From: Durant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Using the quick summary form "Entropy always rises in a closed system",
>you can say yes, there are no exceptions. However, the law limits
>itself to a certain class of situations. If the system isn't closed,
>the law is still valid -- entropy still rises in closed systems -- but
>it doesn't *apply* to the open system.
This really is my last post to the planet of the apes.
Eva's response is typically from someone who hasn't studied
thermodynamics for years. They are remembering someting their
physics teacher said in high school. Moreover, they are self-
evidently to damn lazy to look up the web references I provide.
Eva, please make the supreme sacrifice and visit:
http://dieoff.org/page17.htm
The laws of thermodynamics HAVE BEEN USED in some economics classes
for more than FIFTEEN YEARS! Moreover, the new discipline of
ecological economics is virtually FOUNDED on thermodynamic theory.
One CAN NOT EVEN pick up a text on ecological economics without
finding a discussion on thermodynamics. There are NO exceptions to
the laws of thermodynamics. Obviously, thermodynamics DOES apply
to social systems -- SCIENTISTS ARE APPLYING IT!
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
How in the world can anyone expect to understand social systems by
omitting universal laws. What kind of stupid philosophy is this?
C U in a few weeks,
Jay
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Here is one sample from http://dieoff.org/page17.htm
ENTROPY, ENVIRONMENT AND RESOURCES (Second Edition), M. Faber,
H. Niemes, and G. Stephan; Springer-Verlag, 1995.
Phone: 1-800-SPRINGER ISBN 3-540-58984-8
Preface to the Second Edition:
This book has been used as a text in the Department of Economics
at the University of Heidelberg (FRG) during the last decade and
the University of Bern (Switzerland) during the last seven years.
We therefore were glad when Dr. Muller of Springer-Verlag offered
to publish a soft cover version of the second edition, to make
the text economically more accessible to students.
>From CONTENT:
In Part II we develop our natural science starting point (cf.
Fig. 0.1). Since the notion of entropy is very difficult to
understand and at the same time of central importance for our
approach, we devote the larger part of Chap. 3 to its
introduction It is well known that economics has been strongly
influenced by classical mechanics for about a century. The
development of thermodynamics since the beginning of the
nineteenth century, however, has remained largely unnoticed by
economists (cf. MIROWSKI 1984). For this reason we have chosen to
present in detail the thermodynamic relationships that are of
importance for us. We hope that in this way we can highlight the
difference between classical mechanics and thermodynamics.
Thermodynamic processes are irreversible and thus
process-dependent with respect to time; CLAUSIUS noticed this
temporal aspect and introduced the notion of entropy, which stems
from the Greek verb "turn over" (turn back, change). It can be
argued that it was from classical mechanics that economists
derived the attitude that economic processes are fully
controllable once they have been fully described. Thus, in many
models of growth theory the initial conditions and the growth
rate suffice for a determination of the values of all variables
at all times. The study of thermodynamic processes, however,
shows that there are also uncontrollable variables in addition to
controllable ones. Economists, of course, have noticed this, too.
The following remark by LEONTIEF (1953 :14), however, still
applies to many economic analyses even today:
"In principle at least, it has long been recognized that the
ultimate determinants of the structural relationships which
govern the operation of the economic system are to be sought
outside the narrowly conceived domain of economic science.
Notwithstanding their often expressed desire to cooperate with
the adjoining disciplines economists have more often than not
developed their own brand of psychology, their special versions
of sociology, and their particular 'laws' of technology."
It remains to the critics to decide how far this is also true for
our Part II. Here, we only wish to mention that Chap. 3 was
written for economists and may - except for Sects. 3.5, 3.8 and
3.9 - be skipped by readers with a natural science background.
In Chap. 4 we use the notion of entropy to establish a
relationship between economic activities and the environment. We
shall interpret the separation process in the extraction of
resources as a reversed diffusion process. Thereafter we shall
derive relationships between resource quantities, resource
concentration, entropy change, energy, and factor inputs. We
shall use these in order to show how changes in the environment
influence the economic production process. We shall establish the
relationship between the economic system and the environment as a
supplier of resources by way of the resource concentration. We
thus directly utilize a variable of nature. With our entropy
approach we extend the resource problem beyond the quantitative
problem, by the inclusion of aspects of the distribution of
resources within the environmental sector and the specific
conditions within resource deposit sites.
These two aspects are explicitly taken into consideration in Part
III, which deals with "The Use of Scarce Resources with
Decreasing Resource Concentration". In Chap. 5 we integrate the
resource problem into our capital-theoretic approach, using the
same model structure as in Chap. 2. The common basic model is,
however, extended by a resource sector. The waste treatment
problem, on the other hand, remains temporarily outside of the
analysis. We shall, however, be taking into consideration changes
of resource quantities and concentration within the environmental
sector. In Chap. 6 - similarly to Chap. 2 - we investigate the
properties of our model by analyzing the effects of a
rearrangement of production on the temporal distribution of the
supply of consumption goods. In doing so, we are also interested
in the replacement of techniques as a function of resource
availability. We then derive optimality conditions for the
temporal use of the environment as a supplier of resources. With
the help of the variable 'resource concentration' we are able to
show how the long-run increase of resource extraction costs can
be explained as the result of technological and ecological
conditions.
In Part IV we analyze interdependencies between environmental
protection and resource use. For this purpose we join the
environmental model of Chap. 2 with the resource model of Part
III in a five sector model. With the examples of the recovery of
resources from waste materials (recycling), and the controlled
deposition of waste materials in the environmental sector, we
show how our approach can be used to simultaneously investigate
both environmental protection measures and resource use. [p.p.
6-8]
>From the back cover:
In this book the authors analyze environmental protection and
resource use in a comprehensive framework where not only economic
but also natural scientific aspects are taken into consideration.
With this inderdiciplinary procedure an attempt is made to
incorporate the irreversibility of economic processes. The
special features of the book are (i) that the authors utilize a
natural scientific variable, entropy, to characterize the
economic system and the environment, (ii) that environmental
protection and resource use are analyzed in combination, and
(iii) that a replacement of techniques over time is analyzed. A
novel aspect is that resource extraction is interpreted as as a
reversed diffusion process. Thus a relationship between entropy,
energy and resource concentration is established. The authors
investigate the use of the environment both as a supplier of
resources and as a recipient of pollutants with the help of
thermodynamic relationships. The book therefore provides a new
set of tools for environmentalists and economists.
