Blinded by the science

My first meeting with Beth was fascinating. She was really engaged with the project and had loads to contribute. She obviously knows her stuff, she is the 'expert of entropy!' I had to ask her to slow down and say things again on multiple occasions due to my lack of knowledge. But after a lot of note taking and going over things again, I think that some points started to emerge. I have tried to distill some of this conversation here:

Physics ideas

Beth is interested in my project because in her own work she thinks a lot about order V chaos or Enthalpy V Enthropy. These processes apply to all systems.

Enthalpy = how a system is held together, its internal energy.

'Enthalpy comprises a system's internal energy, which is the energy required to create the system, plus the amount of work required to make room for it by displacing its environment and establishing its volume and pressure. (Zemansky, Mark W. (1968). "Chapter 11". Heat and Thermodynamics (5th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. p. 275.)

Entropy = how many different ways can you arrange a system.

Boltzmann's 2nd Law of Thermodynamics concludes that in a world of colliding particles, disordered states are the most probable. Because disordered states are much more possible than ordered ones, a system will almost always be in the state of maximum disorder or moving towards it. "A dynamically ordered state, one with molecules moving at the same speed and in the same direction is the most improbable case conceivable...an infinitely improbable configuration of energy." (Boltzmann, L. (1974). The second law of thermodynamics. p. 20.)

Few rearrangements in a system = low entropy 

Many rearrangements in a system = energy lowered – entropy increased

This is the basis for ‘Heat death of the Universe’ theory  

Our sun is an example of this  - high energy is distributed into low energy across the universe

Vitalism, was a compelling idea, the idea that biology is special, acting against thermodynamics.

The idea that the beautiful systems of nature are ordered.   

For example, a cell is structured and ordered, if you randomise it you destroy biology.

Therefore, you need to keep the energy in a sytem high to fight entropy, for example, humans need to eat food.

BUT

Beth’s field suggests that...

There is spontaneous creation of order, even when something is not alive.

Order and structure arise spontaneously out of the laws of thermodynamics.

Therefore, this is a physics process, not a biological one.

Biology is imbedded in the laws of thermodynamics. 

Beth showed me a video of oil and water molecules seperating – Phase separation

Chaos (high entropy) - to organised (low entropy)

In the video, although the oil was showing low entropy, 

The stuff you couldn’t see (the water) was driving the process.

In this video it was possible to view the water as well as the oil. The water had more space and therefore became high entropy (as it had more space to move into different variables). It was the water driving the system, entropy was driving the system.

In a system you can see, something happens underneath which is invisible.

The properties of the invisible are at work.

There is a drive towards being random, which is hidden.

Brownian motion, renders the invisible, visible.

Order appears out of chaos – but really chaos is winning.

We discussed that there are some interesting overarching themes in my work for this project about order and chaos and the idea that invisible systems are at work underneath the visible world we can see.

Ideas about making

We talked about using actual microscopic lenses to make the Kaleidascope. Beth is going to play around with this idea.

Beth suggested using different weights of glitter in the snow globe piece, to get different effects.

Beth suggested we could set up a digital simulation of entropy, at a molecular scale to create a video.

This would look similar to the massive scale simulations of the Universe they do at the Ogden centre.

This is interesting in terms of scale – molecular happening over short period, universe model happening over deep time. This could be an interesting moving image piece.  It is probably too ambitious given the timescale, for this project.

After this meeting I sent Beth the 6th chapter of Carlo rovelli's book Seven brief lessons on Physics, as this was the inspiration for the sculptures. I asked her to read it, as I am interested to hear if she agrees with the physics, I'm sure she will have something to say about it.