Towards a new kind of science and technology

Reading the history of science and technology, one is surprised by the importance of two branches of physics: electricity, magnetism, and thermodynamics. The former is primarily a way for us to transport energy conveniently. The latter is…. How we obtain energy in the first place and how much of chemistry is possible. Even an invention as humble as a small electric motor can have a huge impact on how things are done. For example, before the invention of small electric motors, a machine shop or printing press was powered directly by a thermodynamic and mechanical link: usually a belt driven by a belt. spool. Other types of mechanical connections are also used: wire rope system (elevators still use them, which is a bit weird) or Hydraulics. Today, we send electricity through pipes and electric motors convert it into motion. It certainly seemed like magic at the time; when you stop and think about it, it’s pretty cool. Burn something in one place and send the energy through a thin sheet of metal into small motors that do useful work where you need it. It’s much better than tying a belt to the output shaft of a steam engine and having guys in another room shoveling coal into it.

Thermodynamics is how we derive energy from heat. It’s also how we design chemical reactions to make useful substances. I can imagine a modern world without modern chemistry (without modern chemistry there would be fewer people) Haber-Bosch process); even without electricity (and certainly without computers: life would be more interesting without them), but not without thermodynamics and heat engines. Human living standards are essentially proportional to the amount of heat converted into energy that humans can use to do useful work. Without the heat engine and the science that drove its creation and refinement, we would be back in Renaissance or Roman times, when almost everything was moved and built with muscles. Electricity can now be obtained directly from the sun, and we have had windmills and waterwheels for thousands of years. There are some fancy ways to extract electricity directly from heat: magnetohydrodynamics For example: it’s still thermodynamics in the end. The most accessible human power comes from thermodynamics. We live in an age of thermodynamics: without it we would be back to subsistence agriculture and chattel slavery.

There is a reductionist version of thermodynamics that is mostly taught in schools: statistical mechanics. For physicists, it’s “nice” to think of things this way because we can derive most of the ideas of thermodynamics from simpler ideas in probability and statistics, and knowing that matter is made of atoms . For this reason we like to think of it as more fundamental, but I’m not sure it’s more general than thermodynamics, which was developed to optimize heat engines. It’s wonderful that we can derive all this thermodynamic knowledge from simpler ideas, and it represents a great intellectual achievement. Still, something is lost teaching method Just think about statistical physics stuff.

I think it’s also possible that the statistical physics stuff is blinding us to things we should be able to see if we approach the problem differently. If physicists hadn’t invented thermodynamics first, they probably wouldn’t have invented statistical physics and derived all these cool gauge ensembles. It’s not something that arises naturally from the idea of ​​probability and atoms, although everyone who studies thermodynamics thinks it might be something similar. Thermodynamics really came from thinking hard about how to make better steam engines (and before that, better steam engines) cannon). That’s how we got there. Practical observations of nature, not smoking a pipe, thinking about big ideas in mathematics. Statistical physics was a clean-up job; this was a very successful example, but it came after the laws were discovered.

There are other attempts to embed thermodynamics into other types of abstractions. Rupaine Geometry is a way to embed it into information geometry: I think mainly because it makes it easier to reason about thermodynamics in other differential geometric systems like general relativity, although I haven’t looked into it and I could be wrong of. other expansion This idea may have more generalizability. Maybe not: Physics fans love mapping ideas onto other types of models, especially geometric models (guilty). This doesn’t mean you can gain any additional insights from them. Other examples of higher-form thermodynamic formulas: contact geometry, hamilton jacoby theory (and here as brilliantly), E.T. Jaynes largest entity Try using information theory, by Kara Theodori axiomatic Thermodynamics. Are they important? Don’t know: So far, they don’t seem to have much of an impact on anything, other than “this is very pretty.”

Thinking about the history of thermodynamics is essentially people trying to grasp the following concepts: hot. Heat and its absence are things we observe in nature through rather humble observations. Drill a hole and everything heats up: what does this mean? People have been thinking about heat in various ways for hundreds of years years ago thermodynamics was formulated mid-1800s and completed in the early 1900s. The observation of heat and its behavior is a fairly simple matter: observing microscopic theory is fun and you can find strange effects that you might not be looking for, but it is basic Something that brings the most insights. Very simple measurements: pressure, temperature, volume, work. Retarded monkeys measure things in interesting ways, noting that things are conserved or equal to combinations of other variables. None of the “probe into the mind of God” folly we’ve been subjected to since the 20th century has brought public relations to the physics community: just science hammered down by the people who actually created the modern world.

I hypothesize that there are higher order “thermodynamics” that are discoverable but have not yet been discovered. Everyone knows that there is something called non-equilibrium thermodynamicsit almost certainly has many undiscovered laws, and several have been discovered like Onsager Countdown relation. Note that the Onsager reciprocity relation, like all other laws of thermodynamics, is strictly stated. He did not start with a microscopic version of statistical physics; He used normal physical concepts of continuity and thought about what was going on in a way that was almost not statistical mechanics until the end of the second paper. You can read his original paper here and here for his reasoning. The impetus for this work was the thermoelectric effect, which had previously been a classic subject of interest to pioneers of thermodynamics such as Lord Kelvin. Onsager got the job done; the first and so far only law of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Despite its extreme real-world utility, it’s woefully undertaught in schools: I think because you have to be very familiar with thermodynamics itself, and thermodynamics is woefully undertaught in physics schools.

With the advent of useful computers, people mostly stopped thinking about these things seriously. If you have a non-equilibrium system, you can calculate most of what you need using computer simulations. The problem with having a computer find answers in specific situations is that you don’t get higher-level Onsager-type things that allow you to find effects you haven’t thought of yet. I’m talking about the inconspicuous phenomena you can see. There are many phenomena that exhibit order in matter that are not easily described by higher-order thinking or some Onsageresque thermodynamic relationship. They may or may not be describable by some kind of simulator. When things behave in an orderly manner, they should be describeable mathematically.

There is this person Hermann HakenWhat amazes me is that he just died this year (at the age of 97) and he wrote some books about what he called Synergetics. This was an exciting series of books to read as an undergrad in the early 90s, because it seemed to tie together a bunch of physics stuff that was bothering me and promise a way forward (it also made me think about anger, information, and entropy are the same) things). Haken’s idea came from the study of phase transitions, specifically the self-organization of laser dynamics. He and his colleagues are interested in things that organize themselves: turbulence, fluid mechanics and patterns in plasmas, the brain, the Fokker-Planck equation, and more. He thought (like I did) that there must be some unifying mathematics behind this weird stuff that looked familiar and classically mathematical.

I don’t think these efforts produced anything useful; partly because it was a long-term commitment to qualitative research, fiddling with differential equations, and interdisciplinary work, and a lack of trying to make something in the physical world work properly, unlike thermodynamics and steam engines. But you can’t blame them for trying; Ilya Prigogine Around this time he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in chemistry self-organizing systemfractals are a big thing, and results from chaos theory are pouring in, providing mathematical order to yet another complex system that appears to have the ability to self-organize. characteristic. Simple computer simulations of flocks of birds and ant colonies are now possible, showing a seductive order through simple rules. Soliton It was something people were working on at the time: a self-organizing system that could be made with a small bucket of water. Of course it is made of Kortwig de Vries Equation, problem solved, right? No, not really. This phenomenon is more common than that and can basically only be understood through computer simulations. For a while, it was thought that solitons might hold the hidden key to what’s really going on in quantum mechanics. This seems a bit far-fetched, but it’s the best guess I know. When I started my physics career in the early 1990s, these things seemed like the future. Unfortunately, it’s still a thing of the future: as far as I know, people mostly don’t think about these things anymore, and never really think about them seriously in the end. These days, physicists seem more interested in tinkering with neural networks.

Of course, all this spontaneous order may just be an accident, and these things have no overall principle. But I don’t think so. I think it’s still mostly unstudied, and it’s unlikely to be helpful to anyone outside of classified work at the Navy and Aerospace Labs. Although there are Some interesting Exceptions In this regard, military research on turbulence has yielded new results. Think that something like turbulence is related to non-equilibrium chemistry Reactions, chaos, or solitons, but I think Haken and his friends are on to something, and there’s something there that could unify a lot of seemingly unrelated anomalous material behavior. This sort of thing can be used to solve real problems, and in order to make progress on this, we should probably use one or more of these as test cases if we want to figure something out, just like we figured out thermodynamics by thinking about steam Same engine. I think Haken’s project was a failure, mainly because it was a late-career vanity project, completed in the usual dull way”Convene meetings and publish meeting minutes” way, but I think his assumption about the underlying order is probably correct. This kind of thing might not progress by throwing money and holding conferences (no other problem in human history has been solved in this way): it might try to build some practical stuff involving such self-organizing systems. Or at least an Onsaga-style in-depth look at some specific studies. Figuring out what this might be is almost certainly not going to happen in the “physics world”, for the same reason that nothing else is going to happen in the “physics world”, but it should happen. Otherwise, humans leave money on the table.