02 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Entropy in our Everyday Lives: Active Stability
Because things naturally move to disorder over time, we can position ourselves to create stability. There are two types of stability: active and passive. Consider a ship, which, if designed well, should be able to sail through a storm without intervention. This is passive stability. A fighter jet, in contrast, requires active stability. The plane can’t fly for more than a few seconds without having to adjust its wings. This adjustment happens so fast that it’s controlled by software. Ther... 1 
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notes24 DEC 2016 by ideonexus
Unlike Physics, Biology Can't Ignore Information
Physicists love to think about systems that take only a little information to describe. So when they get a system that takes a lot of information to describe, they use a trick called 'statistical mechanics', where you try to ignore most of this information and focus on a few especially important variables. For example, if you hand a physicist a box of gas, they'll try to avoid thinking about the state of each atom, and instead focus on a few macroscopic quantities like the volume and total en... 1 notes
notes23 JAN 2014 by ideonexus
Life Emerges from the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Every species of living thing can make a copy of itself by exchanging energy and matter with its surroundings. One feature common to all such examples of spontaneous “self-replication” is their statistical irreversibility: clearly, it is much more likely that one bacterium should turn into two than that two should somehow spontaneously revert back into one. From the standpoint of physics, this observation contains an intriguing hint of how the properties of self-replicators must be constr...Folksonomies: life thermodynamics
Folksonomies: life thermodynamics
1 Hypothesis that life is the result of needing to dissipate energy that builds up.
23 APR 2013 by ideonexus
Entropy as a Purpose in Life
To the best of our knowledge, these tool use puzzle and
social cooperation puzzle results represent the rst successful completion of such standard animal cognition tests using
only a simple physical process. The remarkable spontaneous emergence of these sophisticated behaviors from such a
simple physical process suggests that causal entropic forces
might be used as the basis for a general—and potentially
universal—thermodynamic model for adaptive behavior.
Namely, adaptive behavior might ... 1 notes
notesResearchers have created an AI that self-directs itself into activities like balancing a ball on a stick or buying stocks low and selling high by simply programming it with the desire to maximize the "future histories" available to it (ie. if the ball drops or the AI runs out of money, then the possible futures are reduced to one in the simulation). This suggests a thermodynamic relationship between intelligence and disorder; that we might seek to maximize the entropy in our lives by staying alive, making money, getting educated, or otherwise increase the number of future histories available to us.
