Editor:
I would like to respond to Barry Evans’ Field Notes headlined “Mirror Universes” (Oct. 24) in which he states that, “You’re more disordered than you were yesterday …”
While this may be true in our personal lives as far as biology is concerned, we remain highly ordered day after day. Even though cells are continually dying, in living things the cells never move towards chaos, but instead are deconstructed. Their components are either broken down and recycled or turned into waste products that are then eliminated. All of these processes are highly ordered. When living things eventually die, they are deconstructed by other living organisms such as fungi and bacteria.
This process has been on going for the last 3.4 billion years on the earth. When it comes to living systems, the universe is not tending toward chaos at all but, rather, it is highly ordered and organized. This is something that physics simply does not get.
Charles Davy, Bayside
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This article appears in Spreading the gospel of good fire.
Charles Davy writes, “…the universe is not tending toward chaos at all, but rather is highly ordered and organized.”
The Second Law of Thermodynamics (about as much of an actual “law” as we’ll ever get) says otherwise; the cosmos is moving inexorably from a highly-ordered (low entropy) state to one of high entropy, what has been called “heat death” of the universe. Fortunately for us, we’re able to temporarily maintain our local order thanks to that big ball of low entropy in the sky responsible for photosynthesis. When the sun goes out, any local order goes with it.
My two-part column on entropy (9/20/18 and 9/27/18) explains this is more detail.
One thing human history has proven is that we get science “half-right” at best. Every two or three hundred years we look back in awe at our extraordinary ignorance.
The most we can hope for is to stop doing things we know to be damaging to posterity…a consideration in the U.S. Constitution Preamble.
The greatest, (enduring) scientific and medical discoveries in the last 300 years were made by individuals in their 20’s without any academic background in those fields.
Thus, it makes for great fun and profit that all may participate in, even Mr. Evans.