Beyond Mechanism by Henning Brian G.; Scarfe Adam;

Author:Henning, Brian G.; Scarfe, Adam;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1153780
Publisher: Lexington Books

Notes

1. The empirical data summarized in this essay that relates thermodynamics to life is detailed in Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

2. Frank L. Lambert (b. 1918), a Professor Emeritus of Occidental College, Los Angeles, has, since 1999, produced publications that have led 29 chemistry textbooks, reaching approximately 450,000 students (to date), to discard “disorder” as a description of entropy. See, for example, Frank L. Lambert, “Disorder—A Cracked Crutch for Supporting Entropy Discussions,” Journal of Chemical Education 79 (2002a), 187-192; Frank L. Lambert, “Entropy Is Simple, Qualitatively,” Journal of Chemical Education 79 (2002b): 1241-1246; and Frank L. Lambert, “Disorder in Thermodynamic Entropy,” http://entropysite.oxy.edu/boltzmann.html, retrieved June 22, 2012. His websites include secondlaw, shakespeare2ndlaw, and entropysite, all with the suffix oxy.edu; the latter containing multiple links to relevant publications at a variety of levels.

3. In Lectures on Gas Theory (New York: Dover Publications, 1898), 443, Ludwig Boltzmann writes that the world, “or at least most of the parts of it surrounding us are initially in a very ordered—therefore very improbable—state. When this is the case, then whenever two or more small parts of it come into interaction with each other, the system formed by these parts is also initially in an ordered state and when left to itself it rapidly proceeds to the disordered most probable state.”

But, as Frank J. Lambert points out in “The Conceptual Meaning of Thermodynamic Entropy in the 21st Century,” International Research Journal of Pure & Applied Chemistry 1, no. 3 (2011): 67, http://www.sciencedomain.org/issue.php?iid=82&id=7, physicist Max Plank did the actual calculation (inscribed on Boltzmann’s tombstone) to show the equation for energy change. As Lambert writes, “If liquid water at 273 K, with its 101,991,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 accessible microstates [quantized molecular arrangements] is considered ‘disorderly,’ how can ice at 273 K that has 101,299,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 accessible microstates be considered ‘orderly’?”

4. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Lowell Lectures 1925 (New York: The New American Library, 1962), 15.

5. Lynn Margulis and Michael J. Chapman, Kingdoms and Domains: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth (San Diego: Elsevier, 2010).

6. Alla Katsnelson, “Microbe Gets Toxic Response. Researchers Question the Science behind Last Week’s Revelation of Arsenic-Based Life,” Nature News, December 2010, http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101207/full/468741a.html.

7. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What Is Life? Foreword by Niles Eldredge (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).

8. Harold J. Morowitz, Personal Communication at Science and Literature: Narratives of Discovery, Key West Literary Seminar, 2001.

9. Freeman Dyson, Origins of Life: Revised Edition (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

10. Dennis Noble et al., “Homage to Darwin, Evolution Debate with Dawkins, Margulis, Brasier, Bell, Chaired by Denis Noble,” Balliol College, Oxford University, archived debate, 2010, http://www.voicesfromoxford.com/homagedarwin_part1.html.

11. Vladimir I. Vernadsky, The Biosphere: Complete Annotated Edition (1926; repr., New York: Springer, 1998).

12. Dorion Sagan and Jessica Hope Whiteside, “Gradient-Reduction Theory: Thermodynamics and the Purpose of Life,” in Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 173-186.

13. Eric D. Schneider and James J. Kay, “Life

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