Yes, I know 'Nobel season' is over, the articles (and blog posts, including a couple here) that it regularly generates have been written and for the most part forgotten, though they might be taken out of drawers again next October when related cogitations come into play. But I want to revisit the institution of the Nobel Prize for a second, in the process harkening back to 1977. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry that year went to Ilya Prigogine "for his contributions to non-equilibrium thernodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures." The fascinating thing is, not only that Prigogine's contribution was fallacious, but that it was known to be such (by researchers on the cutting edge of chemistry, if not to the members of the Nobel committee) before the prize was awarded. What is non-equilibrium thermodynamics? Well, let's take that mouthful apart. Thermodynamics is the study of heat and its relationship to matter. In chemistry (as distinct...
Posts
I tried to describe the 'big picture' of Smolin's book in yesterday's post. Today I'll write about a detail -- a point hidden in the end note, the lengthy note 10 for the chapter 16. Smolin discusses the different "arrows of time" and the question whether they can all be reduced to one. Is time's directionality one fact, or several? He seems to think it is several distinct facts. There is a cosmological arrow, a thermodynamic arrow, a biological arrow, an experiential arrow, and an electromagnetic arrow. In principle, we could perhaps reduce the biological and experiential flow of time to thermodynamics, though Smolin sounds dubious even about this. "We remember the past and not the future because memory is a form of organization, and organization decreases in the future -- or so it is claimed." Similarly, as to biology, "we age, it is claimed, because disorder accumulates in our cells." But where he steps in with something ...
This came up in the climate-change discussion group I've mentioned before. One participant in a heated exchange, seeking to boost his own scientific cred, challenged the other to explain the Stefan-Boltzmann Law. The second fellow refused to participate in that discussion, saying, "I suspect you copied the question from elsewhere, and would be unable to actually converse on the topic ... are you real or are you Memorex?" That last reference tells me something about his age, at least. Anyway, now I'm curious, so I do a little research. The S-B Law describes the radiation from a black body as directly proportional to the fourth power of that black body's thermodynamic temperature. Huh? A "black body" is an ideal state, somewhat akin to those "frictionless surfaces" you encounter in "Intro to Physics" courses. But you don't get to this ideal state until you get to "Intro to Thermodynamics." A black body is one ...