[crazygringo]

At least from the way it's presented in the article, I don't see how this makes any sense at all. Maybe someone else here can explain it better?

Because the idea the article presents is that if you have matter that is being bombarded with energy (e.g. electromagnetic radiation) and is in an environment where it can dissipate heat (like the ocean), that this leads to self-organization of that matter to more efficiently convert the energy to dissipated heat, and that this could explain the early evolution of life.

Key quote:

> "Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment. This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments,” England explained.

But there's zero explanation of why. It's not like the matter has some goal of dissipating the energy or becoming resonant in order to do so. It seems far more likely that the matter just absorbs or reflects or transmits the energy, and that it heats up to the extent that it absorbs it (and maybe melts a bit or something, e.g. becomes even less structured). But I don't understand what principle would lead the matter to become "resonant" or structure itself to "more efficiently" absorb and dissipate the energy. Clumps of atoms don't care, do they?

It's like the article is relying on some new physical principle of "desire to dissipate energy efficiently" in non-living matter but without naming or justifying it. Can someone else point out what that principle might be, or if there is one at all? I've gone through all the links in previous submissions and can't find any mention of it. Or am I misunderstanding or missing something here?

[DigitalNoumena]

How I understand it:

Entropy (according to Boltzmann) is proportional to the number of microstates that can give rise to a particular macrostate of a system. The macrostate with the highest number of possible microstates is the uniform one, where all the accessible microstates are equally likely. So if by the 2nd law entropy must increase, the system will tend towards the uniform configuration.

In other words, if a force is pushing water, the configuration with the highest number of states is that where all the particles of water are also moving i.e. indistinguishable microstates, doesn't matter how you rearrange the moleculles, it will look the same as they are all moving uniformly. It would be extremely unlikely that there were a pocket of water that is mysteriously still in the middle of the stream no? Clearly there are not a lot of rearrangements of the mollecules that will keep the macrostate the same, so low entropy, which tends not to be the case.

(Edit) How this connects to the "desire to dissipate energy efficiently":

Essentially, when we talk about "energy" we really mean "free energy". This is the amount of work that we can extract from a system. This is nothing but a measure of how far a current system is to it's maximum entropy state. So dissipating energy = increasing entropy.

The mindblowing part for me is the connection that the process of extracting free energy is the same process that moves a system to its most likely state, uniformity, high entropy. So somehow, the ability to _accelerate_ an already inevitable process lets us reconfigure other systems _away_ from their most likely state!! So if we imagine the arrow of time to progress at the average rate of entropic decay, we are essentially reversing it for some systems by accelerating it for others!!!

Man...

[crazygringo]

Thanks for writing all that. The key part seems to be:

> So somehow, the ability to _accelerate_ an already inevitable process lets us reconfigure other systems _away_ from their most likely state

But this is exactly the part that doesn't make sense to me. Why would it accelerate? There's no principle I'm aware of that would prefer or cause this accelerated version. There's no such "ability".

Rather, the entropy process just happens in this "already inevitable" way you describe, without any self-organizing "resonant" structures or anything or the sort. I don't understand what would cause anything different.

It's kind of like saying boulders eventually roll downhill, so therefore hills spontaneously turn their rocky surfaces into smooth slides so the boulders can roll down faster. But that's not how it works.

[DigitalNoumena]

Ah I see, sorry to not address that - got carried away on entropic musings. It seems that is not an assumption he’s making, but it’s what he’s proven:

> when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (…) and surrounded by a heat bath (…), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy.

To be honest I cannot go any deeper without reading the paper.

[bmitc]

> It's not like the matter has some goal of dissipating the energy

Doesn't it, though? Everything is thought to be tending towards higher entropy, and the dissipation of heat helps accomplish that.

[crazygringo]

No, because that higher entropy is developing regardless. The energy will eventually hit and heat up something, and who cares where it does?

There's no reason I can see why atoms would spontaneously rearrange to try to help that along in their local spot. It's not something that needs any help. Entropy increases, but there's no law that says it always increases as quickly as possible, as soon as possible. It just happens as physics describes it.

[bmitc]

Thanks for the clarification, as I see what you're arguing now. It increases but nothing says that it increases as effectively or efficiently as possible.

Is that part of what these new theories are arguing though, where they are claiming that the universe does behave that way? Or is it this game where under certain conditions, molecules begin to self-assemble and thus decrease the local entropy but then must do so in a way to account for that and increase the local entropy (implying efficient heat dissipation), hence life?