🌀 THERMOECONOMICS: BEYOND THE SECOND LAW
BY PETER CORNING

🔗 http://complexsystems.org/publications/thermoeconomics-beyond-the-second-law/

📌 Abstract
Physicist Erwin Schrodinger’s What is Life? (1945) has inspired many subsequent efforts to explain biological evolution, especially the evolution of complex systems, in terms of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the concepts of “entropy” and “negative entropy.” However, the problems associated with this paradigm are manifold. Some of these problems will be highlighted in the first part of this paper, and some of the theories that have been derived from it will be briefly critiqued. “Thermoeconomics”, by contrast, is based on the proposition that the role of energy in biological evolution should be defined and understood not in terms of the Second Law but in terms of such economic criteria as “productivity,” “efficiency,” and especially the costs and benefits (or “profitability”) of the various mechanisms for capturing and utilizing available energy to build biomass and do work. Thus thermoeconomics is fully consistent with the Darwinian paradigm. Furthermore, it is argued that economic criteria provide a better account of the advances (and recessions) in bioenergetic technologies than does any formulation derived from the Second Law.

#cybernetics, #entropy, #information, #natural_selection, #synergy, #thermodynamics

💰 The relevance of thermodynamics to economics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Georgescu-Roegen#The_relevance_of_thermodynamics_to_economics

The physical theory of #thermodynamics is based on two laws: The first law states that energy is neither created nor destroyed in any isolated system (a conservation principle). The second law of thermodynamics — also known as the #entropy law — states that energy tends to be degraded to ever poorer qualities (a degradation principle).

Georgescu argues that the relevance of thermodynamics to #economics stems from the physical fact that man can neither create nor destroy matter or energy, only transform it. The usual economic terms of "#production" and "#consumption" are mere verbal conventions that tend to obscure that nothing is created and nothing is destroyed in the economic process — everything is being transformed.

The science of thermodynamics features a #cosmology of its own predicting the #heat_death_of_the_universe: Any transformation of energy — whether in nature or in human society — is moving the universe closer towards a final state of inert physical uniformity and #maximum_entropy. According to this cosmological perspective, all of man's economic activities are only speeding up the general march against a future planetary heat death locally on earth, Georgescu submits. This view on the economy was later termed '#entropy_pessimism'. Some of Georgescu's followers and interpreters have elaborated on this view.

💡 Complexity is not just a measure of how intricate, or sophisticated, something is. It defines the topology of information flow and of the processes which make Nature work!

🔗 https://resiliencepost.com/2018/01/16/on-the-extraordinary-importance-of-complexity/amp

#Complexity #Entropy #Energy #DNA #Nature

🎞 Streaming now from SFI: External Professor Amos Golan of Americanunivers on "#Information and Model Misspecification: Classical #Statistics vs. Info-Metrics"

https://t.co/XL340hSKKa

#entropy #likelihood #infometrics #inference #powerlaw

“What are you thinking?” “#Entropy” “Entropy?” “Yeah, entropy.
Boris explained it. It’s why you can’t get the toothpaste back in the tube.”

Whatever works by Woody Allen