It became such a treat that googling ‘How efficient is
Nature?’ I stumbled on Dave Week’s Frogtails Y1995 [1] article answering the
same question. And he hit the target on its head, as my heart momentarily
stopped. His answer was:
“Perhaps
nature has the view that with unlimited resources and time it doesn't really
matter whether or not the most efficient systems are in place. It only matters
that they work once in a while. Even then (remember the dinosaurs), if things
do not continue to work as intended, so what!”
I called this
Week’s Dictum. And, it dawns on me that Nature has no definition of efficiency
[2] and the Laws of Thermodynamics affirm this dictum; Nature’s supply of mass and
energy are constant, as guaranteed by the Zeroth and the First Laws. And in
cases that these Laws were compromised or momentarily suspended by Nature’s own
complexity, the Second Law or Entropy guarantees that with time, these laws
would be restored.
However,
there is an interesting mystery of how Entropy works; though it would restores constancy
of mass and energy, it would not guarantee that final forms of matter
would be the same. This is Nature’s trump card: Entropy restores constancy of energy
and mass, and, yet creates diversity in the final product. Hence, Entropy is Nature’s creative force by creating new possibilities as different forms of
matter through dispersion [3] of mass and energy !
This idea is completely un-palatable and counter-intuitive
to most scientists, engineers, and, economists. Man always design and create
systems that are efficient. One reason is scarcity of materials and energy
supply. But there is insidiously wrong to seek more efficient systems:
Say we have a big man-made heterogeneous system that
consists of different types of sub-systems. These sub-systems do not necessary
work for or work against each other. But all of them use energy and portion of
available materials from Nature. As a particular sub-system becomes more
efficient, than the rest, it seeks control to ensure exclusive supply of materials,
to perpetuate its existence. With time, this efficient machine will eventually dominate
all the sub-systems, and lead to singular-uniform or homogeneous system.
But this efficient system, man-made homogeneous system, is
just a sub-set of Nature’s bigger system. On a bigger scheme of things, man’s
system is always smaller than Nature’s. The crisis is Nature’s system is
totally different to Man’s. Nature’s way is to create possibilities by dispersing
mass and energy, and maintaining balance. While Man’s is concentration to
ensure only one possibility: his own. Man’s system, needless to say, results to
in-equality.
Such system is systemic to man-made system. And will always
fail. Entropy assures that this will fail. But Man is such a proud creature.
Always rationalizing his dominion to Nature, he defiled the definition of
Entropy as “degree of Dis-order”, pertaining to in-efficiency, rather defines
it as the creative force in Nature, guaranteeing diversity and equality.
Hence, Week’s dictum of Efficiency is so rightly tune to Nature.
Perhaps, it is Man’s folly not to un-ravel this lie and hide its true meaning.
But not in my case. The next blogs will be focused on the
evidences to destroy this lie.
Notes:
[1] See: http://www.frogtails.com/efficiency.html
[2] If one
thinks about it, if Nature is a creation of a Universal God, asserting nature’s
in-efficiency is religious blasphemy. For now, we will suspend alluding to
religion or political views. Technical discussion will be central in this article.
[3] See: http://entropysite.oxy.edu/.
Thermodynamic
Change in Entropy is NOT measure of Disorder. As of April 2014, 36 Science
textbooks have deleted "disorder" from their description of the
nature of entropy. “Entropy change is the measure of how more widely a specific
quantity of molecular energy is dispersed in a process, whether isothermal gas
expansion, gas or liquid mixing, reversible heating and phase change or
chemical reactions, as shown by the Gibbs free energy equation/T. Such movement
resulted from life-long advocacy of Dr. Frank L. Lambert, Professor Emeritus,
Chemistry, of Occidental College, after more than century of misinformation,
and, mis-use by writers, joking mathematicians, and, philosophers.
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