Thermodynamics is not only the pinnacle of 19th century physics, but at the time and lingering into the present, carried a whiff of semi-religious overtones. The field arose with the birth of the Industrial Revolution, whose childhood was the Age of Steam. For the first time, steam engines made it possible for man to triumph over his environment without the mobs of slaves Pharaoh needed to erect his pyramids. It was preceded by several centuries of development of water power, with entire factories or mills, located near fast rivers so as to harness the energy of falling water to drive entire buildings full of leather belts. The only remnant today of this important precursor to the Industrial Revolution is the large number of "Mills" in place names. But steam permitted factories to be built anywhere that coal and water could be delivered, and thermodynamics was the Scottish science that fixed its profitability. Despite having a unit of power named for him, James Watts was not the inventor of the steam engine, but the Scot credited with making it 4 times more efficient.

With such success in improving the efficiency of the engine, fertile minds continued to imagine that equally great improvements in efficiency were waiting to be discovered and provide a steady income from patents. Perhaps it was possible to invent an engine that would run forever without any coal at all! But French engineer, Sadi Carnot, destroyed all these fantasies when he calculated the maximum possible efficiency of a theoretical carnot-cycle steam engine. It seems work is a form of energy, and energy is never free, it isn't even cheap. Rather, energy is conserved, neither increasing nor decreasing, but always changing form and degrading into that least usable of all forms: heat. The laws of thermodynamics describe this universal journey of energy from its birth as work to its long drawn-out heat death, where death is deanthropomorphized (physicalized?) as the mysterious "Entropy".

The mathematics wasn't limited to steam engines, however, and the physicist's wandering eye began to see everything as a disguised power plant: the sun, the hydrologic cycle, chemical reactions, the human body, and of course, the living cell. Soon physicists were claiming that there wasn't an object in the universe that didn't obey these laws. In Sir Arthur Eddington's pop-sci book, "The Nature of the Physical World" (1928) he writes:

If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations—then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation—well these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

And so thermodynamics, like Einstein's space-time, or Heisenberg's quantum mechanics, became part of the furniture of reality, the geometry of Plato's forms, the law of heaven second only to God himself.

There was just one problem. Living things seem to violate thermodynamics routinely.

Which is to say, they multiply and make complex things out of simple ones. They take carbon dioxide and water and sunshine and make redwood trees and oats from it. Then other living things make rabbits or houses or the Golden Gate bridge from them. Complexity is increasing, and work seems to increase, not decrease. How can living things seemingly violate these inviolate laws of entropy?

As I remarked earlier, physicists dismissed it with a wave of the hand. "Living things are not closed systems", they would say, "they consume fuel and emit carbon dioxide, which more than compensates the Entropy-god for the things they make."

But does it? If we draw a big circle around the Earth or around the solar system, is the entropy really increasing? It would seem that the anti-entropy (negentropy) or the information of the system is growing exponentially with life, and this doesn't seem to fit the three laws of thermodynamics. Have they really nothing to say at all about life?

In recent years, biologists have been getting more physical, and physicists getting more biological, so there has been a resurrection of interest in this philosophical topic. An early effort was to find a "fourth law" of thermodynamics that would explain what life is doing. It has blossomed to no less than 17 different attempts on this web site.

Here is Chris Beling's effort.

Here's my correspondence with Chris, on what I think is the meaning of these 4th law attempts.

The 4th Law has been claimed multiple times, Prigogine's MaxEnt being one of the earlier manifestations. (A recent popular book was "Into the Cool" here's a link to my PPT talk.) What is peculiar, is that it sounds like your formulation and Prigogine's are diametrically opposite. So perhaps you want to either: a) describe yours as a further refinement; or b) describe yours as a 5th law.

> I have looked through your powerpoint. I have some difficulty because I do not know the specifics of many of the systems you study i.e Coronal Heating. I think I would have to take each specific subject one by one - and would need more materials to read.

It isn't your fault for finding it hard to read. I usually annotate my PP slides, but not this one, and even I had trouble remembering what I was talking about three years ago! Coronal heating has been a mystery because the source of the energy is the sun's photosphere at 5500K, whereas the corona is 2,000,000K, which makes it appear that energy flows from colder to hotter, violating Newton's law of cooling, as well as numerous thermo laws.

> But there are some interesting things that come out: (1) That Gibbs Free Energy and Exergy are the same thing. I have read one or two books where Exergy was mentioned and to me it seemed the same as Gibbs Free Energy, but then I thought - why give it a different name?

Well, you must remember that Gibbs was a somewhat obscure AMERICAN physicist, and "exergy" is promoted by Europeans. Also recall that Italian Amedeo Avogadro didn't discover any numbers, but rather German Johann Josef Loschmidt, so that when the British Alfred Nobel prize went to Frenchman Jean Perrin in 1909, he would not acknowledge the prior work of a German, and attributed it to the Italian. I hope that clarifies things.

> (2) MEPP. The first thing of interest is that this is the same thing as "The minimum entropy production rule". I had been confused about the naming (as you may see from my paper). I badly need to read on this subject and I think the reference you give should help me.

MEPP actually stands for "Maximum Entropy Production Principle", though Prigogine gave it the minimum entropy title, thus confusing you. Prigogine's Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1977 has been supplanted by more modern work that prefers to talk of the maximum entropy production, though they are still talking about the same thing. The question addressed, is when a system is far from equilibrium, which process restoring equilibrium will dominate? The answer is the one that increases entropy the fastest. So large convection cells will be favored over small ones in a boiling pot, simply because they increase entropy faster than little convection cells.

> Question: Is the MEPP what you would refer to as the 4th law?

Yes, this is the MEPP that I refer to as the 4th law.

> (3) Telos: According to the law of "information decrease" = entropy increase - a law that only works if there is some sort of configuration space (real of imposed) then it is indeed true that the fireball of the BB must be low entropy. This certainly points towards an origination of information (and thus intelligence).

I'm not sure I understand your statement. The BB fireball was incredibly dense as well as incredibly hot. If S=Q/T, then Q (heat) goes as the density, T (temperature) is inversely proportional to density (PV/nR = T), so S was very high in the BB. So it is counter-intuitive that a high entropy BB could produce a low-entropy universe that included us.

> Comment: I don't see in your work mention of information. I think the definition of information is critical for the 5th law (if we call it this).

I'm not entirely sure what happened to the slide on Shannon information. Perhaps I merely said the words when I gave the talk. But in any case, Shannon information is the negative of the log of S ==> -ln(S) = I or "negentropy".

> (4) Do you know of any other good accessible book on MEPP and NET?

My introduction to the topic was "Into the Cool" which I think I referenced at the end of the talk. The original talk I heard was by a remote sensing specialist who demonstrated that the temperature of a field of peas or grassland was an indication of the health of the ecosystem because living things attempt to maximize their exergy. Then the figures in my talk were extracted from lengthy Google searches on the topic, several PP were found. There were also several good Wikipedia entries.

The connection between "telos" and information, is that life uses MEPP to maximize exergy, thereby avoiding heat death. As long as there is a flow of energy, then it is possible to stay far from equilibrium making use of structure to produce MEPP. That structure while not always spontaneous (like Benard convection cells) nevertheless demonstrates order and information. Thus information arises out of heat flow as a 2nd order process (relying on derivatives of the basic quantities), whereas everything in the 1st order (direction of heat flow, equilibrium thermo) removes information. To paraphrase, everything in the first 3 laws destroys information, whereas the 4th law restores information. For the sake of symmetry, perhaps we should have the 5th and 6th laws restoring information as well. I would guess, though haven't done anything in the field for 3 years, that the complexity of 2nd order, non-equilibrium thermo will parallel the transition from electrostatics to plasma physics.

You should download Prigogine's 1977 Nobel lecture. I don't know whether I referenced it or not in my talk. Prigogine was criticized for getting too philosophical (as in Bergsonian) and abandoning physics (a crime Feynman once said was endemic among middle-aged physicists, and I might add, especially those who have become famous). You might think of him as the intellectual grandfather of the Sante Fe Institute and Stuart Kauffman's attempts to find self-organized, emergent phenomena. That is, the everlasting Darwinian hope of life crawling out of the slime. The recent Vatican conference on evolution had a bunch of these guys lecturing the Church on why they don't need no stinking teleology.

The following critical review of Prigogine suggests that his mathematical insights were singularly unfruitful (but then again, that's exactly what you would expect a critic to say), though it is peculiar that the critic doesn't mention Kauffman at all.

Here at seminary, I've finally understood the connection between Whitehead, Bergson, Barth, Milic Capek, scads of modern theologians, Stuart Kauffman, and good 'ole GWF Hegel. There really are only a half dozen metaphysical constructs possible: the One, the Many, the Dual, the Trinity, and various Dialectic dynamical equilibria (think of them as the NET of metaphysics).

I think it was George Gamow who published a book "One, Two, Three, Infinity" about physics, but it could easily have been about philosophy. So also Prigogine and Hegel want to put information into the dynamical regime, which removes it from the static eternity of Augustine. This Hegelian desire attempts to solve the dualist paradoxes introduced by various solutions to the pre-Socratic one vs many problem. However, as my seminary prof attempted to demonstrate, Hegel and his 20th century progeny really can't solve the problem either, rather they just use a sophisticated shell game that keeps moving the problem around. This is Dembski's critique of Darwinism, that it plays a shell game with information. In the end, both Darwinism and Hegel put all the information into the boundary conditions, whose eternality is implied but rarely stated. My prof is trying to convince me that a founding faculty at WTS, Cornelius Van Til, solved the problem with a Trinitarian metaphysic that has been extended by WTS faculty John Frame and Vern Poythress. I've sort of come to the same view in a wide circle that includes some math and physics examples. Here's a paper I wrote last winter for a course I had hoped would get credit, that calls it the "holy grail" of post-modernism.

The point of the paper, is that information is part of the process that it describes, and therefore cannot be separated from it. Such circular loops are particularly pernicious when they deal with definitions. God, people and words are all things whose definition is inclusive of the class, and therefore can be said to be sui generis. Information, then, can only be metaphysically defined in a system that includes one of those three basic categories. E.g, God as information, man as information, or words as information. Otherwise, it becomes an idol, a substitute G/M/W whose definition decimates itself, whose existence denies itself, whose operation eats itself.