Entropy never dies. That story.

[rich]

meant little pockets of order

On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 9:46 AM rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> those little pockets of disorder are a nice metaphor for Pynchon's
> imagined utopias:hippie communes, anarchist spaces, DeepArcher and family
>
> rich
>
> On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 5:11 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> *love the line phrase: "contraptions that squeeze out the disorder that is
>> locked inside of matter"*
>>
>> *From an interview with Somebody Greene, physicist with a new book.
>> Guardian interview. *
>>
>> *"In your book, you talk about the rising disorder – the increasing
>> entropy
>> – of the universe, and how that shapes its future. If the universe is
>> becoming more and more disordered, why do stars, planets and people form?
>> "*
>> "This is absolutely fundamental. The beauty of the second law of
>> thermodynamics is that while it stipulates that the overall amount of
>> disorder has to increase, little pockets of order can form so long as, in
>> the process, they create enough disorder in the surrounding environment to
>> compensate. For stars and planets, we can establish that the formation
>> process discards enough waste and disorder to the surrounding environment
>> that the overall disorder goes up. Indeed, we humans are contraptions that
>> squeeze out the disorder that is locked inside of matter. We eat things,
>> we
>> breathe, and when we metabolise all that we take in, we use it to create
>> our internal order, to grow bigger, stronger and so forth, but in the
>> process we release enough heat and waste so that the overall disorder
>> balance sheet is totally in the direction of disorder."
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>