#thermodynamics

#thermodynamics

Tonight is the press night for Arcadia's second major London revival at the playwright's home from home, The Old Vic where he made his name with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. An extremely witty and intellectually dazzling masterpiece, the play in typical Stoppardian fashion examines man's drive to impose systems of order and disorder on the world, the dialectical tension that exists between art and science, sex, the laws of thermodynamics, chaos theory and landscape gardening amongst many other popular dinner table subjects.

A key goal, writes the author, Bobby Azarian,is to argue against the view that life is an unlikely accident that may have emerged only once on one tiny speck in a vast universe, and that it is certain to disappear as the universe's free energy dissipates in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics. He argues that while such a conclusion had for several generations seemed to be the destination to which clear-headed scientific exploration had brought mankind,

The ordered state is a low-entropy state, and entropy measures the system's proximity to the most probable (equilibrium) state. Therefore, a system is "far from equilibrium" if its components are statistically correlated, because correlation among components is order. When parts are correlated rather than independent, you have structure.The system occupies a state that's improbable relative to chance. You can predict something about one part by knowing about another.