Confusion about 2LoT in regard to heat and information
| March 5, 2006 | Posted by Dave S. under Intelligent Design |
A number of people conflate heat entropy with information entropy and then willy-nilly substitute one for the other. This is what the NeoDarwinists do when they point to the sun and say it makes the earth an open system to explain the evident way life violates information entropy. The sun is irrevelevant in this siutation as it is adding heat, not information. While heat and information entropy are closely related (they both behave according to 2LoT which was originally formulated for heat alone) they are not the same thing and cannot be exchanged.
Heat diffuses in a closed system until maximum entropy is reached where the heat is uniform (everything is the same temperature). Likewise a dye will diffuse through a glass of water until its distribution is uniform (everything is the same color). Dye and heat are not the same thing and you can heat or chill that uniformly colored glass of water all you want and it won’t undistribute the dye. That’s because heat entropy and dye entropy are not the same thing.
The layman’s expression relating to this is you can’t unbake a cake. The reason why you can’t unbake it is it would violate 2LoT. However, that’s not quite right because a sufficiently advanced intelligence can unbake a cake. Intelligence can accomplish things that nature cannot and that includes violating 2LoT in relation to information entropy.
It’s intuitively obvious to me that 2LoT governed heat and information entropy aren’t the same thing. Sewell expresses this in a more rigorous manner in A Second Look at the Second Law.
DaveScot’s Evo-Creo 2LoT Corollary: As Intelligent Design arguments become more organized, NeoDarwinian arguments must become less organized. The end result is that ID becomes a completely coherent explanation of the facts while the NeoDarwinian narrative decays into a vast state of disarray.
It’s all a simple matter of physics you see. 
45 Responses to Confusion about 2LoT in regard to heat and information
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Davescot
If you can give me a clear and precisely worded example of an `intelligent’ agency causing a violation of the second law, please do.
Me writing this sentence. -ds
Dave,
- All entropy is information entropy, as entropy indicates the information content of a given state. I can point you to articles that formalize this idea, if you’d like. In return, I’m hoping you can point me to articles that formalize Sewell’s argument.
- If virtually impossible odds are routinely overcome by intelligence, then in what sense are they virtually impossible?
They are virtually impossible without intelligence. -ds
physicist wrote:
“Davescot is certainly correct that one can trivially convert between these unitsâ€â€in stat mech sometimes it’s just conventional to consider temperature as having units of energy. Of course in your language this `temperature’ is just (k_b T).”
physicist,
Temperature is equivalent to the average energy per molecule of a substance. Boltzmann’s constant gives a way of converting between the two, going from joules to Kelvins and back. This is uncontroversial.
But this has nothing to do with blackbody radiation. You cannot multiply the blackbody temperature of radiation by Boltzmann’s constant to find out how much energy there is per photon. Doing so gives you the average energy per molecule in the black body, but not the average energy per photon in the radiation being emitted by the body.
Individual photons do not have a blackbody temperature.
I’ve had it with your crap, Valerie. This stuff is not hard to learn but you make no attempt, thinking you know it all already. Single photon calorimeter developed by NASA. Don’t bother commenting on UD for the next week. -ds
However much the darwinites obfuscate this scientific problem with their ‘uphill’ theory…
the ‘downhill’ experience of everyday life contradicts mindless macroevolution.
It seems clear even for a mere engineer like me that the point being made is that energy and information follow the laws of entropy but are independent.
Thermodinamic entropy can be increased or decreased by heating or cooling.
Information entropy can be increased or decreased by “removing” or “adding” information.
These effects are disconnected, even though they can be observed on a given system at the same time.
After reading Sewell’s article, the conclusion would be that for information entropy to decrease on earth, producing DNA for instance, it would be necessary that the corresponding “amount” of information was being injected into the system through its boundaries. The loss of energy in the form of heat does not explain the decrease in information entropy observed, the same way cooling the water in the glass won’t make the dye undistribute, as stated in the initial post.
The critics should bring examples where decreasing energy entropy leads to decrease in information entropy, without confusing the media where the information is stored with the information content. Energy is spent in the storage, transmission and manipulation of the information but that does not decrease the information entropy of a system.
“Do you think nature, absent intelligence, could have created the information represented by the particular arrangement of atoms in the chair you’re sitting in? 2LoT applied to information would have virtually denied the possibility of chance assemblage of that information. Intelligent agency routinely overcomes virtually impossible odds. That is the hallmark of intelligence.”
I have been meaning to ask this for some time. What makes intelligence exalted from nature so much that we can reccon it not to be a part of it? Because that is what you seem to be implying with posts like these. You are making the creating intelligence supernatural and that is not what ID should be doing if it wishes to be scientific. Because, as you no doubt know, any appeal to the supernatural destroys the scientific value of a theory. A dichotomy with intelligence on one side and ‘nature’ on the other reeks of supernaturalism. What can you do to overcome that barrier?
Edin,
How does it sound supernatural when he gives himself typing a coherent sentence or a human manufacturing a chair as exampes of the difference intelligent input can make? Perhaps we can use the example of a beaver building a dam. Nature on its own would not form the dam, but the beaver is certainly part of nature.
It seems to me physicist and Valerie are focusing on the heat exchange and pressuring DS to agree that he does not get away without increasing entropy while inputting information. I don’t think that DS is really attempting to state that he can avoid the normal entropy of physical processes while engaging in intelligent input, rather he is stating that the very same minimal entropy increase to the environment that is involved in typing a sentence is about the same whether he types nonsense or very valuable and coherent words with meaning.
In other words, you get more value for your money.
In fact, I’m thinking this should probably be included as part of the definition of information, if it hasn’t already been.
Dear Valerie
“But this has nothing to do with blackbody radiation. You cannot multiply the blackbody temperature of radiation by Boltzmann’s constant to find out how much energy there is per photon.”
No—basically, you can. In blackbody radiation characterised by temperature, T, the total (averaged in the grand canonical ensemble) number of photons is:
N ~ V*T^3
while the total energy is:
E ~ V*T^4
Hence the energy per photon does indeed go like E/N ~ T. The dimensionful part of the constant of proportionality is k_B, as usual. I might be misunderstanding what your point was but you seemed to be saying the energy per unit photon in BB radiation *didn’t* grow linearly with the temperature of the radiation, which is wrong. Any stat mech book will have this calculation.
Maybe you just mean that there is a dimensionless number, too, which I agree with, but I think the question was more about units.
So Davescot was correct, unless I am misreading what you are both saying. However, I think it’s off the main topic of this debate!
Davescot
“Physicist–If you can give me a clear and precisely worded example of an `intelligent’ agency causing a violation of the second law, please do.
Davescot–Me writing this sentence.”
No, as other people have pointed out, the overall entropy will have increased as you think about and write this sentence. One would need to take into account the very complicated system of your brain, which probably none of us have a desire to do!
If you want to convince any physicists, you should come up with a precise example where you can do the calculations and show that entropy has decreased in a closed system. I am skeptical.
I’m guessing, but it sounds like what you actually want to do is isolate the entropy in that sentence, call it information entropy and then say it has clearly decreased as the sentence is typed. Well, fair enough, but unfortunately this does not violate any statement of the second law!
Of course, if you want to invent a new law, which is routinely violated, well no one will be impressed when it is…routinely violated. I think you need to think more clearly about exactly what `law’ you are violating, and exactly who thinks this `law’ is a physical law.
Dear Davescot (again)
“Physicist, Do you somehow calculate any reasonable possibility that nature, absent intelligence, could have created the information in your computer’s memory subsytems? Do you think nature, absent intelligence, could have created the information represented by the particular arrangement of atoms in the chair you’re sitting in? 2LoT applied to information would have virtually denied the possibility of chance assemblage of that information. Intelligent agency routinely overcomes virtually impossible odds. That is the hallmark of intelligence. ”
I find your statements here completely unchallenging. This is because the intelligence you are referring to in making computers and chairs is human intelligence, and humans are a part of nature.
So essentially your statement comes down to: `if there were no humans, would you be surprised if things that are made by humans are no longer found?’
My answer is no, and moreover there is no challenge here to the second law.
An attempt to clarify some understandings:
Thermodynamic entropy = Boltzmann’s constant x Shannon (information) entropy, or, S = kH
Energy = Boltzmann’s constant x temperature, or E = kT
Hence, thermo entropy is to info entropy as energy is to temperature
__________
The entropy rate balance for a control volume (CV) is as follows:
[rate of change of entropy within the CV] =
+ [rate of entropy transfer associated with heat transfer across boundary] (1)
+ [rate of entropy transfer associated with mass transfer into the CV] (2)
- [rate of entropy transfer associated with mass transfer out of the CV] (3)
+ [rate of entropy production within the CV due to irreversibilities] (4)
(1) is positive when heat is transferred in, negative when heat is transferred out.
(2) and (3) are zero for closed systems (mass is not transferred into or out of a closed system).
(4) is always positive.
__________
Now, some of my musings:
By analogy, since the First Law of Thermodynamics is basically the Law of Conservation of Energy, perhaps the Law of (Imperfect) Conservation of (Thermodynamic) Entropy (i.e., 2LoT) is better thought of as the First Law of Infodynamics? (Jaynes suggested something similar in 1957.)
For a closed system, if more entropy is transferred out than is transferred in, and if this rate is greater than the rate of entropy production due to irreversibilities, then entropy will be reduced within the system. With undirected natural processes, “self-organizational” phenomena (e.g., the formation of ice crystals, vortices in flowing water, ripples on sand dunes) can reduce entropy faster than irreversibilities generate it for limited periods of time and space. But such phenomena are necessary, rather than contingent; Also, they just don’t have the same “character” as the low entropy phenomena in living things. E.g., they can’t create novel cell types, tissue types, organs, or body plans (credit: ds). (Things to ponder: Why are there self-organizational tendencies of matter? From where do they originate?)
The following two considerations suggest how the Second Law of Thermo may be violated: Consciousness (which would appear necessary for true, original intelligence, rather than stored intelligence as in computer programs) seems to be associated with quantum mechanical phenomena; there are “two unwritten assumptions about Shannon’s definition of information that may make it inapplicable as such to quantum mechanics: (1) The supposition that there is such a thing as an observable state (for instance the upper face a die or a coin) before the observation begins (2) The fact that knowing this state does not depend on the order in which observations are made (commutativity).” ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy in thermodynamics and information theory ) Or, perhaps the Second Law is not universally valid, as Stephen Wolfram suggests.
Whether or not intelligence violates the entropy accountancy required by 2LoT, what it certainly can do is repeatedly and unpredicably create regions of indefinitely large amounts of low entropy, of arbitrary character. Undirected nature can’t.
davescot: “1LoT in information theory (IT): information can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change state. 2LoT in IT: information gradients tend to diffuse in a closed system until information is equally distributed.”
Dave,
Do you have any justification to offer for either of these “laws”?
Of course. The first law is more controversial. In a deterministic universe information is never created or destroyed. In principle sufficient knowledge of the state of any closed system enables perfect prediction of its past and future. Before you say the universe is not deterministic I suggest you at least know that it is perfectly deterministic at larger than quantum scales as far as physics informs us and at quantum scales the jury is out on whether quantum uncertainty is an artifact of not having complete knowledge such as a theory of quantum gravity. Dembski proposes a law of conservation of information but I didn’t know that until just now when I googled it. I figured it out on my own long ago as it’s an obvious logical consequence of a deterministic universe. The only question is whether the universe is truly deterministic. I suspect that it is deterministic with the sole exception that intelligent life is non-deterministic. In other words “free will” exists and that, and that alone, can break the law of conservation of information.
There is little controversy about the second law in information theory.
Now I have a question for you. Why did I have to give you this information when it’s freely available on the internet with a simple google? I’m not here to do your homework for you. Next time you question me I expect you to have done a little reseach youself first or you’ll be asking questions on a different blog.
Your “1LoT” is not true. Information can be destroyed (and is destroyed all the time). Logically irreversible processes destroy information. For example, a three-input OR gate destroys information — you cannot reproduce the values on the three inputs from the value on the single output.
John von Neumann suggested, and Rolf Landauer proved, that there is a minimum entropy increase (and hence energy cost) associated with the destruction of information by irreversible processes. The field of reversible computation theory is aimed at reducing the entropy increase by making the logical processes reversible, thus preventing the destruction of information. Our three-input OR gate becomes a three-input, three-output gate in a reversible computer.
Regarding your “2LoT”, what do you even mean by an “information gradient” or the “diffusion of information”?
Again, a simple google for information gradient and information diffusion. Start reading. -ds
Woody
Interpreting the laws of thermodynamics in terms of “information” (in the sense of a Shannon entropy) is fine (and not at all controversial, as you know — a statistical mechanics approach to thermodynamics has an analogous form), but to do so, one must equate energy and information, though obviously through some conceptual mechanism. And that means the second law of thermodynamics still applies to any change in the nature of information (or, equivalently, energy), however it might occur.
The “conceptual mechanism”?: info entropy change = [integral(heat energy / temperature)] / k.
But 2LoT may not be applicable to QM, or otherwise may not be universally valid. If it’s not, then it’s moot.
j said
That’s what I wanted to say but I guess I didn’t find the right words. I consider repeated and unpredictable creation of large regions of low entropy to be a violation of 2LoT. If a glass of water becomes warmer by sucking heat out of a cooler surrounding environment that’s the creation of a region of low entropy – whether permanent or not it’s a violation of 2LoT. Similarly, if a DNA molecule becomes more complex by sucking information out of a less information-dense environment that also is a violation of 2LoT. The difference is that you will never see this kind of violation in heat transfer and aside from living things you won’t see this violation in information transfer either. We know intelligent agency routinely causes large regions of decreased information entropy. The big question then becomes whether any unintelligent process can create large regions of decreased information entropy. Granville Sewall says there are none and I agree with him.
There also appears to be a lot of confusion between order and information. An example of increased order is wind ripples on sand. But order is not necessarily information in information theoretic terms. There’s no specific information in those ripples. No message (or at least no message we know of). The information contained in them is objective, quantifiable, and not different in kind or quantity than the information contained in unrippled sand. What the ripples have more of is order, not information. Contrast this with the digitally encoded information on the spine of the DNA molecule. There is specified information quite different in kind and quantity from the order you see in crystals or the objective information seen in an unspecified arbitrary string of nucleic acids of similar length. Digitally encoded information that’s meaningful to a ribosome in building hideously complex self-replicating protein machines is a class of information apart from mere ordered arrangements of matter and energy. The class of information is complex specified information. Physicists don’t deal with this kind of order. This is information theory not physics but as Shannon has demonstrated information follows thermodynamic principles. But as Dembski and Sewall and others are attempting to show, when it comes to living things the thermodynamic principles that apply to information are evidently violated.