Tag Archives: thermodynamics

Cause and Effect

One of the most fundamental tenets of our macroscopic world is the notion that an effect has a cause. Throw a pebble (cause) into a still pond and the ripples (effect) will be visible for all to see. Down at the microscopic level, physicists have determined through their mathematical convolutions that there is no such thing — there is nothing precluding the laws of physics running in reverse. Yet, we never witness ripples in a pond diminishing and ejecting a pebble, which then finds its way back to a catcher.

Of course, this quandary has kept many a philosopher’s pencil well sharpened while physicists continue to scratch their heads. So, is cause and effect merely an coincidental illusion? Or, does our physics only operate in one direction, determined by a yet to be discovered fundamental law?

Author of Causal Reasoning in Physics, philosopher Mathias Frisch, offers great summary of current thinking, but no fundamental breakthrough.

From Aeon:

Do early childhood vaccinations cause autism, as the American model Jenny McCarthy maintains? Are human carbon emissions at the root of global warming? Come to that, if I flick this switch, will it make the light on the porch come on? Presumably I don’t need to persuade you that these would be incredibly useful things to know.

Since anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions do cause climate change, cutting our emissions would make a difference to future warming. By contrast, autism cannot be prevented by leaving children unvaccinated. Now, there’s a subtlety here. For our judgments to be much use to us, we have to distinguish between causal relations and mere correlations. From 1999 and 2009, the number of people in the US who fell into a swimming pool and drowned varies with the number of films in which Nicholas Cage appeared – but it seems unlikely that we could reduce the number of pool drownings by keeping Cage off the screen, desirable as the remedy might be for other reasons.

In short, a working knowledge of the way in which causes and effects relate to one another seems indispensible to our ability to make our way in the world. Yet there is a long and venerable tradition in philosophy, dating back at least to David Hume in the 18th century, that finds the notions of causality to be dubious. And that might be putting it kindly.

Hume argued that when we seek causal relations, we can never discover the real power; the, as it were, metaphysical glue that binds events together. All we are able to see are regularities – the ‘constant conjunction’ of certain sorts of observation. He concluded from this that any talk of causal powers is illegitimate. Which is not to say that he was ignorant of the central importance of causal reasoning; indeed, he said that it was only by means of such inferences that we can ‘go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses’. Causal reasoning was somehow both indispensable and illegitimate. We appear to have a dilemma.

Hume’s remedy for such metaphysical quandaries was arguably quite sensible, as far as it went: have a good meal, play backgammon with friends, and try to put it out of your mind. But in the late 19th and 20th centuries, his causal anxieties were reinforced by another problem, arguably harder to ignore. According to this new line of thought, causal notions seemed peculiarly out of place in our most fundamental science – physics.

There were two reasons for this. First, causes seemed too vague for a mathematically precise science. If you can’t observe them, how can you measure them? If you can’t measure them, how can you put them in your equations? Second, causality has a definite direction in time: causes have to happen before their effects. Yet the basic laws of physics (as distinct from such higher-level statistical generalisations as the laws of thermodynamics) appear to be time-symmetric: if a certain process is allowed under the basic laws of physics, a video of the same process played backwards will also depict a process that is allowed by the laws.

The 20th-century English philosopher Bertrand Russell concluded from these considerations that, since cause and effect play no fundamental role in physics, they should be removed from the philosophical vocabulary altogether. ‘The law of causality,’ he said with a flourish, ‘like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed not to do harm.’

Neo-Russellians in the 21st century express their rejection of causes with no less rhetorical vigour. The philosopher of science John Earman of the University of Pittsburgh maintains that the wooliness of causal notions makes them inappropriate for physics: ‘A putative fundamental law of physics must be stated as a mathematical relation without the use of escape clauses or words that require a PhD in philosophy to apply (and two other PhDs to referee the application, and a third referee to break the tie of the inevitable disagreement of the first two).’

This is all very puzzling. Is it OK to think in terms of causes or not? If so, why, given the apparent hostility to causes in the underlying laws? And if not, why does it seem to work so well?

A clearer look at the physics might help us to find our way. Even though (most of) the basic laws are symmetrical in time, there are many arguably non-thermodynamic physical phenomena that can happen only one way. Imagine a stone thrown into a still pond: after the stone breaks the surface, waves spread concentrically from the point of impact. A common enough sight.

Now, imagine a video clip of the spreading waves played backwards. What we would see are concentrically converging waves. For some reason this second process, which is the time-reverse of the first, does not seem to occur in nature. The process of waves spreading from a source looks irreversible. And yet the underlying physical law describing the behaviour of waves – the wave equation – is as time-symmetric as any law in physics. It allows for both diverging and converging waves. So, given that the physical laws equally allow phenomena of both types, why do we frequently observe organised waves diverging from a source but never coherently converging waves?

Physicists and philosophers disagree on the correct answer to this question – which might be fine if it applied only to stones in ponds. But the problem also crops up with electromagnetic waves and the emission of light or radio waves: anywhere, in fact, that we find radiating waves. What to say about it?

On the one hand, many physicists (and some philosophers) invoke a causal principle to explain the asymmetry. Consider an antenna transmitting a radio signal. Since the source causes the signal, and since causes precede their effects, the radio waves diverge from the antenna after it is switched on simply because they are the repercussions of an initial disturbance, namely the switching on of the antenna. Imagine the time-reverse process: a radio wave steadily collapses into an antenna before the latter has been turned on. On the face of it, this conflicts with the idea of causality, because the wave would be present before its cause (the antenna) had done anything. David Griffiths, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Reed College in Oregon and the author of a widely used textbook on classical electrodynamics, favours this explanation, going so far as to call a time-asymmetric principle of causality ‘the most sacred tenet in all of physics’.

On the other hand, some physicists (and many philosophers) reject appeals to causal notions and maintain that the asymmetry ought to be explained statistically. The reason why we find coherently diverging waves but never coherently converging ones, they maintain, is not that wave sources cause waves, but that a converging wave would require the co?ordinated behaviour of ‘wavelets’ coming in from multiple different directions of space – delicately co?ordinated behaviour so improbable that it would strike us as nearly miraculous.

It so happens that this wave controversy has quite a distinguished history. In 1909, a few years before Russell’s pointed criticism of the notion of cause, Albert Einstein took part in a published debate concerning the radiation asymmetry. His opponent was the Swiss physicist Walther Ritz, a name you might not recognise.

It is in fact rather tragic that Ritz did not make larger waves in his own career, because his early reputation surpassed Einstein’s. The physicist Hermann Minkowski, who taught both Ritz and Einstein in Zurich, called Einstein a ‘lazy dog’ but had high praise for Ritz.  When the University of Zurich was looking to appoint its first professor of theoretical physics in 1909, Ritz was the top candidate for the position. According to one member of the hiring committee, he possessed ‘an exceptional talent, bordering on genius’. But he suffered from tuberculosis, and so, due to his failing health, he was passed over for the position, which went to Einstein instead. Ritz died that very year at age 31.

Months before his death, however, Ritz published a joint letter with Einstein summarising their disagreement. While Einstein thought that the irreversibility of radiation processes could be explained probabilistically, Ritz proposed what amounted to a causal explanation. He maintained that the reason for the asymmetry is that an elementary source of radiation has an influence on other sources in the future and not in the past.

This joint letter is something of a classic text, widely cited in the literature. What is less well-known is that, in the very same year, Einstein demonstrated a striking reversibility of his own. In a second published letter, he appears to take a position very close to Ritz’s – the very view he had dismissed just months earlier. According to the wave theory of light, Einstein now asserted, a wave source ‘produces a spherical wave that propagates outward. The inverse process does not exist as elementary process’. The only way in which converging waves can be produced, Einstein claimed, was by combining a very large number of coherently operating sources. He appears to have changed his mind.

Given Einstein’s titanic reputation, you might think that such a momentous shift would occasion a few ripples in the history of science. But I know of only one significant reference to his later statement: a letter from the philosopher Karl Popper to the journal Nature in 1956. In this letter, Popper describes the wave asymmetry in terms very similar to Einstein’s. And he also makes one particularly interesting remark, one that might help us to unpick the riddle. Coherently converging waves, Popper insisted, ‘would demand a vast number of distant coherent generators of waves the co?ordination of which, to be explicable, would have to be shown as originating from the centre’ (my italics).

This is, in fact, a particular instance of a much broader phenomenon. Consider two events that are spatially distant yet correlated with one another. If they are not related as cause and effect, they tend to be joint effects of a common cause. If, for example, two lamps in a room go out suddenly, it is unlikely that both bulbs just happened to burn out simultaneously. So we look for a common cause – perhaps a circuit breaker that tripped.

Common-cause inferences are so pervasive that it is difficult to imagine what we could know about the world beyond our immediate surroundings without them. Hume was right: judgments about causality are absolutely essential in going ‘beyond the evidence of the senses’. In his book The Direction of Time (1956), the philosopher Hans Reichenbach formulated a principle underlying such inferences: ‘If an improbable coincidence has occurred, there must exist a common cause.’ To the extent that we are bound to apply Reichenbach’s rule, we are all like the hard-boiled detective who doesn’t believe in coincidences.

Read the entire article here.

A Physics Based Theory of Life

Carnot_heat_engine

Those who subscribe to the non-creationist theory of the origins of life tend gravitate towards the idea of assembly of self-replicating, organic molecules in our primeval oceans — the so-called primordial soup theory. Recently however, professor Jeremy England of MIT has proposed a thermodynamic explanation, which posits that inorganic matter tends to organize — under the right conditions — in a way that enables it to dissipate increasing amounts of energy. This is one of the fundamental attributes of living organisms.

Could we be the product of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, nothing more than the expression of increasing entropy?

Read more of this fascinating new hypothesis below or check out England’s paper on the Statistical Physics of Self-replication.

From Quanta:

Why does life exist?

Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.

England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”

His idea, detailed in a recent paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.

England has taken “a very brave and very important step,” said Alexander Grosberg, a professor of physics at New York University who has followed England’s work since its early stages. The “big hope” is that he has identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life, Grosberg said.

“Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever came across,” said Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institutes of Health who corresponded with England about his theory after meeting him at a conference. “I was struck by the originality of the ideas.”

Others, such as Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and biophysics at Harvard University, are not convinced. “Jeremy’s ideas are interesting and potentially promising, but at this point are extremely speculative, especially as applied to life phenomena,” Shakhnovich said.

England’s theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab.

“He’s trying something radically different,” said Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an experiment after learning about England’s work. “As an organizing lens, I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, it’s going to be very much worth the investigation.”

At the heart of England’s idea is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the “arrow of time.” Hot things cool down, gas diffuses through air, eggs scramble but never spontaneously unscramble; in short, energy tends to disperse or spread out as time progresses. Entropy is a measure of this tendency, quantifying how dispersed the energy is among the particles in a system, and how diffuse those particles are throughout space. It increases as a simple matter of probability: There are more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be concentrated. Thus, as particles in a system move around and interact, they will, through sheer chance, tend to adopt configurations in which the energy is spread out. Eventually, the system arrives at a state of maximum entropy called “thermodynamic equilibrium,” in which energy is uniformly distributed. A cup of coffee and the room it sits in become the same temperature, for example. As long as the cup and the room are left alone, this process is irreversible. The coffee never spontaneously heats up again because the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against so much of the room’s energy randomly concentrating in its atoms.

Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or “closed” system, an “open” system can keep its entropy low — that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms — by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings. In his influential 1944 monograph “What Is Life?” the eminent quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that this is what living things must do. A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.

Life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but until recently, physicists were unable to use thermodynamics to explain why it should arise in the first place. In Schrödinger’s day, they could solve the equations of thermodynamics only for closed systems in equilibrium. In the 1960s, the Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine made progress on predicting the behavior of open systems weakly driven by external energy sources (for which he won the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry). But the behavior of systems that are far from equilibrium, which are connected to the outside environment and strongly driven by external sources of energy, could not be predicted.

Read the entire story here.

Image: Carnot engine diagram, where an amount of heat QH flows from a high temperature TH furnace through the fluid of the “working body” (working substance) and the remaining heat QC flows into the cold sink TC, thus forcing the working substance to do mechanical work W on the surroundings, via cycles of contractions and expansions. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

 

God Is a Thermodynamicist

Physicists and cosmologists are constantly postulating and testing new ideas to explain the universe and everything within. Over the last hundred years or so, two such ideas have grown to explain much about our cosmos, and do so very successfully — quantum mechanics, which describes the very small, and relativity which describes the very large. However, these two views do no reconcile, leaving theoreticians and researchers looking for a more fundamental theory of everything. One possible idea banishes the notions of time and gravity — treating them both as emergent properties of a deeper reality.

From New Scientist:

As revolutions go, its origins were haphazard. It was, according to the ringleader Max Planck, an “act of desperation”. In 1900, he proposed the idea that energy comes in discrete chunks, or quanta, simply because the smooth delineations of classical physics could not explain the spectrum of energy re-radiated by an absorbing body.

Yet rarely was a revolution so absolute. Within a decade or so, the cast-iron laws that had underpinned physics since Newton’s day were swept away. Classical certainty ceded its stewardship of reality to the probabilistic rule of quantum mechanics, even as the parallel revolution of Einstein’s relativity displaced our cherished, absolute notions of space and time. This was complete regime change.

Except for one thing. A single relict of the old order remained, one that neither Planck nor Einstein nor any of their contemporaries had the will or means to remove. The British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington summed up the situation in 1915. “If your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation,” he wrote.

In this essay, I will explore the fascinating question of why, since their origins in the early 19th century, the laws of thermodynamics have proved so formidably robust. The journey traces the deep connections that were discovered in the 20th century between thermodynamics and information theory – connections that allow us to trace intimate links between thermodynamics and not only quantum theory but also, more speculatively, relativity. Ultimately, I will argue, those links show us how thermodynamics in the 21st century can guide us towards a theory that will supersede them both.

In its origins, thermodynamics is a theory about heat: how it flows and what it can be made to do (see diagram). The French engineer Sadi Carnot formulated the second law in 1824 to characterise the mundane fact that the steam engines then powering the industrial revolution could never be perfectly efficient. Some of the heat you pumped into them always flowed into the cooler environment, rather than staying in the engine to do useful work. That is an expression of a more general rule: unless you do something to stop it, heat will naturally flow from hotter places to cooler places to even up any temperature differences it finds. The same principle explains why keeping the refrigerator in your kitchen cold means pumping energy into it; only that will keep warmth from the surroundings at bay.

A few decades after Carnot, the German physicist Rudolph Clausius explained such phenomena in terms of a quantity characterising disorder that he called entropy. In this picture, the universe works on the back of processes that increase entropy – for example dissipating heat from places where it is concentrated, and therefore more ordered, to cooler areas, where it is not.

That predicts a grim fate for the universe itself. Once all heat is maximally dissipated, no useful process can happen in it any more: it dies a “heat death”. A perplexing question is raised at the other end of cosmic history, too. If nature always favours states of high entropy, how and why did the universe start in a state that seems to have been of comparatively low entropy? At present we have no answer, and later I will mention an intriguing alternative view.

Perhaps because of such undesirable consequences, the legitimacy of the second law was for a long time questioned. The charge was formulated with the most striking clarity by the British physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1867. He was satisfied that inanimate matter presented no difficulty for the second law. In an isolated system, heat always passes from the hotter to the cooler, and a neat clump of dye molecules readily dissolves in water and disperses randomly, never the other way round. Disorder as embodied by entropy does always increase.

Maxwell’s problem was with life. Living things have “intentionality”: they deliberately do things to other things to make life easier for themselves. Conceivably, they might try to reduce the entropy of their surroundings and thereby violate the second law.

Information is power

Such a possibility is highly disturbing to physicists. Either something is a universal law or it is merely a cover for something deeper. Yet it was only in the late 1970s that Maxwell’s entropy-fiddling “demon” was laid to rest. Its slayer was the US physicist Charles Bennett, who built on work by his colleague at IBM, Rolf Landauer, using the theory of information developed a few decades earlier by Claude Shannon. An intelligent being can certainly rearrange things to lower the entropy of its environment. But to do this, it must first fill up its memory, gaining information as to how things are arranged in the first place.

This acquired information must be encoded somewhere, presumably in the demon’s memory. When this memory is finally full, or the being dies or otherwise expires, it must be reset. Dumping all this stored, ordered information back into the environment increases entropy – and this entropy increase, Bennett showed, will ultimately always be at least as large as the entropy reduction the demon originally achieved. Thus the status of the second law was assured, albeit anchored in a mantra of Landauer’s that would have been unintelligible to the 19th-century progenitors of thermodynamics: that “information is physical”.

But how does this explain that thermodynamics survived the quantum revolution? Classical objects behave very differently to quantum ones, so the same is presumably true of classical and quantum information. After all, quantum computers are notoriously more powerful than classical ones (or would be if realised on a large scale).

The reason is subtle, and it lies in a connection between entropy and probability contained in perhaps the most profound and beautiful formula in all of science. Engraved on the tomb of the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann in Vienna’s central cemetery, it reads simply S = k log W. Here S is entropy – the macroscopic, measurable entropy of a gas, for example – while k is a constant of nature that today bears Boltzmann’s name. Log W is the mathematical logarithm of a microscopic, probabilistic quantity W – in a gas, this would be the number of ways the positions and velocities of its many individual atoms can be arranged.

On a philosophical level, Boltzmann’s formula embodies the spirit of reductionism: the idea that we can, at least in principle, reduce our outward knowledge of a system’s activities to basic, microscopic physical laws. On a practical, physical level, it tells us that all we need to understand disorder and its increase is probabilities. Tot up the number of configurations the atoms of a system can be in and work out their probabilities, and what emerges is nothing other than the entropy that determines its thermodynamical behaviour. The equation asks no further questions about the nature of the underlying laws; we need not care if the dynamical processes that create the probabilities are classical or quantum in origin.

There is an important additional point to be made here. Probabilities are fundamentally different things in classical and quantum physics. In classical physics they are “subjective” quantities that constantly change as our state of knowledge changes. The probability that a coin toss will result in heads or tails, for instance, jumps from ½ to 1 when we observe the outcome. If there were a being who knew all the positions and momenta of all the particles in the universe – known as a “Laplace demon”, after the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, who first countenanced the possibility – it would be able to determine the course of all subsequent events in a classical universe, and would have no need for probabilities to describe them.

In quantum physics, however, probabilities arise from a genuine uncertainty about how the world works. States of physical systems in quantum theory are represented in what the quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger called catalogues of information, but they are catalogues in which adding information on one page blurs or scrubs it out on another. Knowing the position of a particle more precisely means knowing less well how it is moving, for example. Quantum probabilities are “objective”, in the sense that they cannot be entirely removed by gaining more information.

That casts in an intriguing light thermodynamics as originally, classically formulated. There, the second law is little more than impotence written down in the form of an equation. It has no deep physical origin itself, but is an empirical bolt-on to express the otherwise unaccountable fact that we cannot know, predict or bring about everything that might happen, as classical dynamical laws suggest we can. But this changes as soon as you bring quantum physics into the picture, with its attendant notion that uncertainty is seemingly hardwired into the fabric of reality. Rooted in probabilities, entropy and thermodynamics acquire a new, more fundamental physical anchor.

It is worth pointing out, too, that this deep-rooted connection seems to be much more general. Recently, together with my colleagues Markus Müller of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and Oscar Dahlsten at the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore, I have looked at what happens to thermodynamical relations in a generalised class of probabilistic theories that embrace quantum theory and much more besides. There too, the crucial relationship between information and disorder, as quantified by entropy, survives (arxiv.org/1107.6029).

One theory to rule them all

As for gravity – the only one of nature’s four fundamental forces not covered by quantum theory – a more speculative body of research suggests it might be little more than entropy in disguise (see “Falling into disorder”). If so, that would also bring Einstein’s general theory of relativity, with which we currently describe gravity, firmly within the purview of thermodynamics.

Take all this together, and we begin to have a hint of what makes thermodynamics so successful. The principles of thermodynamics are at their roots all to do with information theory. Information theory is simply an embodiment of how we interact with the universe – among other things, to construct theories to further our understanding of it. Thermodynamics is, in Einstein’s term, a “meta-theory”: one constructed from principles over and above the structure of any dynamical laws we devise to describe reality’s workings. In that sense we can argue that it is more fundamental than either quantum physics or general relativity.

If we can accept this and, like Eddington and his ilk, put all our trust in the laws of thermodynamics, I believe it may even afford us a glimpse beyond the current physical order. It seems unlikely that quantum physics and relativity represent the last revolutions in physics. New evidence could at any time foment their overthrow. Thermodynamics might help us discern what any usurping theory would look like.

For example, earlier this year, two of my colleagues in Singapore, Esther Hänggi and Stephanie Wehner, showed that a violation of the quantum uncertainty principle – that idea that you can never fully get rid of probabilities in a quantum context – would imply a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. Beating the uncertainty limit means extracting extra information about the system, which requires the system to do more work than thermodynamics allows it to do in the relevant state of disorder. So if thermodynamics is any guide, whatever any post-quantum world might look like, we are stuck with a degree of uncertainty (arxiv.org/abs/1205.6894).

My colleague at the University of Oxford, the physicist David Deutsch, thinks we should take things much further. Not only should any future physics conform to thermodynamics, but the whole of physics should be constructed in its image. The idea is to generalise the logic of the second law as it was stringently formulated by the mathematician Constantin Carathéodory in 1909: that in the vicinity of any state of a physical system, there are other states that cannot physically be reached if we forbid any exchange of heat with the environment.

James Joule’s 19th century experiments with beer can be used to illustrate this idea. The English brewer, whose name lives on in the standard unit of energy, sealed beer in a thermally isolated tub containing a paddle wheel that was connected to weights falling under gravity outside. The wheel’s rotation warmed the beer, increasing the disorder of its molecules and therefore its entropy. But hard as we might try, we simply cannot use Joule’s set-up to decrease the beer’s temperature, even by a fraction of a millikelvin. Cooler beer is, in this instance, a state regrettably beyond the reach of physics.

God, the thermodynamicist

The question is whether we can express the whole of physics simply by enumerating possible and impossible processes in a given situation. This is very different from how physics is usually phrased, in both the classical and quantum regimes, in terms of states of systems and equations that describe how those states change in time. The blind alleys down which the standard approach can lead are easiest to understand in classical physics, where the dynamical equations we derive allow a whole host of processes that patently do not occur – the ones we have to conjure up the laws of thermodynamics expressly to forbid, such as dye molecules reclumping spontaneously in water.

By reversing the logic, our observations of the natural world can again take the lead in deriving our theories. We observe the prohibitions that nature puts in place, be it on decreasing entropy, getting energy from nothing, travelling faster than light or whatever. The ultimately “correct” theory of physics – the logically tightest – is the one from which the smallest deviation gives us something that breaks those taboos.

There are other advantages in recasting physics in such terms. Time is a perennially problematic concept in physical theories. In quantum theory, for example, it enters as an extraneous parameter of unclear origin that cannot itself be quantised. In thermodynamics, meanwhile, the passage of time is entropy increase by any other name. A process such as dissolved dye molecules forming themselves into a clump offends our sensibilities because it appears to amount to running time backwards as much as anything else, although the real objection is that it decreases entropy.

Apply this logic more generally, and time ceases to exist as an independent, fundamental entity, but one whose flow is determined purely in terms of allowed and disallowed processes. With it go problems such as that I alluded to earlier, of why the universe started in a state of low entropy. If states and their dynamical evolution over time cease to be the question, then anything that does not break any transformational rules becomes a valid answer.

Such an approach would probably please Einstein, who once said: “What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.” A thermodynamically inspired formulation of physics might not answer that question directly, but leaves God with no choice but to be a thermodynamicist. That would be a singular accolade for those 19th-century masters of steam: that they stumbled upon the essence of the universe, entirely by accident. The triumph of thermodynamics would then be a revolution by stealth, 200 years in the making.

Read the entire article here.