Posts Tagged ‘entropy’
“Nothing is lost. . . Everything is transformed.”*…
In yesterday’s post, Álvaro García Linera wrote of the liminal time in which we live. Today, Parag Khanna starts from a similar place, but equally provocatively concentrates on what he sees coming next…
… the grander the vision, the further it likely lies from reality. Theories that inaccurately observe the present will inevitably fall short in predicting the future. This goes both for proponents of American hegemony as well as those aping the “return of great power rivalry” meme. Even as mainstream Western scholars belatedly accept the emergence of a multipolar world, it would be a mistake to allow their parsimonious frameworks such as neorealism to guide our thinking.
These top-down approaches neither capture the shifting global and regional dynamics among more than a dozen primary and secondary powers, nor the deeper systemic change by which a wide range of actors contest authority and shape global society in an irrevocably decentralized direction.
Indeed, the most accurate description of today’s world is high entropy, in which energy is dissipating rapidly and even chaotically through the global system. In physics, entropy is embodied in the Second Law of Thermodynamics (pithily summed up in a Woody Allen film as: “Sooner or later, everything turns to shit”). Entropy denotes disorder and a lack of coherence.
Robert Kaplan’s famous thesis of “The Coming Anarchy” three decades ago strongly aligns with the entropy mega-trend. Indeed, Kaplan memorably captured the decay underway, particularly in the “global south,” and the failed attempts by the post-Cold War West to sustain order in those regions.
Covid, supply chain shocks, inflation, corruption and climate volatility have all conspired to uphold his thesis alarmingly well: Swathes of Latin America, Africa and the Near East exhibit neither functional domestic authority nor regional coherence. The current faddish term “poly-crisis” applies in spades to this large post-colonial domain.
But entropy is not anarchy. It is a systemic property that manifests itself as a growing number of states and other actors seize the tools of power, whether military, financial or technological, and exercise agency within the system. There is still no consensus as to what to name the post-Cold War era, but its defining characteristic is clear: radical entropy at every level and in every domain of global life. How do we reconcile an increasingly fractured order with an increasingly planetary reality?…
[Khanna characterizes the decline of U.S. exceptionalism (centrality/hegemony), the rapid diffusion of systemic power, …
… the structure of power is no longer a pyramid but a web with multiple spiders forging networks of varying strength. Today we live in a truly multipolar, multicivilizational and multiregional system in which no power can dominate over others — while all can freely associate with others according to their own interests.
This structural entropy is embodied in what I call the geopolitical marketplace, a distributed landscape far more complex than the conventional wisdom of a bipolar U.S.-China “new Cold War.” Many countries in the world are post-colonial nations innately suspicious of overtures that would render them subservient pawns of either the U.S. or China.
This is why the notion of alliances is a hollow one for much of the world. Alliances are more like multi-alignments in which swing states, regional anchors and almost every other country actively play all sides in pursuit of their own best deal. This is not about deference to hierarchy but active positionalism: each country, large or small, places itself at the center of its own calculations…
This is the reality of regional systems, overlapping spheres of influence, and ascending powers willing to say yes or no as it suits them. Exploring dynamics within this geopolitical marketplace are far more revealing than today’s anodyne tropes such as the “return of great power rivalry” that posit a neat division of the world into red and blue. And yet the rapidly changing structure of global order is only half the story of the entropy engulfing our world…
[Kahnna describes the “Global Middles Ages,” in which the world has moved from a presumed monopoly to an active marketplace in which anyone with the capacity can offer their supply to meet another’s demand, and the world devolves into a networked archipelago of functional hubs…..
… Every geography in the world thus features a complex milieu of overlapping and contested authority among some combination of the five Cs: countries, cities, commonwealths, companies, and communities. The answer to the question “who’s in charge?” is far from uniform. In contrast to an era where the government was the sole sovereign, authority in today’s polities is an ever more unique combination that depends on the locale.
A similar devolution is underway in the financial domain. The Eurozone is moving toward a capital markets union to deepen its own liquidity, while countries within regional trade blocs such as Asia’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) are harmonizing interest rate policies to minimize exchange rate fluctuations. The BRICS nations also want tighter exchange rate bands and trade denominated in their own currencies.
The U.S. dollar still comprises the largest share of global reserves, but nations have amassed dollar savings not to underwrite America’s low borrowing costs but to invest in their own economic security — including offloading U.S. Treasuries to hoard gold. Trillions of dollars of accumulated savings have been channeled into Western corporate war chests and Asian and Arab sovereign wealth funds whose capital flows and recirculates in all directions.
Most global trade is also still denominated in dollars, but new agreements are undercutting Washington’s blocking power. China is the largest trading partner of most countries in the world, and incrementally converting its trade with them into RMB currency, meaning they will increase their RMB share of reserves in order to finance imports. Russia is not only accumulating RMB reserves but has started lending RMB to its own banks. Expect a petro-yuan soon — but also a petro-euro and petro-rupee as well. But remember, countries don’t want to unshackle themselves from the dollar only to become subservient to another self-interested superpower.
Indeed, the more the U.S. weaponizes the dollar through sanctions, the more countries flock to alternatives such as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) that enable instantaneous and secure transactions while circumventing the U.S. financial system…
The diffusion of power in the technological domain accelerates all this simply by way of states enabling other states — whether by launching their satellites, installing their 5G networks, selling them surveillance technology, training their scientists or engaging in other modes of technology transfer. Now thanks to Starlink, there is WiFi almost everywhere.
And anywhere there is WiFi there can be DeFi — decentralized finance — a peer-to-peer marketplace of exchanges and crypto-currencies. We have entered a supply-demand world in which any two nodes in the global network can transact with a third by whichever means they choose…
The dollar, the internet and the modern-era primacy of the English language are symbols of American strength but also default utilities now slipping out of their master’s control. Americans have the loudest English language megaphones on global social media platforms such as X (formerly known as Twitter) and Facebook, but that hasn’t stopped Chinese and Russian state-affiliated groups from bombarding Americans with mind-warping propaganda on TikTok. Regardless of whoever professes to own the global town square, the truth is that nobody controls it.
America is clearly not immune from social and political entropy. In theory, political devolution is a hedge against federal dysfunction. More than a dozen American states have a GDP size that would earn them membership in the global G20; each could be self-governed politically and serve as a laboratory of policy innovation while making America much more than the sum of its parts economically and demographically. But in practice, the federal system all but encourages the Balkanization visible today: An antiquated electoral process has convinced each side that the other is illegitimate, the Second Amendment has become so contorted as to justify red state militias, and a 2024 election may hinge on a heartbeat (or courtroom conviction).
Indeed, of the thousand cuts lacerating America today, most are self-inflicted. Gun violence is escalating, hordes of undocumented migrants are flooding in and being weaponized by red states against blue while drug abuse and fentanyl overdoses surge to record levels. Meanwhile, corporate America has been gorging on inflation while small businesses are forced to swallow rising interest rates and over-regulation. Make no mistake that a restoration of national unity in the model of Johnson’s Great Society is not the most likely scenario for America’s future…
[Khanna contrasts the U.S. condition with that in China, India, and others…]
… Planetary thinking embraces the liminal phenomena and complex butterfly effects that tie us together, but it must also contend with the diffuse patterns of terrestrial agency that will shape our response to the planetary condition. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our efforts to adapt to climate change, which will further create the future’s winners and losers.
Some geographies will suffer such intense drought that they may be fully vacated, while others such as Canada and Kazakhstan will gain millions of grateful climate migrants and be able to harness their human capital to become new power centers. The world will no longer be bureaucratically divided into investment grade categories set by ratings agencies that label them as a “developed market” (DM) or “emerging market” (EM), but between climate resilient and non-climate resilient zones.
If institutionalized orders such as the late 20th-century multilateral system tended to be established only after major wars, would an entropic drift into regional spheres of influence be preferable to a World War III among dueling hegemons? In this scenario, conflicts may flare from Ukraine to Taiwan, but they would be ring-fenced within their respective regions rather than becoming tripwires for global conflict. Regions that strive for greater self-sufficiency, such as North America and Europe today, could reduce the carbon intensity of their economies and trade, but potentially at the cost of undermining their interdependence with and leverage over other regions. Such is the double-edged nature of an entropic world.
With no major power able to impose itself on the global system or able to reign in those transnational actors domiciled abroad or in the cloud, the future looks less like a collective of sovereign nations than a scattered tableau of regional fortresses, city-states and an archipelago of islands of stability connected through networks of mobile capital, technology and talent. To argue that there is some bedrock Western-led order underpinning the global system rather than crumbling inertia is tantamount to infinite regress.
Global entropy doesn’t solely imply fragmentation. To the contrary, the system exhibits characteristics of self-organization, even aggregation, into new patterns and formations. Highways, railways, electricity grids and airlines link cities in ways that form neo-Hanseatic networks and alliances, and the internet transcends borders to link self-governing social communities. The universal reach and penetration of connectivity enables authorities of all kinds to forge bonds effectively more real than the many states that exist more on maps than in their peoples’ reality. The world comes together — even as it falls apart…
Reconciling an increasingly fractured order with planetary reality: “The Coming Entropy of Our World Order,” from @paragkhanna in @NoemaMag. Eminently worth reading in full.
(Image above: source)
* Michael Ende, The Neverending Story
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As we reconsider reorganization, we might recall that it was on this date in 2011, per Harold Camping, that the world would end. A Christian radio broadcaster and evangelist, Camping first predicted that the Judgment Day would occur on or about September 6, 1994. When it failed to occur, he revised the date to September 29 and then to October 2. In 2005, Camping predicted the Second Coming of Christ on May 21, 2011, whereupon the saved would be taken up to heaven in the rapture, and that “there would follow five months of fire, brimstone and plagues on Earth, with millions of people dying each day, culminating on October 21, 2011, with the final destruction of the world.”
For several years after Camping’s death in 2013, Family Radio, the netwok of Christian stations that he co-founded and fronted, continued to air some of his past broadcasts and distribute his literature. But in October 2018, it discontinued using any of Camping’s commentary and content; Tom Evans, president and general manager of Family Radio, explained that “Family Radio has come out of self-imposed isolation and we’ve repented from many of our former positions, date-setting the end of the world and all that.”
“Simplicity, carried to the extreme, becomes elegance”*…
Jordana Cepelewicz on a very different approach to computing…
In 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing came up with an idea for a universal computer. It was a simple device: an infinite strip of tape covered in zeros and ones, together with a machine that could move back and forth along the tape, changing zeros to ones and vice versa according to some set of rules. He showed that such a device could be used to perform any computation.
Turing did not intend for his idea to be practical for solving problems. Rather, it offered an invaluable way to explore the nature of computation and its limits. In the decades since that seminal idea, mathematicians have racked up a list of even less practical computing schemes. Games like Minesweeper or Magic: The Gathering could, in principle, be used as general-purpose computers. So could so-called cellular automata like John Conway’s Game of Life, a set of rules for evolving black and white squares on a two-dimensional grid.
In September 2023, Inna Zakharevich of Cornell University and Thomas Hull of Franklin & Marshall College showed that anything that can be computed can be computed by folding paper. They proved that origami is “Turing complete” — meaning that, like a Turing machine, it can solve any tractable computational problem, given enough time…
Read on for more on how folding paper can, in principle, be used to perform any possible computation: “How to Build an Origami Computer” from @jordanacep in @QuantaMagazine.
* Jon Franklin
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As we contemplate calculation, we might send entropic birthday greeting to Rolf Landauer; he was born on this date in 1927. A physicist, we made important contributions made important contributions in several areas of the thermodynamics of information processing, condensed matter physics, and the conductivity of disordered media… most of which important to the development of computing (of the electronic variety).
He is best known for his discovery and formulation of what’s known as Landauer’s principle: that in any logically irreversible operation that manipulates information, such as erasing a bit of memory, entropy increases and an associated amount of energy is dissipated as heat– a “thermodynamic cost of forgetting,” relevant to chip design (how closely packed elements can be on a chip and still handle the heat), reversible computing, quantum information, and quantum computing… but not an issue for origami.)
“Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics”*…
The second law of thermodynamics– asserting that the entropy of a system increases with time– is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. As Philip Ball reports, new thinking traces its true source to the flows of quantum information…
In all of physical law, there’s arguably no principle more sacrosanct than the second law of thermodynamics — the notion that entropy, a measure of disorder, will always stay the same or increase. “If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations,” wrote the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington in his 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World. “If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” No violation of this law has ever been observed, nor is any expected.
But something about the second law troubles physicists. Some are not convinced that we understand it properly or that its foundations are firm. Although it’s called a law, it’s usually regarded as merely probabilistic: It stipulates that the outcome of any process will be the most probable one (which effectively means the outcome is inevitable given the numbers involved).
Yet physicists don’t just want descriptions of what will probably happen. “We like laws of physics to be exact,” said the physicist Chiara Marletto of the University of Oxford. Can the second law be tightened up into more than just a statement of likelihoods?
A number of independent groups appear to have done just that. They may have woven the second law out of the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics — which, some suspect, have directionality and irreversibility built into them at the deepest level. According to this view, the second law comes about not because of classical probabilities but because of quantum effects such as entanglement. It arises from the ways in which quantum systems share information, and from cornerstone quantum principles that decree what is allowed to happen and what is not. In this telling, an increase in entropy is not just the most likely outcome of change. It is a logical consequence of the most fundamental resource that we know of — the quantum resource of information…
Is that most sacrosanct natural laws, second law of thermodynamics, a quantum phenomenon? “Physicists Rewrite the Fundamental Law That Leads to Disorder,” from @philipcball in @QuantaMagazine.
* “Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don’t have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.” — Seth Lloyd
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As we get down with disorder, we might spare a thought for Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire; he died on this date in 1778. The Father of the Age of Reason, he produced works in almost every literary form: plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works– more than 2,000 books and pamphlets (and more than 20,000 letters). He popularized Isaac Newton’s work in France by arranging a translation of Principia Mathematica to which he added his own commentary.
A social reformer, Voltaire used satire to criticize the intolerance, religious dogma, and oligopolistic privilege of his day, perhaps nowhere more sardonically than in Candide.
“No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.”*…
A 19th-century thought experiment that motivates physicists– and information scientists– still…
The universe bets on disorder. Imagine, for example, dropping a thimbleful of red dye into a swimming pool. All of those dye molecules are going to slowly spread throughout the water.
Physicists quantify this tendency to spread by counting the number of possible ways the dye molecules can be arranged. There’s one possible state where the molecules are crowded into the thimble. There’s another where, say, the molecules settle in a tidy clump at the pool’s bottom. But there are uncountable billions of permutations where the molecules spread out in different ways throughout the water. If the universe chooses from all the possible states at random, you can bet that it’s going to end up with one of the vast set of disordered possibilities.
Seen in this way, the inexorable rise in entropy, or disorder, as quantified by the second law of thermodynamics, takes on an almost mathematical certainty. So of course physicists are constantly trying to break it.
One almost did. A thought experiment devised by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1867 stumped scientists for 115 years. And even after a solution was found, physicists have continued to use “Maxwell’s demon” to push the laws of the universe to their limits…
A thorny thought experiment has been turned into a real experiment—one that physicists use to probe the physics of information: “How Maxwell’s Demon Continues to Startle Scientists,” from Jonathan O’Callaghan (@Astro_Jonny)
* Philip K. Dick
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As we reconsider the random, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Félix Édouard Justin Émile Borel; he was born on this date in 1871. A mathematician (and politician, who served as French Minister of the Navy), he is remembered for his foundational work in measure theory and probability. He published a number of research papers on game theory and was the first to define games of strategy.
But Borel may be best remembered for a thought experiment he introduced in one of his books, proposing that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard will – with absolute certainty – eventually type every book in France’s Bibliothèque Nationale de France. This is now popularly known as the infinite monkey theorem.
Adventures in Cosmology: Starting out Simply…
Why was entropy so low at the Big Bang? (source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Back in 2010, SUNY-Buffalo physics professor Dejan Stojkovic and colleagues made a simple– a radically simple– suggestion: that the early universe — which exploded from a single point and was very, very small at first — was one-dimensional (like a straight line) before expanding to include two dimensions (like a plane) and then three (like the world in which we live today).
The core idea is that the dimensionality of space depends on the size of the space observed, with smaller spaces associated with fewer dimensions. That means that a fourth dimension will open up — if it hasn’t already — as the universe continues to expand. (Interesting corollary: space has fewer dimensions at very high energies of the kind associated with the early, post-big bang universe.)
Stojkovic’s notion is challenging; but at the same time, it would help address a number of fundamental problems with the standard model of particle physics, from the incompatibility between quantum mechanics and general relativity to the mystery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.
But is it “true”? There’s no way to know as yet. But Stojkovic and his colleagues have devised a test using the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a planned international gravitational observatory, that could shed some definitive light on the question in just a few years.
Read the whole story in Science Daily, and read Stojkovic’s proposal for experimental proof in Physical Review Letters.
As we glance around for evidence of that fourth dimension, we might bid an indeterminate farewell to Ilya Prigogine, the Nobel Laureate whose work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility led to the identification of self-organizing systems, and is seen by many as a bridge between the natural and social sciences. He died at the Hospital Erasme in Brussels on this date in 2003.
Prigogine’s 1997 book, The End of Certainty, summarized his departure from the determinist thinking of Newton, Einstein, and Schrödinger in arguing for “the arrow of time”– and “complexity,” the ineluctable reality of irreversibility and instability. “Unstable systems” like weather and biological life, he suggested, cannot be explained with standard deterministic models. Rather, given their to sensitivity to initial conditions, unstable systems can only be explained statistically, probabilistically.
source: University of Texas
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