"----- no closed system can survive in the long run." Does the Second Law of Thermodynamics say so? What happens to the closed or isolated system? Does it die? If it does, in what sense?
How was the earth a closed system in the beginning? Was it not insignificantly a small part surrounded by a vast open environment?
Earth's conducive environment cum Mother Nature cum God: it is nothing but a matter of faith. I don't have any problem with it.
"Purush" and "Prokriti" are the two important ideas or concepts in one branch of Hindu metaphysics. Is Mother Nature being identified with this "Prokriti"? For now I do not have any comment on Rabindranath having identified Mother Nature as God.
Virtually there are many closed societies although they are not closed or isolated in thermodynamic sense. Any way, what happens to these societies (communist and Taliban societies included) if they remain isolated? In thermodynamics, the entropy or disorder tends to reach maximum thereby making the system dynamically equilibrium. How are human closed societies analogous to this?
I see a dangerous mixing of science, economics, philosophy, and theology here. We need to be careful about what we are saying.
In my opinion the statement that we don't need to invoke any divine authority to prove that God created this universe (now we know there are multiple universes) does not make the persons who make this statement atheists. The universes were created from nothing and each of these universes follows it's own natural laws.
The claim that God created these universes leads to one fundamental question: who created God? Let me refer to how Hindu theology answers this question. Brahma is the lord of creation and one name of Brahma is Swoyombhu (self created). Very smart. Right?
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On Jan 5, 2015, at 6:50 PM, Jiten Roy jnrsr53@yahoo.com [mukto-mona] <mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
On Jan 5, 2015, at 6:50 PM, Jiten Roy jnrsr53@yahoo.com [mukto-mona] <mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
As per second law of thermodynamics, no closed system can survive in the long run. The way I understand the process is - earth unstable at the beginning, meaning it was closed system. As it started to become stable, various compound formation started to occur. So, when environment on earth became conducive to the origination of lives, lives started to form from various sources across the globe. As a result, we see regional similarity in species.This article clearly explains that lives could be created out of earth's conducive environment (mother-nature) alone, which is also the view of many Hindu religious scriptures - all living beings are creations of the mother-nature.Many Hindus consider mother-nature as their God. Tagore did so also. Dr. Das, how can you deny the existence of this God, can you? So, left and right depends on one's perspective.Now, as you know, second law of thermodynamics applies to all systems, including social systems. As you know, Communist social system was a closed system, and that did not last. Radical Islamic systems, such as Taliban and Caliphate, are closed systems, and they will not last also in the long run.Now, I can predict, with certainty, that an open system, such as Capitalist social system, will last to the end. I am not predicting this based on my political economics, I am doing so based on my faith in the second law of thermodynamics.Thanks.Jiten Roy
From: "Kamal Das kamalctgu@gmail.com [mukto-mona]" <mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com>
To: mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, January 4, 2015 8:04 PM
Subject: Re: [mukto-mona] God is on the ropes:
God hasn't been a creator in many mythologies. He ain't omniscient even in Abrahamic theology, and not omnipotent in any logic. Vital force theory in creating organic molecules fell apart long ago. Dr. Roy, it is interesting to note, is a wacky right when it comes to political economics. But he belongs to wacky left in denying the existence of god.
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On Jan 5, 2015, at 3:22 AM, "Sukhamaya Bain subain1@yahoo.com [mukto-mona]" <mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com> wrote:Interesting phrase, 'humble servants of God'! I wonder who created this phrase. Shouldn't it be "fearful and ignorant servants of the unknown"?SuBain=====================================On Sunday, January 4, 2015 3:29 PM, "Jiten Roy jnrsr53@yahoo.com [mukto-mona]" <mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
God is on the ropes: The brilliant new science that has creationists and the Christian right terrifiedA young MIT professor is finishing Darwin's task — and threatening to undo everything the wacky right holds dearEnlargeCharles Darwin (Credit: Wikimedia/WDG Photo via Shutterstock/Salon)The Christian right's obsessive hatred of Darwin is a wonder to behold, but it could someday be rivaled by the hatred of someone you've probably never even heard of. Darwin earned their hatred because he explained the evolution of life in a way that doesn't require the hand of God. Darwin didn't exclude God, of course, though many creationists seem incapable of grasping this point. But he didn't require God, either, and that was enough to drive some people mad.Darwin also didn't have anything to say about how life got started in the first place — which still leaves a mighty big role for God to play, for those who are so inclined. But that could be about to change, and things could get a whole lot worse for creationists because of Jeremy England, a young MIT professor who's proposed a theory, based in thermodynamics, showing that the emergence of life was not accidental, but necessary. "[U]nder certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life," he was quoted as saying in an article in Quanta magazine early in 2014, that's since been republished by Scientific American and, more recently, by Business Insider. In essence, he's saying, life itself evolved out of simpler non-living systems.The notion of an evolutionary process broader than life itself is not entirely new. Indeed, there's evidence, recounted by Eric Havelock in "The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics," that it was held by the pre-Socratic natural philosophers, who also first gave us the concept of the atom, among many other things. But unlike them or other earlier precursors, England has a specific, unifying, testable evolutionary mechanism in mind.Quanta fleshed things out a bit more like this: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.
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It doesn't mean we should expect life everywhere in the universe — lack of a decent atmosphere or being too far from the sun still makes most of our solar system inhospitable for life with or without England's perspective. But it does mean that "under certain conditions" where life is possible — as it is here on Earth, obviously — it is also quite probable, if not, ultimately, inevitable. Indeed, life on Earth could well have developed multiple times independently of each other, or all at once, or both. The first truly living organism could have had hundreds, perhaps thousands of siblings, all born not from a single physical parent, but from a physical system, literally pregnant with the possibility of producing life. And similar multiple births of life could have happened repeatedly at different points in time.That also means that Earth-like planets circling other suns would have a much higher likelihood of carrying life as well. We're fortunate to have substantial oceans as well as an atmosphere — the heat baths referred to above — but England's theory suggests we could get life with just one of them — and even with much smaller versions, given enough time. Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake for heresy in 1600, was perhaps the first to take Copernicanism to its logical extension, speculating that stars were other suns, circled by other worlds, populated by beings like ourselves. His extreme minority view in his own time now looks better than ever, thanks to England.If England's theory works out, it will obviously be an epochal scientific advance. But on a lighter note, it will also be a fitting rebuke to pseudo-scientific creationists, who have long mistakenly claimed that thermodynamics disproves evolution (here, for example), the exact opposite of what England's work is designed to show — that thermodynamics drives evolution, starting even before life itself first appears, with a physics-based logic that applies equally to living and non-living matter.Most important in this regard is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that in any closed process, there is an increase in the total entropy (roughly speaking, a measure of disorder). The increase in disorder is the opposite of increasing order due to evolution, the creationists reason, ergo — a contradiction! Overlooking the crucial word "closed," of course. There are various equivalent ways of stating the law, one of which is that energy cannot pass from a cooler to a warmer body without extra work being done. Ginsberg's theorem (as in poet Allen Ginsberg) puts it like this: "You can't win. You can't break even. You can't even get out of the game." Although creationists have long mistakenly believed that evolution is a violation of the Second Law, actual scientists have not. For example, physicist Stephen G. Brush, writing for the American Physical Society in 2000, in "Creationism Versus Physical Science," noted: "As Ludwig Boltzmann noted more than a century ago, thermodynamics correctly interpreted does not just allow Darwinian evolution, it favors it."A simple explanation of this comes from a document in the thermodynamics FAQ subsection of TalkOrigins Archive (the first and foremost onlin
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