Since chemical reactions can neither create nor destroy matter, nor transmute one element into another, the amount of each element must be the same throughout the overall reaction. However, any reaction may be viewed as going in the reverse direction, and all the coefficients then change sign (as does the free energy). In Boltzmann's Day, One Complaint About The Second Law Of Thermodynamics Was That It Seemed To Impose Upon. Nature A Preferred. They Fall Into Two Broad Categories: (a) Those Whose Definition. Is Not Related. Heat Is The Amount Of Energy That Flows Spontaneously From A Warmer Object To A Cooler One.

Scientists, theologians, and philosophers have all sought to answer the questions of why we are here and where we are going. Finding this natural basis of life has proved elusive, but in the eloquent and creative Into the Cool, Eric D.

Schneider and Dorion Sagan look for answers in a surprising place: the second law of thermodynamics. This second law refers to energy's inevitable tendency to change from being concentrated in one place to becoming spread out over time. In this scientific tour de force, Schneider and Sagan show how the second law is behind evolution, ecology,economics, and even life's origin. Working from the precept that 'nature abhors a gradient,' Into the Cool details how complex systems emerge, enlarge, and reproduce in a world tending toward disorder. From hurricanes here to life on other worlds, from human evolution to the systems humans have created, this pervasive pull toward equilibrium governs life at its molecular base and at its peak in the elaborate structures of living complex systems.

Schneider and Sagan organize their argument in a highly accessible manner, moving from descriptions of the basic physics behind energy flow to the organization of complex systems to the role of energy in life to the final section, which applies their concept of energy flow to politics, economics, and even human health. A book that needs to be grappled with by all those who wonder at the organizing principles of existence, Into the Cool will appeal to both humanists and scientists. Smoke Or Fire The Speakeasy Rar Extractor here. If Charles Darwin shook the world by showing the common ancestry of all life, so Into the Cool has a similar power to disturb—and delight—by showing the common roots in energy flow of all complex, organized, and naturally functioning systems.

' Into the Cool is a dazzling exposition of an idea: that life is fundamentally not a noun, or a thing, but a verb. Building upon the beautiful subtleties of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan take us on a tour de force through biology, touching upon the origin of life, sex, evolution, ecology, and even economics. Along the way, they dethrone the idea that the gene is the central actor in the drama of life and put the focus properly back on the plot--the organized flows of matter and energy that make life what it is. This book is destined to be a classic.' 'In Into the Cool, the authors unravel the intricacies of cosmology, meteorology, chemistry, ecology, and even the mysteries of human aging in an unexpected but accessible and entertaining manner. It's all very simple. It's all very complex.

The book careens between these poles like a pinball in urgent play, until the reader is forced, willy-nilly, to think in terms of energy flow, gradients, and the Second Law. This turns out to be something of a delight, like using a new tool specially sharpened and specifically made for that job that we all assume when we first ask 'Why?'

'In his well-known essay 'The Two Cultures,' C.P. Snow famously remarked that an inability to describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics was a form of ignorance comparable with never having read a work of Shakespeare. It's fair to say that these days, the Second Law gets far less press than the Bard. Enter Into the Cool, in which the authors claim that the study of thermodynamics (in some ways the neglected stepchild of the sciences) can inform our understanding of biology, ecology and even economics. The authors begin by rephrasing the Second Law—as 'Nature abhors a gradient'—and proceed to illustrate its relevance to large systems in general. Whether one is considering the difference between heat and cold or between inflated prices and market values, they argue, we can apply insights from thermodynamics and entropy to understand how systems tend toward equilibrium.

The result is an impressive work that ranges across disciplinary boundaries and draws from disparate literatures without blinking. It's also a book that (much like Shakespeare and the Second Law of Thermodynamics) requires effort on the reader's part—it's not for casual reading.'

Snow famously remarked that an inability to describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics was a form of ignorance comparable with never having read a work of Shakespeare.[This is] an impressive work that ranges across disciplinary boundaries and draws from disparate literatures without blinking. It’s also a book that (much like Shakespeare and the Second Law of Thermodynamics) requires effort on the reader’s part—it’s not for casual reading.”— Publishers Weekly “In Into the Cool, the authors unravel the intricacies of cosmology, meteorology, chemistry, ecology, and even the mysteries of human aging in an unexpected but accessible and entertaining manner.

It's all very simple. It's all very complex. The book careens between these poles like a pinball in urgent play, until the reader is forced, willy-nilly, to think in terms of energy flow, gradients, and the Second Law. This turns out to be something of a delight, like using a new tool specially sharpened and specifically made for that job that we all assume when we first ask 'Why?' ”—Tim Cahill, author of Hold the Enlightenment and Lost in My Own Backyard “ Into the Cool is a dazzling exposition of an idea: that life is fundamentally not a noun, or a thing, but a verb. Building upon the beautiful subtleties of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan take us on a tour de force through biology, touching upon the origin of life, sex, evolution, ecology, and even economics.

Along the way, they dethrone the idea that the gene is the central actor in the drama of life and put the focus properly back on the plot—the organized flows of matter and energy that make life what it is. This book is destined to be a classic.”—J.

Scott Turner, author of The Extended Organism. Energy is the only life.—William Blake Confessions of a Government Worker In 1971 one of us, Eric Schneider, was haunted by two simple questions: Do laws exist that govern the behavior of whole ecosystems? If so, what are they? At the time there may have been no one in the world for whom an answer to these questions would have proved more useful. As the director of the National Marine Water Quality Laboratory of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Narragansett, Rhode Island, Eric's mission was to provide scientific data to protect coastal water quality and estuaries. Water-quality laws specifically gave the EPA the responsibility of protecting human health, commercial fisheries, and ecosystems within these coastal waters.

Eric was expected to measure the health of ecosystems without definitions of ecosystem health and without adequate measuring tools. It was a difficult job. Upon his arrival in 1971 as a new director at the EPA laboratory, Eric found that most of the data from the facility consisted of very simple toxicity tests done on algae and small fish. In a typical protocol, adults of the small bait fish mummichog ( Fundulus heteroclitus) were submitted to toxins until measurable percentages of them died. Numerous tests were administered on organisms such as these that 'kept well.' Not to put too fine a point on it (and the EPA didn't), the organisms selected were those that could survive alone in aerated pickle jars.

The EPA experiments were completed within ninety-six hours, a four-day span that allowed them to be set up and dismantled within a government workweek. If not rigorously scientific, the protocol was bureaucratically convenient. The main problem is that such tough species are not necessarily representative of the health of their surrounding ecosystems. For example, some of the hardiest organisms belong to pioneer species that repopulate damaged ecosystems.

Such organisms thus may signify not health but ecosystem illness. Counting how many members of a poisoned tough species died in aerated pickle jars within ninety-six hours: such was the basis of our national water-quality standards throughout the 1960s and the early 1970s. Even though Eric's expertise was not in biology—he had graduated with a doctorate in marine geology from Columbia—it seemed clear to him that the laboratory's task should not be to protect just hardy bait fish dosed with high levels of poisons. It should, rather, be to protect whole marine ecosystems. What good was it, he reasoned, to develop a water-quality standard for a species of fish if the organisms they ate were poisoned to death at much lower toxin concentrations?

What if the lives of these tough guys depended on those of weaker, more easily poisoned beings? If that were the case, then the hardy beings could be tough today and gone tomorrow. In truth, very little seemed known about the linkages among species. Weren't members of healthy ecosystems, like happy people, well connected to a vibrant, interdependent community of other beings? When Schneider asked coworkers the obvious—why they were not testing whole ecosystems—they made comments such as, 'You cannot bring a whole ecosystem into the laboratory.'

Or they would say, 'You cannot replicate a natural system in the laboratory. Latest Genuine Windows Xp Pro Sp3 Iso Download Free. ' Nonetheless, a few years later, these same researchers did just that: they studied, in careful miniature, whole marine ecosystems.

The scaled-down ecosystems, or mesocosms (middle-sized worlds) as they were called, were miniature versions of the Narragansett Bay. The interdependent systems consisted of many representative species living in seawater that filtered into tanks from outside the Rhode Island EPA laboratory. And they mimicked the real bay ecosystems with amazing accuracy. But it still remained nearly impossible to carry out toxicity experiments in the natural environment: understandably, the EPA and the state pollution-control officials were against spreading toxins such as mercury in the oceans or in natural salt marshes, even for the loftiest of scientific purposes.

At the same time, 'naturally' polluted areas such as oil spills or areas poisoned by mercury from paper production became makeshift laboratories where scientists attempted to gauge the movement of toxic materials and the recovery, if any, of damaged ecosystems. To make a long story short, in 1971 it became clear to Eric that ecosystem toxicology—a subdiscipline of ecology, and the science the EPA needed if it was to protect the environment—was in its infancy.

And this held true of ecology in general. Although human habitats were increasingly endangered, the science required to understand exactly how they became endangered—and thus how they could recover—barely existed. Since then ecology has made great progress. Ecologists study the interactions that determine the distribution and abundance of organisms. Most of what we know about this comes from hundreds of years of careful observations of changes in species, populations, and landscapes. Only in the last 150 years have these observations begun to be organized. Ecology branched out into many specialized theories: today there is population-abundance theory, predator-prey theory, niche theory, autecology, synecology, ecosystems ecology, microecology, ant ecology, human ecology, elephant ecology, as well as lots and lots of modeling.

But where, Eric wondered, was the general theory that could predict actual whole ecosystem behavior? Where was the theory that would say what would happen to a given lake ecosystem if its ambient temperature were increased by 5°C? How about if this ecosystem became more acidic? What would happen then? And what would another ecosystem, with different organisms, do under the same conditions? Marine chemists had found that pollutants such as DDT, radioactive elements, and mercury were moving through the global ecosystem and taking their ecological and human toll.

But what routes did these toxic materials take, what were their rates of movement, and where did similar materials accumulate in natural systems? It seemed to Eric that what the EPA really needed was a theory that explained the flow of material and energy through whole ecosystems.

Perhaps due to his training in the physical sciences, Eric was attuned to look for patterns and laws that might apply across the board, to all ecosystems. In particular, he was drawn to investigations by earlier researchers on energy flow. Might simple physical principles underlie the complexity of biology, from ecosystems to the biosphere? The relevant researchers seemed to be at least trying to deal with whole ecosystems rather than with their constituent parts.

There were a few groups, mostly the students and graduate students of G. Evelyn Hutchinson at Yale University, who had made significant inroads in tracking energy's flow through, and effect upon, whole ecosystems. Hutchinson and his colleagues, first at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology in 1957, and later at the Brookhaven Symposium on Diversity and Stability in Ecological Systems, raised ecology's sights beyond a narrow focus on the distribution and abundance of individual species.

The insights of Hutchinson and his colleagues led beyond the quantification of interacting nutrients and their effects. It was to lead Eric Schneider and a few others to the bigger question of why ecosystems behave as they do, a question directly related to the fascinating question—some would say the question of questions—of why (from a material and physical perspective) life exists. The answer had to do with energy, and it would eventually shed light not only on ecosystems, but also on organisms and nonliving systems—the entire field of what has come to be called the sciences of complexity. Indeed, as Eric was to find out with delight and surprise, he was not alone: a most promising research program linking biology to the physics of energy was already under way. It was like finding a buried treasure: gems lingered in past theoretical work, and the energy-flow characteristics of a handful of ecosystems had already been enumerated.

To his great excitement, Eric found out that there was already a young but sophisticated science of thermodynamics that specifically studies energy flow and transformations in natural systems.