From: Brad McCormick, Ed.D. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>structural integrations of aspects of the world? Suppose
>someone found a bread mold that would cure AIDS --
>something which could be easily and cheaply produced,
>and which would cure all the AIDS victims. I would like
>to understand how this would result in a net *increase*
>in the entropy of the world.
All activity increases the entropy of the universe But that's not really
what concerns us. We are concerned with increasing "local" entropy. For
example, when we burn a 200-million-years-in-the-making barrel of oil, its
entropy increases -- order is gone -- and we can't recycle it except by
using more energy than we would recover.
Erwin Schrodinger described life as a system in steady-state thermodynamic
disequilibrium that maintains its constant distance from equilibrium (death)
by feeding on low entropy from its environment -- that is, by exchanging
high-entropy outputs for low-entropy inputs. In other words, we eat order
and poop disorder -- all living creatures do.
The same entropy statement would hold verbatim as a physical description of
our economic process. A corollary of this statement is that an organism
cannot live in a medium of its own waste products. (Daly and Townsend) I
just scanned a chapter of Schrodinger's book and archived it at
http://dieoff.com/page150.htm
Most importantly, the laws of thermodynamics place limits on growth.
Schrodinger's book was endorsed by Karl Popper and Scientific American. Ilya
Prigogine won a Nobel Prize for applying thermodynamics to open systems.
Jay
