[tt] [NSG] Meeting Announcement 9/4

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Fred Hapgood <hapgood at pobox.com> -----

From: Fred Hapgood <hapgood at pobox.com>
Date: Mon, 03 Sep 2007 13:05:54 -0400
To: nsg at marshome.org
Subject: [NSG] Meeting Announcement 9/4
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Reply-To: Nanotechnology Study Group <nsg at marshome.org>



Meeting notice: The 070904 meeting will be held at 7:30 P.M. at the
Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of
Main St. and Mass Ave.  If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the
manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below.

Suggested topic:  Evolution and the Second Law

Entropy as I, perhaps incorrectly, understand it, can be talked about in
two ways: in terms of thermodynamic gradients and the probabilities of
states.  These are supposed to track each other, and it is easy to see
that going up a thermodynamic gradient translates directly into a
decrease in state probability -- a thermonuclear reactor is a lot less
probable than a gallon of gas, which itself is less probable than a
stick of wood.

It is less clear that this transformation works the other way -- that
the lower the probability of some state the more energy you can extract
from it. The case of information is especially rich in apparent counter
examples.  You get no more caloric energy out of a pizza with a picture
of the Virgin Mary on it than an ordinary pizza. An origami expert might
spend a year planning and executing a one-of-the-kind masterpiece, but
it will oxidize the same as any blank, unprocessed, sheet of paper. (The
folds might give off energy as they relax, but the number of folds has
very little relation to how rare a given origami design might be.) The
brain of the expert will give off as much energy during decay as will
mine, who knows nothing about the art.

Whatever, it is interesting to note that life everywhere trades
increases in thermodynamic entropy for decreases in state probability
entropy. Evolution accelerates this conversion, and technology
accelerates it even faster.  The overall effect of the evolution of all
life, including technologically-oriented species like us, is to increase
the spectrum of state probabilities in the universe: to generate ever
higher forms of order over here at the cost of reducing order faster
than would be the case if life (or technology) had never evolved (been
invented) over there.

Certainly everything we ourselves do is about increasing order, directly
or indirectly.  Arguments over which acts to take can often be seen as
disagreements over which act will create more order, with it taken for
granted that making order, lowering state probability, is always the
right thing to do.  Wars fall into this category: they create enormous
amounts of disorder, but the each side believes that it is fighting for
the lowest probability state.

Nanotechnology is clearly part of this process.





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In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the
moon.

                                -- Jules Verne, 1865

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Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.

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Legend:

"NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group.  The Group meets on the
first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which
refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little
else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a
sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg'  to
majordomo at polymathy.org.  Unsubs follow the same model.

Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to:
nsg at pobox.com. www.pobox.com/~fhapgood   www.pobox.com/~fhapgood



www.pobox.com/~fhapgood
www.BostonScienceAndEngineeringLectures.com

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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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