I once mentioned this notion of entropy to a friend on a walk. These walks frequently become philosophical voyages and intellectual quests. I asked him "What is the energy content of an idea?" I used the example of the energy yield directly related to the harnessing of the power of the atom by man. Before that idea existed, the explosions couldn't take place and after it existed, there was a release of energy (really a rather large at that) almost solely as a result of the burning of glucose in the brains of the scientists in the Manhattan Project. There was clearly the chemical energy involved by the mining and concentration of the U235, and chemical energy of the implosion, but I argued that the energy calculation had not been correctly been balanced and that E=mc^2 alone (and those of the thermal equations for the other activities) wasn't allocating this balance of energy correctly. Some activation energy had been provided, but we had no idea how to calculate this energy content or the true barrier energy to a spontaneous fission reaction. He agreed and suggested that thought is catalytic (somehow, mechanism and definition undefined) and worked to reduce energy barriers through a kind of tunneling. I'm still pondering this and don't have a definitive argument for or rebuttal against this. If there is both an information and a thermal entropy as the article suggests, then what rules apply to both?
In my current belief, and it is a belief or a hunch, I suspect that life and life-like processes work by playing one type of entropy against another using phase shifts, much like the swing of a pendulum exchanges momentum for gravmetric potential energy and vice versa. As I mentioned about the snowflakes, they do form order, but order with a smaller set of defining parameters. If the snowflakes assembled into snowmen of varying kinds, they would be acting in a way that increased, rather than decreased the available states and defining parameters. A snowman's arm is fractally more complicated that the arm of a snowflake crystal. |
