Matt, I would love to hear you and Tom Luongo revisit the Entropy subject. It got brushed aside in your last podcast with him. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is certainly valid. It’s real. But its validity presupposes the system is closed and no external energy can enter the system. It also presupposes that time is linear. This is how Russell saw the universe, as you’ve explained.
I don’t know if time is truly linear. Or if it is cyclical. Or if it is a series of nested cycles. Or if it is a cycle moving along a linear trajectory like a bicycle wheel across the pavement.
But what I do know is that Spring follows Winter roughly every 12 months. And the decay and the randomness characteristic of Winter is replaced with new life. Molecules come together by some unseen forces and they organise into new green shoots in my garden and ducklings in my backyard pond. This happens every year and it sufficiently proves to me entropy does reverse for a period. And since this is true (at least in my eyes), it is true that the system is not closed. There is an outside energy expressing itself in the rebirth. I would call it God. Others might call it Mother Nature. Either way, it’s an unseen force reversing periodic entropy.
Coming back to the Malthusians, they decline to view human beings as created in the image of God. They refuse our creative intellect. That creative intellect is something akin to energy being piped into this universe, through us. And it is what allows us to reverse entropy. But we must ever strive to keep the entropy at bay by exercising and fulfilling the potential of that image of God bestowed unto each and every one of us.
If we accept and embody the Malthusian label of ‘talking cow’ slapped on our foreheads... then yes... entropy is inescapable.
A brilliant and insightful analysis, as were the previous ones in the series ....explains so much of where we are now and how we got here!
Matt, I would love to hear you and Tom Luongo revisit the Entropy subject. It got brushed aside in your last podcast with him. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is certainly valid. It’s real. But its validity presupposes the system is closed and no external energy can enter the system. It also presupposes that time is linear. This is how Russell saw the universe, as you’ve explained.
I don’t know if time is truly linear. Or if it is cyclical. Or if it is a series of nested cycles. Or if it is a cycle moving along a linear trajectory like a bicycle wheel across the pavement.
But what I do know is that Spring follows Winter roughly every 12 months. And the decay and the randomness characteristic of Winter is replaced with new life. Molecules come together by some unseen forces and they organise into new green shoots in my garden and ducklings in my backyard pond. This happens every year and it sufficiently proves to me entropy does reverse for a period. And since this is true (at least in my eyes), it is true that the system is not closed. There is an outside energy expressing itself in the rebirth. I would call it God. Others might call it Mother Nature. Either way, it’s an unseen force reversing periodic entropy.
Coming back to the Malthusians, they decline to view human beings as created in the image of God. They refuse our creative intellect. That creative intellect is something akin to energy being piped into this universe, through us. And it is what allows us to reverse entropy. But we must ever strive to keep the entropy at bay by exercising and fulfilling the potential of that image of God bestowed unto each and every one of us.
If we accept and embody the Malthusian label of ‘talking cow’ slapped on our foreheads... then yes... entropy is inescapable.