Thermoeconomics

(This is a very rough slice of a much larger future post by Marc Fawzi)

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Premise:

We can come up with a morally optimal model of society with the only constraints being our own conscience and ideas, but if we do not look at the observed laws of nature (and particularly the laws of thermodynamics) that constrain any model that involves physical resources then the model will run aground sooner or later.

This does not make the social model any less relevant than the physical model. They are both equally important to understand, and they can be made to work together in harmony.

Discussion:

I'll start with a useful definition of thermodynamics:

Thermodynamics is a branch of physics which deals with the energy and work of a system. Thermodynamics deals only with the *large scale response* of a system which we can observe and measure in experiments.

1st Law (also related: conservation of energy, conservation of mass, conservation of momentum):

"Within a given domain, the amount of energy remains constant and energy is neither created nor destroyed. Energy can be converted from one form to another (potential energy can be converted to kinetic energy) but the total energy within the domain remains fixed."

2nd Law (as a follow up to the 1st law):

"We can imagine thermodynamic processes which conserve energy but which never occur in nature. For example, if we bring a hot object into contact with a cold object, we observe that the hot object cools down and the cold object heats up until an equilibrium is reached. The transfer of heat goes from the hot object to the cold object.

We can imagine a system, however, in which the heat is instead transferred from the cold object to the hot object, and such a system *does not violate* the *first law* of thermodynamics. The cold object gets colder and the hot object gets hotter, but energy is conserved. Obviously we don't encounter such a system in nature and to explain this and similar observations, thermodynamicists proposed a second law of thermodynamics. Clasius, Kelvin, and Carnot proposed various forms of the second law to describe the particular physics problem that each was studying.

The description of the second law stated here was taken from Halliday and Resnick's textbook, "Physics". It begins with the definition of a new state variable called entropy. Entropy has a variety of physical interpretations, including the statistical disorder of the system (very relevant to thermoeconomic information processing), dispersal of energy, etc, but for our purposes, however entropy may be defined (in different interpretations), let us consider entropy to be just another property of the system, like (not as) temparature, with whatever interpretation you want to use.

What the second law states, is that for a given physical process, the combined entropy of the system and the environment remains a constant if the process can be reversed.

An example of a reversible process is *ideally* forcing a flow through a constricted pipe. "Ideal" means no boundary layer losses. As the flow moves through the constriction, the pressure, temperature and velocity change, but these variables return to their original values downstream of the constriction. The state of the gas returns to its original conditions and the change of entropy of the system is zero. Engineers call such a process an isentropic. Isentropic means constant entropy.

The second law states that if the physical process is irreversible, the combined entropy of the system and the environment must increase. The final entropy must be greater than the initial entropy for an irreversible process.

An example of an irreversible process is the problem discussed in the second paragraph. A hot object is put in contact with a cold object. Eventually, they both achieve the same equilibrium temperature. If we then separate the objects they remain at the equilibrium temperature and do not naturally return to their original temperatures. The process of bringing them to the same temperature is irreversible.

When it comes to bits and bytes some of the the physical constraints that follow from the first and second laws of thermodynamics are:

Hardware/Physical Domain:

1. The continuous cost of energy (whatever it is, e.g. near zero) used for powering the hardware (including the cost of maintaining and evolving the capability of the energy generation capacity)

2. The continuous cost of energy used for the maintenance of the hardware at every point, from desktop to network core, mesh infrastructure or the hardware landscape, including the communication channels. This includes energy used in manufacturing of new hardware or replacement parts.

Information Processing/Virtual Domain:

3. The continuous cost of energy for evolving the capacity, scale and quality of the communication/transportation/connectivity

4. The continuous cost of energy to power our "human bandwidth for information process," i.e. the energy we need to power our brains/bodies ...

There is also the 0th, 3rd and 4th laws of thermodyanmics which complete the picture, but it's xmas guys and I have 20 minutes to shower and get to the mall before someone here shoot me.

Anyway, while having an engineer's understanding of thermodynamics I would like to invite a rational dialog that would help to bridge the gap between social and physical theory, which is a process of reconciling two different axiomatic deductive systems :-)

Seems like everything is fractal, with problems expressing themselves in other problems with lower and lower resolution (more wiggle room) as we go down the chain and more resolution (less wiggle room) as we go up the chain, but "reality" operates at all levels in the chain. We just have to recognize the common patterns across all our different deductive systems because its those common patterns that will allow us to build a common picture.