patrick.net

“Most accessible human power comes from thermodynamics. We live in a thermodynamic age: without it, we go back to subsistence farming and chattel slavery. Thermodynamics has a sort of reductionist version which is what is mostly taught in schools: statistical mechanics. It’s “nice” for physicists to think about things in this way, as we can derive most of the ideas of thermodynamics from more simple ideas in probability and statistics, and knowing that matter is made out of atoms. We like to think about it as being more fundamental for this reason, but I’m not sure it’s more general than the kind of thermodynamics developed to optimize heat engines. […] something was lost in didactics in thinking only about the statistical physics stuff.

I think it’s within the realm of possibility that the statistical physics stuff also makes us blind to things we should be able to see if we approach the problem differently. Physicists probably wouldn’t have invented statistical physics and derived all those cool canonical ensembles if they hadn’t first invented thermodynamics. It’s not something that comes naturally from ideas about probability and atoms, though everyone who worked on thermodynamics had the notion that it was probably something like that. Thermodynamics does come naturally from thinking real hard about making better steam engines (before that, better cannons). That’s how we got there. Practical observation of nature, not smoking the pipe and thinking big thoughts about mathematics. Statistical physics was a cleanup operation; a very successful one, but it came about after the laws were discovered.

Thinking about the history of thermodynamics, it was essentially people trying to come to grips with the concept of heat. […] The kinds of observations of heat and its behavior are fairly humble stuff: looking at the microscopic theory is interesting and you can find odd effects you might not have looked for otherwise, but it was the basic stuff which brought about the biggest insights. Very humble measurements: pressure, temperature, volume, work. None of the doofus “looking into the mind of God” crap we’ve been afflicted with since the 20th century brought public relations to the physics community: just hammer and tongs science by the men who actually created the modern world.

I postulate there are higher orders of “thermodynamics” which are discoverable, yet undiscovered. Everyone knows there is something called non-equilibrium thermodynamics, which almost certainly has numerous undiscovered laws, and a couple discovered ones like the Onsager reciprocal relations. Note here, that the Onsager reciprocal relations are strictly formulated like all the other thermodynamic laws. He didn’t start from the microscopic version of statistical physics; he used normal physical conceptions of continuity and thought about what was going on in a manner mostly devoid of statistical mechanics until the very end of the second paper. You can read his original papers here and here for his reasoning. The impetus for the work was the thermoelectric effect, which had until previously been a classic subject of interest for thermodynamics pioneers like Lord Kelvin. Onsager finished the job; the first and so far only law of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. It’s criminally under-taught in school despite having extreme real world utility: I think because you’d have to be quite familiar with thermodynamics itself, which is also criminally under-taught in physics school.

People mostly stopped serious thinking about this stuff with the advent of useful computers. If you have a non-equilibrium system you can figure out most of the stuff you need using computer simulations. The problem with letting computard look for answers in specific cases is you don’t get the higher order Onsager-type thing allowing you to look for effects you haven’t thought of yet. I’m talking about humble phenomena you can see. There are numerous phenomena in matter which show order which are not easily described by higher order thinking or some kind of Onsageresque thermodynamic relationship.

[…] There was this guy Herman Haken, who to my surprise only died this year (at 97) who wrote books on something he called Synergetics. It was an exciting series of books to read as an undergraduate in the early 90s, as it seemed to tie together a bunch of stuff which bothered me about physics, and promise a way forward (it also redpilled me that information and entropy were the same thing). Haken’s ideas came from studying phase transitions, and particularly the self-organization of laser dynamics. He and his colleagues were interested in things which self-organized: stuff like turbulence, patterns in fluid mechanics and plasmas, brains, Fokker–Planck equations. He assumed (as I do) there must be some unifying mathematics behind this sort of weird stuff that looks familiar and classically mathematical.

[…] Of course it’s possible that all this spontaneous order is just a coinkidink and there is no over-arching principle to such things. I don’t think so, though. I think it mostly remains unstudied, excepting perhaps outside of classified work in naval and aerospace laboratories, where it isn’t likely to help anybody. Though there are some interesting exceptions to this where new results come out of military studies of turbulence. It is perhaps over-ambitious to think something like turbulence is connected to non-equilibrium chemical reactions, chaos or solitons, but I think Haken and his friends were onto something, and there is stuff there which can unify many seemingly unrelated unusual behaviors of matter. These sorts of things may be used to solve practical problems, and for progress in this, we probably should use one or more of them as test cases, if we want to figure stuff out, the same way we figured out thermodynamics from thinking about steam engines.

I think Haken’s project was a failure mostly because it was a late career vanity project, done in the usual dreary “make conferences, publish proceedings” way, but I think his assumptions of an underlying order are probably right. This kind of thing probably isn’t going to make progress by throwing money at it and having conferences (no other problem in human history has been solved in this way): it’s probably going to be attempting to build something practical that involves this sort of self-organizing system. Or at least a deep Onsager-like study of some particular one. Figuring out what that might be almost certainly won’t happen in the “physics community,” for the same reasons nothing else happens in the “physics community,” but it should happen. Humanity is leaving money on the table otherwise.”

https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2024/12/18/towards-a-new-kind-of-science-and-technology/