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Entropy 2007, 9

The Natural Philosophy of Work

Entropy is arguably the most

pervasively important physical

concept in our Western culture [1].

Introduction:

Entropy is arguably the most pervasively important physical concept in our Western culture [1].

The Second Law of thermodynamics conceives a universal disorder attractor governing our world to the effect that the world tends towards ever more probable configurations of its substance. Formally, this requires the plausible supposition that our universe is an isolated system. The effect on us of this universal tendency is that we cannot ‘have it all’ because our ‘having it’ generates a degree of greater improbability in local energy distributions. This limitation comes about because we go about getting what we want, and we even experience wanting, only by mobilizing energy gradients, which degrade and partially dissipate as a result. By ‘dissipation’ of an energy gradient I mean its degradation all the way to completely degraded energy — heat energy, or entropy. Gradient degradation involves some dissipation directly as well promoting further dissipation by exposing waste products to further dissipative forces. Energy gradients are orderly alignments of ‘free’ energy, potentially ‘available’ to be tapped for work. ‘Order’ in this sense, and ‘availability’, means ‘arranged so as to be consumable’, and this necessarily reflects the properties of consumers as much as those of an energy gradient, since these must in some way, and to some degree, match. And so energy gradient order, being improbable, is not only unlikely to be spontaneously achieved, but is also implicitly subjective, as well as semiotic (i.e., meaningful to potential consumers).

This paper concerns the consumption of thermodynamic order, or available (free) energy. Plants consume solar energy, we consume fresh organic matter, engines consume fossil organic matter. Sunlight is in this sense not ‘available’ to us, or to our engines [2]. With entropy being defined as disorder [e.g., 3], energy gradients that cannot be consumed might as well be viewed as entropic with respect to excluded consumers. So, from the point of view of our physiology, sunlight and fossil organic matter are virtually disordered because we cannot mobilize them directly as sources of assimilable energy (even though they do contain measurable free energy). The ultimate form of nonconsumable energy for any consumer whatever has been conceived in physics as ‘heat energy’ — entropy. This is energy that has been so thoroughly disordered that no gradients are sustained within it long enough for any consumer to mobilize them [4]. Energy gradients might form spontaneously within a volume of heat energy by way of fluctuations, but these will be randomly oriented with respect to any intents and purposes , and so unable to be harnessed to action at any scale larger than Planck scale. Such gradients would be ‘randomized’ with respect to the possibility of accomplishing work. As well, they dissipate spontaneously before they can be harnessed to (what we at our scale would reckon to be) work. Work [e.g., 5] is activity mediating a change from one form of energy to others of lesser amount, but more orderly than heat energy, some of which would be ‘useful’ to the working system. Useful work, however, is always accompanied by the production of heat energy / entropy as well. Available (free) energy degrades into exergy (used in work) plus the energy eventually dissipated into entropy.

References and Notes:

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Biological Sciences, Binghamton University, New York, USA

Full Paper: The Natural Philosophy of Work

Entropy 2007, 9, 83-99 (PDF format 140 K)

Entropy, an International and Interdisciplinary Journal of Entropy and Information Studies.

ISSN 1099-4300, CODEN: ENTRFG, by MDPI. It is a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and it is published online quarterly at http://www.mdpi.org/entropy/.