There is a nice historical book
Helge Kragh, Entropic Creation: Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and
Cosmology, 2008
where the author discusses the heat death debates in 1850-1920. Peirce
is mentioned there and a quote from the book is below.
p. 187-188 "In 1891 he [Peirce] described his hypothesis as follows:
'The state of things in the infinite past is chaos ... the nothingness
of which consists in the total absence of regularity. The state of
things in the infinite future is death, the nothingness of which
consists in the complete triumph of law and absence of all spontaneity.
Between these, we have on our side a state of things in which there is
some absolute spontaneity counter to all law, and some degree of
conformity to law, ...'
This picture, starting from chaos and ending in an ordered and
symmetrical system, turns the ordinary interpretation of the second law
on its head. Some years earlier, in a 1884 lecture on 'Design and
Chance', he declared that the heat death - in which 'there shall be no
force but heat and the temperature everywhere the same' - was
unavoidable. Confusingly, the next year he rejected the global heat
death scenario, retracting to a position similar to that of many other
evolutionary progressivists of the Victorian era: 'But, on the other
hand, we may take it as certain that other intellectual races exist on
other planets, - if not of our solar system, then of others; and also
that innumerable new intellectual races have yet to be developed; so
that on the whole, it may be regarded as most certain that intellectual
life in the universe will never finally cease.' Perhaps he thought, such
as he said in his 'Design and Chance', that the living universe would be
saved by what he called 'chance', an influence he considered to be
opposite to dissipative forces, of what some later authors referred to
as 'entropy'."
Evgenii
--
http://blog.rudnyi.ru
On 27.06.2014 17:15 Stephen C. Rose said the following:
How fixed is the scientific argument for this law? Certainly in this
century there have been some who have chipped away at the idea of
entropy as a fixed star in an otherwise fallible (subject to
revision) scientific universe. And I am unaware of where Peirce stood
on this matter. Were his notions of continuity and logic uneasy in
the shadow of the assertion that everything falls apart?
*@stephencrose <https://twitter.com/stephencrose>*
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