This will be a glimpse at the journey of mankind, through the prism of one of the basic scientific concepts of our time: Entropy. This journey can be seen as a drama in three acts. The first two acts have already been played, while the third act is not yet fully written. Hence, it still depends on us as to what the close of the play will be: the drama may either end with the unreasonable self -sacrifice of the main actor (humanity), or this actor succeeds to find, in due course, a new and better form of living on our beloved Earth. In turn, the three acts are:
1. Classical knowledge about entropy : The Law of Entropy
In 1849, the French engineer Sadi Carnot formulated the first version of the famous second law of thermodynamics (the law of entropy). He observed steam-engines, the main mechanical power sources of that time, and discovered that only a fraction of heat energy can be converted into mechanical energy. The remainder is waste heat that can be used to warm our houses, but cannot be converted into any other useful form of energy.
During the decades which followed, many remarkable scientists like Clausius, Kelvin, Maxwell, Boltzmann, and others worked out the classical theory of entropy, of which the entropy law holds the central position. This law can be expressed in many different forms and it can be proved that all of them are equivalent. Several of these include:
- Every heat engine (like a steam engine for instance) must use resources and drains of heat at different temperatures. The maximum possible energy efficiency of the engine is proportional to this temperature difference. It is impossible to construct a heat engine which would work at only one ambient temperature. Heat cannot be extracted from the surroundings (e.g. from the ambient air or from the rivers) and converted into electrical or mechanical energy. Such a dream device (called the perpetual motion machine of the second kind or sometimes the Maxwell demon) would certainly solve all our energy problems, but to our best scientific knowledge, this is utterly impossible.
- There are many processes in Nature which can flow in one direction of time, but never in the opposite direction. These processes cannot be reversed in time (irreversible processes). Well-known examples are mixing of cold and hot water, or ink and water, or the damping of a ball movement due to friction, or the withering of a dry flower petal… Entropy can be defined as a degree of irreversibility. The heat can flow spontaneously from a place with higher temperature to a place with lower temperature, but never vice versa. Heat flow is an example of an irreversible process.
- Each system consisting of a great number of atoms can be described by a definite degree of internal order (assigned by negative entropy). This order is higher if there are greater differences between various parts of the system (differences in temperature, or in the macroscopic motion of particles, etc.). Mathematically, more ordered states are less probable, hence order spontaneously tends to disorder. In the opposite way, spontaneous generation of order out of chaos, is again utterly impossible. Our whole Universe will die when, after billions of years, all the points in it will reach the same equilibrium temperature.
In this sense, classical physics foretells a rather sombre scenario. In very principle, the stores of order in our whole Universe are limited, and this is even more true for our tiny planet Earth. If activity in one region is more intense, this certainly goes at the expense of the internal order of that region, and then this order is exhausted, at the expense of the neighbouring parts of the Universe.
Biological living beings (viruses, single-celled beings, plants, animals, people) are opened systems. This means that, through their biological evolution, they have invented ingenious mechanisms to nourish their internal order from the order of the environment. If life of all the living beings that inhabit our planet is too active, then the collective order of the planet may be exhausted very soon, and even the beneficial inflow of order from our beloved Sun (in the form of ordered energy in the Sun rays) can not help much here because it is too moderate for our crazy consumption.
These are simple scientific facts, but can be understood in various ways. Strictly speaking, these facts are pregnant with internal meaning and it is not easy to digest that message. Truly, for a long time (more than a century), people did not worry about hidden philosophical implications of the second law. This law seemed to be a threat only in principle, but not in everyday reality. Our Earth seemed to be so large and its riches far from danger to be worn out. There were so many new lands not yet discovered, so many visions of new hidden treasures, and the chances so great! Dream age of technology… Miracles like electricity, self-moving vehicles (cars), conveying of messages over great distances (telephone, radio, TV), thinking machines (computers) and so forth were constantly popping out, anew and anew. There seemed to be no limitations to human creativity.
Even the second law itself proved to be very useful. Today it is accepted as one of two basic laws that govern the behavior of Nature, together with the law of energy conservation. The whole delicate and beautiful structure of modern natural science is built around these two mighty pillars. Entropy law is a useful and powerful tool in so many practical problems and calculations, from the optimization of energy converters to the determination of impurity rate in crystals, from chemical reaction analysis to the determination of the best patterns for coded messages, from the study of complicate ecosystems to the comparative study of languages.
2. Internal contradictions : An unwillingness to accept the Law
Until recently, nobody really worried about the dark philosophical depths of the entropy law. Academically, yes, but in practice man closed his eyes and pretended not to see. The twenty years following the Second World War were still full of prosperity.
But then, in the sixties, a new awareness slowly began to creep upon us. It is difficult to say which one exactly was the first manifestation of that fundamental change. It was like a river which can be seen with our eyes appearing from time to time from underneath the pebbles before its actual source, but then it disappears again into darkness; until it finally, in its full power and glory, bursts into light.
The age of prosperity has come to a kind of saturation. Tired of objective quantities, young people turned to new spiritual qualities. This was the golden time of the hippie movement. Millions of young people listened to music and dreamed about a spiritually warm world without complicated economic and industrial systems. It was like a wave that washes a beach, turns many pebbles and can make many changes.
In the late sixties, the Club of Rome published something which sounded like a warning. There were curves, results of many detailed numerical simulations, which showed the future development of several important variables, for example;
- the number of people living on our planet
- the rate of industrial production
- the quantity of food produced
- reserves of natural resources (oil, coal, ores etc.)
- contamination of the earth
- exhaustion of the soil.
The curves showed an exponential continuation of the population growth and of the industrial production, but a growing crisis in all other areas. The world gradually comes to a state of saturation. Then, according to these calculations, something like a disaster should happen around the year 2015. Within a few years, the number of people falls to a fraction of the previous number, the industrial production disappears completely and food production is barely enough for the surviving part of humanity. As one can guess, the earth is terribly exhausted and polluted, remaining without many important natural resources.
The computers continued the calculations into a more distant future. Slowly, a new stability consolidates, but this time by a smaller and invariable number of people, and still without any industrial production! Is this maybe a restitution of the ancient forms of life-style?
There are possible objections to such a conclusion. The computer did not take into account the new knowledge that we can get through this very analysis, the new events during our decades, spanning over this critical time. Maybe we have enough time to change our habits and thus avoid the disaster.
Certainly, there are enormous changes on the global scale, a growing new ecological awareness. All those who consider themselves important speak about ecology: making use of it, politicians attract electors, producers attract customers. It is almost like the ideology of our time. But does this awareness really work? For instance, how do the conclusions of the Rio de Janeiro World Conference on ecology (1992) reflect themselves in our present everyday life? Did we cease to cut down the rainforests, the lungs of our planet? Without them, we cannot live. Did we begin to replace gasoline cars by much less consuming hybrid electric cars? If not, we are in danger to suffocate ourselves in our cities. Did we do enough so that the interests of capital do not cover all our natural environment with concrete and asphalt? Without green nature, we shall slowly loose our sanity. And so on.
A great deal of hypocrisy is also evident. In economy, the Third World is striving hard to emulate the developed countries, often copying very problematic production processes – exactly those which, thirty years ago when nobody yet spoke about ecology, helped the rich world to fortify its sovereignty. Now it is a different time, but nobody offers the Third World a different possibility. Ecology may become a means to maintain the superiority of the rich over the poor.
Wars are devastating many regions, and there is a war between different visions for our survival. Things are far from being clear, we must work hard to find appropriate solutions in time.
Amidst this mess, this overflow of ideas, can we listen to the entropy law ? Hardly. But the law is still there and raises serious restrictions. If we are quite sincere, there are only three possible ways out of the present dilemma :
- We shall not obey the Law, but shall continue to expand the production and profits, waiting for a miracle. But this miracle will not come. Accordingly, a catastrophe on the global scale will follow (comparative to the one in the Club of Rome scenario).
- We shall return to the style of life from the preindustrial age, with very moderate production. But this is the least likely possibility, because human pride is so strong that man would accept drastic discipline that the Law imposes on our life-style and consumption, only after the beginning of a total collapse.
- We shall continue to profit from science and technology, but in a very different sense. In time, totally new ways of production processes and activities will be discovered, ways which do not increase the total entropy of our planet. If this is combined with the rules that regulate sustainable societies (e.g. choosing very carefully those products which are really necessary, or making intelligent use of waste materials), a global collapse may be avoidable. Our pride will admit this change, because even much more knowledge, greater technological perfection, and spiritual maturity will be needed to make such a change possible.
Every reader will agree, that of the three possibilities stated above, the first one is not really a solution to our problems. And the second possibility is very unlikely to happen, because it is against one of the basic rules of the human history; the same path can never be trodden twice. Even if there is an attempt to do so, there are obviously different initial conditions and they obviously lead to different end results. We cannot pretend that nothing happened in the last few hundred years, we cannot hide all that we have learned during that time. We are conditioned also by our recent past and so we must learn ourselves to live with it or digest it in the best way we can. Only the third possibility takes these new initial conditions into account. Maybe this is the only possible solution which is equally optimistic and realistic. At least, it is difficult to find some other good substitute.
We are going to have a closer look at this possible way. Our approach will be very unusual – through modern biology. Entropy law will be revisited.
3. The subtle reality: The symphony of life
What occurs in Nature is far from the rigid formulation of the second law. It seems that through this law a physicist fanatically struggles to see everything in the Universe as mere dead objects. The entropy law was modeled on such things like steam engines, inorganic chemical mixtures, or diffusion of electrons from one kind of metal to another, but never on subtle phenomena like the germination of a flower, cell division or the metamorphosis from a caterpillar into a butterfly.
A hundred years ago, scientists even did not dispose of adequate tools to correctly observe these subtle phenomena. Methods like scanning electron microscopy or computer modeling were developed only recently. Now we are much more able to closely admire incredible wonders that are taking place all around us, in every living organism.
At first glance, it seems that biological phenomena oppose the second law. Self-growing structures tend to self-organization with growing inherent order. But a conventional physicist would say that this order goes on account of the order from the environment (we have already mentioned that living beings are opened systems), especially the highly ordered electromagnetic radiation from the Sun, visible light.
This is partially true. However, many recent discoveries leave us in doubt. Molecular biology, in particular quantum biology, and such new fields as cognitive science, furnish us with pictures of tremendously minute molecular systems which display quite intelligent ways of functioning. The entropy law begins at the level of quantum particles, but these very particles are perhaps too clever to obey the law which deals only with dead bodies.
A hundred years ago, there seemed to be a gap between atoms and intelligent matter. Intelligence was assigned to beings much greater in scale than single atoms or molecules. But now we know more about this. We are even designing a silicon basis for artificial intelligence. The computing elements in modern chips are smaller than one micrometer, and we are already speaking about nanotechnology. The scale has also diminished in biology. Using such delicate techniques like SEM (scanning electron microscopy) or even STM and EFM (scanning tunneling microscopy, electron force microscopy) we can see not only the smallest living beings, crystals of life called viruses, but even single biomolecules. And everywhere we can admire the incredible complexity of self-organization, intelligent functioning, even at the scale of less than 100 nanometers.
From the other side, another half of the gap is approaching. By means of modern computer modeling, we are already able to study quantum behavior of very large macromolecular systems, more than 10 nanometers. We are learning that these relatively large systems can be in a coherent quantum state. Quantum coherence is a notification of those large quantum states which are internally completely in tune. Here, this means that complex biomolecules can enter as a whole entity onto the level where entropy law begins to function.
Definitely, the gap is willing to close completely. The entropy law is not prepared to deal with intelligent beings, but we are starting to see that this is exactly what is happening in animate nature.
In modern technology, there are also tendencies to close this gap. Certain very large quantum systems are known as superconducting circuits. For a long time, these were merely exotic devices, functioning only at extremely low temperatures, by aid of costly liquid helium. But now we have new ceramic superconductors which can work at much higher, quite practical temperatures. Superconductive logic devices are being developed. A superconductive microprocessor will enclose a very great number of different superconductive circuits, interlaced together into a single functioning ensemble, with a high degree of internal order. This will be similar to ordering of biomolecules inside a virus, a complex ordered ensemble of tiny quantum logic elements.
In nearly all living cells, certain protein molecules assemble themselves together into tiny tubular structures, called microtubules. Besides many other functions, microtubular structures seem to play the role of the cellular nervous system. The regular pattern of discrete protein molecules at the tubular surface resembles a grid of logic elements within a nascent quantum chip, fabricated by tomorrow’s means of nanotechnology. Nanochips and microtubules, both share many similar abilities of quantum information processing.
The most recent theories about brain functioning also assume a certain kind of quantum coherence inside the living matter. The idea of quantum computing largely inspires many contemporary researchers, from biologists to formal theorists and on to computer engineers.
No one can predict exactly what all these newly discovered ordered quantum ensembles will reveal to us. Even very simple superconducting circuits, like the Josephson computing elements, yield quite unusual phenomena. If we go a step further, markedly ordered and complex quantum ensembles, like living organisms (or at least large parts of their organisms), manifest dynamical behavior that is significantly different from the phenomena analyzed by the old thermodynamics. H. Umezawa pointed out explicitly, that living matter decreases entropy and disorder, and increases order. Most simply, this fact ignores the second law! A. Szent-György long ago had already introduced the idea of syntropy (negative entropy, inherent tendency towards order) instead of the worn-out idea of entropy (tendency towards disorder). Life and consciousness of every living being can be based only upon the concept of syntropy.
Therefore we see that one may dare to challenge seriously the entropy law, investigate it anew in the fresh atmosphere of the most recent discoveries.
What does it all mean? Will this research lead to profound changes in our technology, our society and spiritual understanding of our own existence? For instance, shall we find a long-hidden form of life, which is pregnant with human dignity and yet does not increase the total entropy of our planet (possibility # 3 of the previous chapter)?
The answer to this question will surely be a matter of a vast and long debate. Personally, I believe that the answer is essentially yes. But I also believe that we obviously need enough time before we can give a mature answer to some basic questions on our future. Namely, new scientific discoveries and technological achievements are of no use if they are not accompanied by a deep human understanding of their meaning. And this takes time.
We need not be afraid that this deep evolutionary process may lack its own confirmatory signs. Such signs will always exist, especially in the form of modern ethics which could really work in the complex post-industrial societies.
This essay could point only to several basic features of the present great transformation. A vision of a different society was offered, with a different role of the second law – but which still remains to be one of the cardinal turning shafts in the transformation.
The first act of the play was like stumbling against the Law. There was a snake. Man was expelled from Paradise. In the second act, Adam and Eve were suffering in their hard labour down on the Earth. The more they were striving, the more they were embroiled into chaos and danger of a total collapse. What will the third act be? In which way should we reconcile with the Law ?
Expressed by the words of a contemporary musician Keith Jarrett, the answer sounds poetically :
“I now see that the dark can be looked at two ways : forbidding or enticing. I chose to be enticed and was finally allowed to turn on a light in there. Now the darkness is that much smaller and my faith is greater that what is found in the darkness is not destructive, but Creative.”
Truly, the snake may be a bearer of wisdom.
(December 1996)