On Aug 24, 2013, at 7:42 AM, Julio Huato wrote:


...the universe is defined as a closed system. In fact, it is the only true closed system in physics. It excludes God...

Unfortunately, neither ancient nor modern physics defines the universe as a closed (limited in time and space) system. Orthodox modern physics defines the universe as originating in a "big bang." Even that plurality of physicists unwilling to embrace a Big Banger have to wrack their brains to come up with some origin for that event (they look for a "singularity," for "strings," for multiple "dimensions," or for a "multiverse"), and however nonsensical all such speculations are they all have to postulate something "outside" the universe to account for its very existence. So modern physics is talking about an open universe. Ancient physics, and heterodox modern physics, looks explicitly at an open universe, limitless ("infinite") in space and time. Plato's Timaios talks poetically of the universe as the *partial* ordering of a "matrix," a "receptacle for becoming." The statement by Herakleitos that I like to use as a signature tag ("This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures") is a virtually explicit statement of heterodox modern physics's universe--energetic plasma permeated by currents of cosmic electricity that sometimes concentrate it into stars, planets, molecules, atoms, etc., sometimes explodes those material concentrations back into plasma and radiant energy.

Practical, as opposed to theoretical, physics and economics deal with partially closed systems--systems, with their own internal dynamical laws, that are always subject to modification from external sources of energy.


Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64





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