of Victorian science, leads us dangerously astray.
Thinking of energy and order as naturally dwindling scarcities that we must drum up through our ingenuity and hustle -- or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, feeling this way about them -- it is difficult for us to comprehend and respond to a historical moment in which the gravest threat is not scarcity but superabundance. Not that we will run short of energy, but that we will burn ourselves up in various ways.
Climate change is the obvious example [...] What if we had a different ur-myth about energy and order in the universe? ... Imagine, that is, a sense of energy informed not by Victorian science but by more recent physics -- from cosmic background radiation to the quantum effervescence of space itself. And imagine, too, a feeling for order that derived less from loose notions of entropic decline, and more from recent work on physical self-organization or the way organisms adaptively harness tiny changes in entropy to drive productive chemical reactions.
Imbued with such a worldview, moved and directed by it much as the Victorians were influenced by thermodynamics and Darwinism, we might think and act less in the vein of industrial agriculture, with its mining of natural gas and unidirectional spill of energy. We might be more inclined to let the flywheel of ecology get spinning and investigate the potential allowances of regenerative agriculture. More generally, perhaps we would begin to see that part of the solution to our planetary crisis lies not in hustle, but in repose... (MORE - details)