Eddies in the Flow of Life?
I’ll just leave this here.
The dissipative-systems / entropic-anthropic agenda seems to have taken off in the wake of Dan Brown.
The key point being that the 2nd law’s cosmic drive to dissipate energy and maximise entropy inevitably leads to intentional life because local concentrated pockets of reverse-entropy / complex-order turn out to be the most effective and efficient way of dissipating energy in the whole system. A cosmic teleological drive towards intelligent (human) life (and beyond). Get used to it.
Today’s point? This cosmic level is is analogous to scale-dependent eddies in turbulent flow — vortices and organised sets of vortices that are created in smooth flow regimes in the wake of solid objects. This vorticity contributes to engineering effects local to the objects but ultimately dissipates the flow energy more remotely. Vorticity is a measure of the order and potential in a given flow situation. I’m not the first to spot the analogy across a wide range of more fundamental physics:
Originally published at Psybertron Asks.
