Dan said: > ROTFLMAO. That's so similar to my reaction its spooky. :-)
I thought that too. > I agree, thermodynamics is neat stuff. In my experience most people don't pay much attention to thermodynamics lectures because they're much more interested in quantum mechanics and relativity, and it only dawns on them later that it's very a very general and powerful theory. > Did you read Penrose's 40 page explanation on thermo and life on > earth in "The Emperor's New Mind"? Yes, but not since I was in high school and most of it has faded in the intervening eleven. I'd read it again if I hadn't let a friend borrow my copy and never got it back. Recently I was thinking about the analogue of that flow of energy steadily increasing in energy in the case of artificial life (I was laying on the banks of the Cam looking at a tree and then suddenly wondered what the tree-analogue in an information ecology would be). I couldn't figure out what the equivalent quantity was, or even if there was one. My best guess was that it was CPU time, and that there would be low-level organisms that had access to the "low entropy" CPU time, but higher-level ones would see fewer effective clock cycles because their runtime environments would consume so many. I don't have a book on thermodynamics (the nearest is Feynman's lectures on _Statistical Mechanics_, but that starts with density matrices and path integrals and works from there). There's an interesting section on the mathematics of the theory in Frankel's excellent _The Geometry of Physics_ but I could do with a proper introduction to thermal and statistical physics, preferably one with lots of physical insight. Does anyone have any recommendations? Rich, who knows the subject line is only approximate but who couldn't resist.
