Guerin -
Very well stated....
However, considering the source, it is very much more likely:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy
Don't (ever) forget that "newage rhymes with sewage".
The ever-recurring "zero-point energy" scam that people
fool themselves with at least as often as perpetual motion
devices. Or better yet, contrive perpetual motion devices
which aspire to tap said "zero-point energy"
In my apprehension, Zero-Point energy is nearly useless
and therefore mostly boring except for the related Casimir
effect which will likely play an important role in practical
nanomachinery which does not necessarily exclude
biology.
In fact, is would surprise me if there were no significant
nanoscale effects in biology. I don't track closely enough
to have examples or counter-examples. It seems at least
likely that the Van der Waals force is significant to biological
processes. (shit, before I could hit "send" my parallel
research discovered that Gecko glass-climbing is
attributable to Van der Waals)
It reminds me of the time I was at a party in Santa Fe and
had someone ask me if I used "ESP" in my work. I told
them that "absolutely, I use it all of the time!" Of course
it took at least 15 minutes of mutual misunderstanding
before I realized they were talking about "extra-sensory-perception"
and I was talking about "easy structured programming"
(a lab developed visual programming language
pre-processor for Fortran which used ... if you can imagine...
ascii-art diagrams of block-programs to design and
self-document and make modular Fortran IV code!
It parsed Whiles and Untils (comparison done at the
end of the loop instead of the beginning) into if/then/goto
structures similar to RatFor.
I found some line-printer output from my ESP
coding days while cleaning out my files... I should like
offer it to some museum maybe... too bad I threw
away my MANIAC manuals 3 moves ago!
Damn... I'm old.
- Steve
- Smith
On Dec 26, 2007, at 5:47 PM, Stephen Guerin wrote:
> Free energy is the amount of energy in a system that is available to
> do work. A
> room with all its air molecules equally distributed will have energy
> but no free
> energy. If you put a heater in one corner of the room and a cooler
> in an
> opposite corner, this second system would have free energy and a
> device could be
> introduced to extract work from it.
>
> How living systems identify sources of free energy and construct
> devices to use
> it is a central question in complex systems research (or should be
> more). Both
> Boltzmann and Shrodinger suggested living systems struggle not for
> energy but
> for free energy.
>
> Here's a recent working paper abstract from Eric and Harold Morowitz:
>
> Harold Morowitz and Eric Smith have a very approachable working
> paper on Origin
> of Life:
> http://www.santafe.edu/research/publications/wpabstract/200608029
>
> ABSTRACT: Life is universally understood to require a source of free
> energy and
> mechanisms with which to harness it. Remarkably, the converse may
> also be true:
> the continuous generation of sources of free energy by abiotic
> processes may
> have forced life into existence as a means to alleviate the buildup
> of free
> energy stresses. This assertion -- for which there is precedent in
> non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and growing empirical evidence
> from
> chemistry -- would imply that life had to emerge on the earth, that
> at least the
> early steps would occur in the same way on any similar planet, and
> that we
> should be able to predict many of these steps from first principles
> of chemistry
> and physics together with an accurate understanding of geochemical
> conditions on
> the early earth. A deterministic emergence of life would reflect an
> essential
> continuity between physics, chemistry, and biology. It would show
> that a part of
> the order we recognize as living is thermodynamic order inherent in
> the
> geosphere, and that some aspects of Darwinian selection are
> expressions of the
> likely simpler statistical mechanics of physical and chemical self-
> organization.
>
> -S
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> Sent: Wednesday, December 26, 2007 3:48 PM
>> To: [email protected]
>> Subject: [FRIAM] "free energy"
>>
>> At a Christmas eve party here in Santa Fe (the city very
>> different) , a number of new age or whatever folks were
>> talking about "free energy" which they claimed was a
>> scientific reality. Being somewhat of a sceptic and cynic, I
>> cried out a Dickens' humbug. But thought I would toss this
>> out to the FRIAM list to see if anyone knew anything about
>> so-called "free energy". cheers Paul
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
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