Guy Hoelzer  wrote or quoted:
> in article clc03g$24sv$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org, Tim Tyler at tim{at}tt1lock.org
> > Guy Hoelzer  wrote or quoted:
> >> in article cl65so$b0p$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org, Catherine Woodgold at

> >>> If you mean "maximizing, under the constraint of
> >>> following all the other physical laws" -- is that really
> >>> any different from just plain "following all the other
> >>> physical laws"?  What exactly is your claim?
> >> 
> >> My claim is that this IS a physical law.  There is an ongoing
debate about
> >> whether this claim constitutes a fourth law of
thermodynamics, or whether it
> >> can be accommodated by a minor modification of the way we
articulate the
> >> second law.  I am in favor of the latter.
> > 
> > Several points here:
> > 
> > I wouldn't even describe the second law of thermodynamics as a physical
> > law.  It's not a "law" - since it permits exceptions
> 
> Our traditional understanding of a static 2nd law explicitly applies to to
> closed systems, and there are no exceptions permitted or observed, AFAIK.

Violations of the second law are commonplace on small scales - e.g. see:

``One of the most important principles of physics, that disorder, or 
  entropy, always increases, has been shown to be untrue. 

  This result has profound consequences for any chemical or physical 
  process that occurs over short times and in small regions 
 
  Scientists at the Australian National University (ANU) have carried out 
  an experiment involving lasers and microscopic beads that disobeys the 
  so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics [...]''

> So I do see it as a universal and physical law, albeit one that 
> appropriately leads to statistical sorts of models. [...]

It's no more a physical law than evolution is.  Evolution and
the second law are *consquences* of the physical laws (and the
initial conditions) - but they are not themselevs necessary to
explain what happens in the world.  I.e. The physicist's "theory
of everything" would make no mention of either concept.

> > Care to say what you have in mind for a modification of the second law?
> 
> I think that I've posted this before on sbe.  I would offer the following
> conjecture as a universal physical law:  "Thermodynamics causes an
> exploration of paths (e.g., mechanisms, processes) affecting the rate of
> entropy gain within closes systems (I suspect that the whole universe is the
> only truly closed system), and favors those that maximize this rate."
> Favoring these paths is equivalent to the structure of the universe taking
> the path of least resistance as it "falls" toward higher
entropy levels.

In some respects, that seems weaker than the second law - in that it
doesn't explicitly say that entropy can't decrease.

I agree with the spirit of this sort of idea - though as we've
discussed, I have some issues about whether such maximisation
will necessarily happen in the short term - since organisms
can act to conserve resources in the short term under some
circumstances - as a squirrel burying a nut demonstrates.
-- 
__________
 |im |yler  http://timtyler.org/  tim{at}tt1lock.org  Remove lock to reply.
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