Showing posts with label Entropy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Entropy. Show all posts

Tuesday, 25 February 2014

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Pink Entropy

Blog and Mablog

I recently wrote on the subject of entropy here, and set off a maelstrom of comments. Some people just have that gift, and other people don’t. That appears to be just the way it is for me, and I try to be humble about it. Sometimes I think my comments section is a good example of entropy.

If I might, I would like to supplement my initial observations with a few quick follow up jabs, and see if it happens again. These are just quick responses to a couple of basic questions that were raised, and which I would like answer outside the thread.

Since I speak English, let us go with a dictionary:

Entropy is “a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.”
Now I don’t see anything in my argument or illustrations that would constitute a howler when it comes to that definition.

Friday, 21 February 2014

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Building Things With Sunshine

Blog and Mablog

I have said in the past that I think evolution is a hoot, and moreover, I have given reasons for thinking this. One of the reasons is that the idea of evolution runs clean contrary to the second law of thermodynamics. In response to this view of mine, an anti-theist web site (read more here) has offered the following:

“To finish this argument (hopefully once and for all) I will give a similar example but in relation to life.-
In ‘open’ thermodynamic systems energy is imported to turn simple compounds into complex ones, a perfect example of this is photosynthesis in which; water and carbon-dioxide are turned into complex carbohydrates.
The energy for this is imported from the sun, because the earth is not a ‘closed’ system, it is an open one.
If evolution is impossible relating to the second law, so is photosynthesis, which is obviously not the case.”

Let me go straight to my conclusion, state the problem, and then work back to the argument. My interlocutor is trying to explain things with photosynthesis, when what he needs to do is give an accounting for photosynthesis.