Order out of chaos

What Hacker News says

1. FiatLuxDaveJul 2017
   I love the idea of looking for overlooked gems. Here are a few of mine:

   Infinite in All Directions, Freeman Dyson : just a book of his thoughts, but I really appreciated his perspective on respect between religion/spirituality and science.

   Ignition! An informal history of liquid rocket propellants, J.D. Clark : I picked up a copy of this in a roadside bookstore on a lark. Entertaining tales of people blowing themselves up in the name of science.

   Apollo 11 Press kit : My grandmother was a journalist for Florida Today during the space race, and she gave me her copy. It is amazing to see how much detail was provided. I don't know if our modern press ever gets press kits like these, but it was not dumbed-down much at all, which was very nice to see.

   The Adventures of Samurai Cat, Mark Rogers : Silly fun. Kind of like if Bored of the Rings had been written by Jerry Bruckheimer and Spider Jerusalem.

   Into the cool, Sagan and Schnieder : about complexity and thermodynamics. Written for a layperson, I still learned a lot from it.

   Order out of Chaos, Prigogine and Stengers : More thermo, also written for lay audience, also learned a lot from it.

   Controlled Thermonuclear Reactions, L. Artsimovich : Of all the plasma physics books I have read (many) this is the one I remember most. Rather out-of-date now, it contains loads of information about the early Soviet fusion program, with pictures and discussion of now-forgotten experiments.

   Show morethread
2. FiatLuxDaveJul 2017
   "What is Life", by E. Schroedinger is referenced in the article and covers these topics.

   "Order out of Chaos" by Prigogine and Stengers, and "Into the Cool" by Sagan and Schneider would also be decent recommendations.

   thread
3. woopsnOct 2024
   Ilya Prigogine wrote a lot about this, see eg Order Out of Chaos. He won the Nobel prize in chemistry for his work on nonequilibrium thermodynamics.

   Boltzmann had originally tried to prove that the second law is a mechanical (statistical) fact and several others tried as well. But Poincaré showed that those systems which, regardless of their initial state, inevitably increase entropy later on inevitably reduce it (his recurrence theorem). There are also in fact reversible processes in nature, so it can't be that mechanics alone implies the procession of time. Something more involved is going on.

   Carlo Rovelli has also written a lot about the "thermal time" concept in his books.

   My takeaway from them is that you can't really get time out of mechanics by itself (statistical or otherwise). In the same way that you can't get baryon asymmetry. It is intrinsically a selection principle on initial conditions.

   Show morethread
4. lioetersJan 2024
   Oh I didn't notice you were getting downvoted up there in the parent comment, it wasn't me! :)

   Anyway, I'm now going back to read Prigogine's book, Order Out of Chaos. It's also brought me around to think and study more about self-organization and emergent properties of complex systems.

   About "A New Physics Theory of Life", and the idea that life exists because "the law of increasing entropy drives matter to acquire lifelike physical properties".. I see this is what you meant by "entropy is the process that drives life".

   > Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. Thus, England argues that under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize.

   Re-reading the article, I'm struck by how entropy and organization are, seemingly paradoxically, two sides of the same coin. It feels like there's something profound there, some principle that explains many phenomena at different scales all at once.

   Show morethread
5. ganzuulApr 2022
   Is this ruliad the logos of philosophy?

   ---

   My own attempt at what Wolfram is doing resulted in:

   1: f(a,a)

   2: f(a,b)

   I call the former introspection and the latter is regular old composition. This seems to be a taxonomy of everything my discerning mind is capable of and hence the limit of what aspects of human experience I can peer review. The rest (the bulk) is mysticism and always-valid personal experience.

   ---

   “Whatever we call reality, it is revealed to us only through the active construction in which we participate.” – Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (1984)

   Show morethread