Category: thermodynamics
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Entropy and Miscibility Gap: Tutorial for Biologists
Main Points A homogeneous phase can be spontaneously decomposed into two immiscible phases. Concentration gradients can be spontaneously formed at the border between immiscible phases when the system reaches its equilibrium state. At constant temperature and pressure the entropy of system in question spontaneously decreases during the separation process. In the adiabatic system the increase…
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Muddle Puddle with Entropy in Biology
One paragraph from J. Scott Turner, Biology’s Second Law: Homeostasis, Purpose, and Desire. In Beyond Mechanism: Putting Life Back Into Biology I should say that the book is good and the chapter actually is also not bad. Yet, this paragraph speaks for itself: p. 192 “At its most general, the disequilibrium that characterizes a living system…
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Prigogine: The new alliance
I. Prigogine and I. Stengers, The new alliance, Scientia 112 (1977) Part One – From Dynamics to Thermodynamics: Physics, the Gradual Opening towards the World of Natural Processes, 319-332. Part Two – An Extended Dynamics: towards a Human Science of Nature, 643-653. I like the beginning of the first part where the problem is formulated…
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Thermodynamics of evolution
Prigogine, I., G. Nicolis & A. Babloyantz (1972). Thermodynamics of evolution. Physics Today 25(11), 23-28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3071090 “The functional order maintained within living systems seems to defy the Second Law; nonequilibrium thermodynamics describes how such systems come to terms with entropy.” Prigogine, I., G. Nicolis & A. Babloyantz (1972). Thermodynamics of evolution. Physics Today 25(12), 38-44.…
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Schrödinger’s Order, Disorder and Entropy
Recently I have made a talk “Does Entropy Play a Role in Biology?” where I have made a short introduction to the thermodynamic entropy and discussed misconceptions of the entropy in biology. Now I see that I have missed to mention an important text that seemed to play a big role in raising one particular…
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The Unavoidable Cost Of Computation Revealed
Some quotes (mostly mine) from the discussion on the everything list http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list/t/aea1a68dd8286d97 13.03.2012 01:43 Russell Standish: http://www.nature.com/news/the-unavoidable-cost-of-computation-revealed-1.10186 This about experimentally testing Landauer’s principle that computation has thermodynamic constraints. 13.03.2012 16:29 Evgenii Rudnyi: Thanks for the link. Yet, it is unclear to me what is exactly information and computation in this experiment. To be more precise,…
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Entropy and Information
In the modern scientific culture, the statement that the entropy and information are the same things is ubiquitous. For example the famous paper of Edwin T. Jaynes [1] according to Google Scholar [2] has been cited more than 5000 times. The list of books from Prof Gordon [3] about the deep relationship between entropy and…
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Books on entropy and information
A list of books from Prof Gordon http://groups.google.com/group/embryophysics/msg/e9229530251b7d58 While I might agree with you on the misuse of “entropy” in biology, many people would disagree with you, as evidenced by the list of books below. Adami, C. & N.J. Cerf (1999). What information theory can tell us about quantum reality. In: Quantum Computing and Quantum…