Entropy and the Origin of Life

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, Entropy, states that the universe moves from order to disorder.  To the initiate, this would seem to contradict a common observation:  that life systems in general and humans in particular move from a disordered state to an ordered state.  Life seems to move in opposition to entropy.  If the universe moves towards disorder, how, then, does life evolve? These are questions that early researchers in thermodynamics, such as Schrödinger and Prigogine, asked themselves.

In fact, we can see order spontaneously created from disorder around us all the time.  When water starts to go down the drain in the tub, for example, you will see a little whirlpool (vortex in physics-speak) form around the drain.  

Order spontaneously created from Disorder.

Or when a heated solution moves from mere conduction heat transfer to heat transfer through convection cells.  Or when you flick a super-saturated solution of copper sulphate in water and the whole test-tube freezes as the copper sulphate crystallizes. In each case, when faced with a large energy gradient, an organized structure (vortex, convection cell, crystal lattice) spontaneously formed.  So spontaneous organization is not peculiar to life.

What is required in each case is the energy gradient (potential energy from the height of the water in the case of the vortex, heat in the case of the convection cell and concentration in the case of the copper sulphate solution).  The system "wants" to maintain its equilibrium, and the most efficient way it can do this is by organizing itself to dissipate the energy gradient and return to equilibrium.  Order can only appear from disorder if there is an energy gradient to exploit.

In complexity theory, these are known as self-organizing dissipative structures.  "Dissipative" because they "seek" to dissipate the energy gradient and return the system to equilibrium.  These organized systems that spontaneously appear are, in fact, low entropy.  However they only decrease entropy locally, and only in order to more efficiently increase entropy globally.

Moving up in scale, the planet Earth is subject to a huge energy gradient, namely the massive influx of energy from the sun. Recall that exergy is a measure of the quality of energy, the availability of that energy to do something useful.  The energy gradient, or Exergy, is basically a measure of distance of a system from equilibrium.  At equilibrium, exergy is zero. The system (Earth) receives a exergy from the sun in the form of electromagnetic radiation (mainly heat and light).  The system responds in a way to dissipate that exergy, to move it towards zero (equilibrium). 

So taken on their own, humans and other life forms are indeed a reversal in the tendency towards increased entropy.  However, taken within the context of the system as a whole (Earth-Sun system) we are actually increasing the rate of the entropy.  From a thermodynamic perspective, we are self-organized dissipative structures seeking to dissipate the exergy from the sun.

The late Waterloo professor James Kay wrote extensively about non-equilibrium thermodynamics and self-organizing systems.  He cites studies where an overflying aircraft with thermal multispectral analysis capability measures the "canopy temperature" of different ecosystems, including an astroturf field, a mowed lawn, a farmers field, and a complex rainforest ecosystem.  The surface temperature of the rainforest ecosystem was the coolest, indicating that the most complex ecosystem was also the most efficient at using the incoming solar exergy.  The astroturf was the warmest, because there are no life systems (such as photosynthesis) to effectively use the incoming solar radiation.  The rainforest, conversely, had a rich array of life systems to effectively use all the incoming solar energy.

A human being, I have heard said, is an organism that takes perfectly good food and manufactures it into crap.  That is one way we increase entropy.  We also must keep the furnaces of our bodies going, so we constantly generate about as much heat as a 100 W light bulb. On a social level we increase the disorder of the environment around us in order to increase order of our societies.  We take low-entropy bound carbon in oil and release it as very high-entropy gaseous oxidized carbon, for example. We know from the Second Law of Thermodynamics that the amount of disorder we create in the environment is greater than the amount of order we reap (thus, globally, entropy increases).

It’s a great theory and make s a lot of intuitive sense. 

However, I was left wondering:  the energy gradient due to the sun on the planet Mercury is far greater than that of Earth, yet as far as we know, there is no life on Mercury, no super-high level of self-organizing dissipating systems. Same with Venus.  So why only Earth? 

Schrödinger hypothesized that self-organizing dissipative systems only happen within a "window of vitality."  Too little exergy and there is not enough of a gradient to drive the creation of a self-organizing dissipative system.  Too much energy and the system is overcome and becomes chaotic.  But nobody has been able to develop, to my knowledge, any of the science around what the limits of the window of vitality are. 

Until then, the theory of life as a self-organizing dissipative system remains and enticing idea, but it is missing a crucial link.

The Continuing Adventures of Thermodynamics and Exergy

Earlier, some time ago, I was talking about thermodynamics and exergy. When talking about energy, we tend to lump al forms of them together as if they were the same--oil, nuclear, wind, solar, electric and what have you.  But energy comes in many different forms.  Recall the First Law of Thermodynamics says that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. It merely changes form.

Exergy is a measure of the quality of the different types of energy, the amount of work available in the energy to do something useful for us.  It's an analysis of energy using the Second Law of Thermodynamics--entropy. 

Let's take the example of electric heat--driving a current through a resistor to produce heat.  From a First Law perspective, this is very efficient.  Every watt of energy pushed through turns to heat, which is exactly what we wanted--virtually 100% efficient.  But from a Second Law perspective, from a measure of energy quality, you're taking a form of energy (electricity) capable of heating a tungsten filament in a light bulb to 3000°C and you're using it to heat a room by five degrees. It's like, "Pass me that grenade, I think I see a fly on the wall."

To turn oil into electricity, the crude must first be accessed by drilling a whole into the ground, then pumped out, treated, pumped again, refined, pumped again, burned in a burner which heats water to produce steam to drive turbines which rotate a generator coil to produce electricity. A tremendous amount of heat is generated by the friction of the drill in the rock, as well as the heat given off by all the pump motors and through the refining process. Coal plants have vast cooling towers where the steam is cooled back to water, to be pumped once again through the burner.  All that heat wasted just so you can take the final product--electricity--to heat your room.  If some of that "waste" heat were captured, you wouldn't need that electricity to start with.

Cooling Towers at Ferrybridge Power, West Yorkshire

This isn't news to power engineers.  That's why they developed co-generation plants at several pulp mills in BC.  They use their waste wood in a traditional turbine generator to make electricity.  A typically set up is about 50% efficient, with the other 50% lost to "waste heat."  IN a cogeneration plant, this heat is captured to provide heat for the mill.  So the mill is creating surplus electricity to sell to the grid, and creating heat for the mill.

Or there's urban geothermal heating, where water is pumped deep into the earth, heated up, and then pumped as hot water to a bunch of surrounding buildings. Here you are matching a low-quality energy (geothermal heat) to a low-quality use (indoor heating).

Or there's architectural methods to conserve heat, or, more commonly, to conserve cool.  Putting trees on the roof, using "light shelves" to channel natural sunlight to interior offices, making the building itself a solar cell.  I don't know much about that end, but it seems to me, with these new incredibly efficient buildings, that the architects are charting the path here.

There are, of course, challenges.  We already have a ready infrastructure to transmit electricity, but to pump hot water around a high density area requires a whole new insulated piping system.  And collecting waste heat from industrial operations is an intensive undertaking.  There's fugitive heat coming from every pump, every reactor, every piston.

And, more vexing, oil and coal are just so darned cheap and packed with energy. To use a mining analogy, who wants to go around picking up gold flecks when there's big nuggets everywhere.  Put another way, we are not being efficient, because we don't have to be efficient. 

But, as we all know, both population and per capita consumption are rising exponentially (actually, logarithmically, to be perfect correct), and the amount of available coal, oil and gas is limited. 

(You often here folks say we have enough coal, or bitumen or shale to last hundreds of years, but that again is more like a First Law analysis--i.e. just an accounting of the total volume of hydrocarbon out there.  However, from a Second Law analysis, a lot of that hydrocarbon isn't available, since it takes more than a barrel's worth of oil in energy to extract and refine a barrel of it.  This is why some people were floating the idea of a nuclear power plant in the Alberta oil sands--so they wouldn't be burning oil to get oil.)

Anyway, energy scarcity--or peak oil, if you will--seems to  me like a mathematical inevitability, barring some kind of apocalypse or other.  The society that has already examined ways to use energy more efficiently is going to be further ahead I the long haul.

The Fridge Question and the Heat Death of the Universe

Housework is never completed, the chaos always lurks ready to encroach on any area left unweeded, a jungle filled with dirty pans and the roaring of giant stuffed toy animals turned savage. Terrible glass eyes.

     -- Pamela Zoline, "Heat Death of the Universe"

The question was:

You're in a perfectly insulated room.  No heat escapes.  You open the door of the fridge and leave it open. Does the room:

(a)    cool down

(b)    heat up

(c)    stay the same temperature.

Answer:

A fridge is a heat engine that pumps heat from a cold body to a warm body. This is backwards from how things happen naturally (where heat flows from a warm body out to the cooler air). To reverse entropy, we must apply external work, in the form of electricity driving a compressor and pump. If we could do this with 100% efficiency then the room would stay the same temperature. The fridge would cool at teh same rate the room heated.

But the second law states that there will always be irreversible losses that cannot do work for us. So some of the electrical energy will be lost as waste heat, instead of helping cool the fridge. The waste heat will raise the temperature in the room. So the answer is (c).

You are actually reversing entropy locally for a system (the fridge), but only by speeding it up by an even greater amount for the environment. So what that means is that every time you do work, say by picking a toy up off the ground and putting it on a shelf, you are accelerating the Heat Death of the Universe.  In case you needed another excuse not to clean up.

That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.  Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding dispair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

                    --Bertrand Russel, 1903 

[consider] ... the view now held by most physicists, namely that the sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life, unless indeed some great body dashes into the sun and thus gives it fresh life--believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all the other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.

                    --Charles Darwin, 1876 

All right, a little break from thermodynamics next time. Maybe a little more on Afghanistan.

Entropy: What the Heck Is the Deal with That?

The human being is an organism that takes perfectly good food and manufactures it into crap.

    -- On a toilet stall wall somewhere at the University of British Columbia

So we covered the FIrst Law of Thermodynamics, concerning Energy.  The Second Law is Entropy.  Almost nobody knows what entropy is, including most scientists.  Brilliant physicist Max Planck referred to it as a "mathematical spook."  Mathematician John Neumann, advising a learned colleague on what to call a certain property he'd uncovered, said:

"You should call it entropy, because nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage."

Even the guys who are supposed to know what entropy is don't know what entropy is.  It's that twisted.

Here is what entropy is. 

What's that squiggly thing before the Q?

I won't bother to explain it, I just like the way it looks.  Mathematics can be quite poetic; it can articulate profound concepts with the stroke of a few lines.  Like Joyce Kilmer should have said,

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as is E

=mc².

The mathematical equation above is the most succinct definition, but here are some other definitions:

1.      Heat will not flow spontaneously from a cold object to a hot object.

2.      Any system which is free of external influences becomes more disordered with time. This disorder can be expressed in terms of the quantity called entropy.

3.      You cannot create a heat engine which extracts heat and converts it all to useful work.

4.      The total sum of information in the universe is diminishing to zero.

5.      Time’s arrow.

Entropy says that heat will flow from a hot body to a cold body, but not the other way around.  Simple enough.  Intuitive.  You pull muffins out of the oven and they cool down and the room heats up a bit. Every time.

But entropy is the only law in science that says that will happen. Theoretically, the air in the room could drop a few degrees and use that energy to cook your muffin batter while it is sitting on the counter. But that never happens.  Hot flows to cold, but cold does not flow to hot. It is not reversible.  Entropy, like time, only happens in one direction; it only increases.  Time is irreversible and entropy is a measure of irreversibility. 

If it weren't for entropy, we might not have a concept of time at all.  Fascinating--what began as a study of heat and work in engines leads us to an insight about time itself.

Or you can think of entropy, in a sense, as things moving from order to disorder. Think of the heat in the muffins as red checkers, and the cool in the room as black checkers.  After a while, when the room and the muffins are at the same temperature, the red checkers and black checkers are all mixed. up.  It'll take work to separate them again (by putting the muffins back in the oven, for example).

This is illustrated in many songs:

All you do, crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see (Kansas)

It falls apart (The Odds)

Everything turns to shit (Marilyn Manson)

So, while the First Law of Thermodynamics says you can't win (energy cannot be created), the Second Law says you can't even break even (entropy always increases; there will always be irreversible losses in a system; energy dissipates; order moves to disorder).  But, bless the dreamers out there, this has not slowed down the number of patents filed for such machines, and I refer the reader to  the Museum of Unworkable Devices to see some of these marvelous contraptions.  However, bowing to the Second Law, the United States Patent Office no longer accepts patents for perpetual motion machines unless you can show them a working model.

So energy is not destroyed (First Law) but, when used, it is always degraded (Second Law).  When we use energy it moves from high quality (low entropy, order, concentrated) to lower quality (higher entropy, disorder, dissipated).

Human beings, for example, take high quality energy (food), extract work from it (calories), and then expel lower quality energy (crap and waste heat).  We extract and use high quality energy from the environment in order to keep our metabolisms in an odered state (in order, if you will, to stave off the tide of entropy in our own bodies). 

As you'll see in the next column, it is not energy we are trying to conserve when we switch off the lights, but energy quality or Exergy.  And that produces some neat insights into how we can better interact with the environment around us, and perhaps even some clues to the nature and origin of life. 

I'll leave you with a riddle.  You're in a perfectly insulated room.  No heat escapes.  You open the door of the fridge and leave it open. Does the room:

(a)    cool down

(b)    heat up

(c)    stay the same temperature.

Think about it.  All you need to answer this is in today's post.  No consulting the Goggle Oracle! Answer tomorrow.

No Body

Perhaps a poem today. This one was actually originally published as a very short story in Quantum Genre in the Planet of the Arts (ed. V. Ulea, 2009), but I think I like it better as a poem.  It's actually where I used the word "Mindfingers" which, of course, became the name of this blog.  Stupid name.  Pretentious.  Anyway, enjoy.

NO BODY

No Body, I call me now.

No high-school sweethearts think of where I am now as they lie ruminating one night. 

No workers gossip about me in furtive morning coffee huddles.

No secret agent discusses my name with raised eyebrow on the sixth floor of a nondescript square building. 

Getzel Ternell, government clerk, bachelor, 35.

I whisper my existence in the urban cacophony.

I'm convinced I'm disappearing.

I slouch at the cluttered kitchen table with flimsy metal legs,

Pour cream into my coffee.

I consider patterns.  Patterns within patterns. 

Entropy is cream in an unstirred cup of coffee,

the tendrils of white softly curling,

each tendril producing smaller appendages and repeating itself over and over,

the intricacy staggering and beautiful. 

The design reminds me of a vast, leafless oak on a winter plain, or the ganglion net of a brain. 

Eventually the dancing back eddies of the cream coalesce, diffuse to mere colour, dead uniformity.

We are back eddies in the tide of entropy. 

I feel the psychic tendrils of others lose purchase as I immaterialize. 

Puzzled, their mindfingers search for me momentarily like the pseudopods of hungry amoebae. 

Humans are increasingly irrelevant. 

Their sounds are like the utterances of cattle, 

as if every word is spoken out of context from the one before it. 

I come to un-understand people, their reactions to given phenomena.

Time becomes distorted,

The waterfalls are languid as clouds,

the life spans of stars are cracks from dry wood in a campfire.

I am many places simultaneously. 

My edges have become fuzzy. 

Dust crawls at my feet, if it can be said that I have feet, if it can be said that there is dust.

This is how I see the humans now:

A vast beach stretching to three horizons

Seven billion bodies planted up to the neck in the sand,

Faces able only to see those close around them,

Behind them the jagged slow tide comes in to end them, one by one.

Do they scream?

No.  They sing.

They sing.

Ahead lies a fecund oblivion,

an abyss made out of everything. 

I can just about touch it. 

And here is the mystery: 

I can't reach it without letting go,

but once I let go, I lose all desire to reach.