Great Minds Discuss Ideas; Average Minds Discuss Events; Small Minds Discuss People.

By Eleanor Roosevelt.

Entropy and the Gospel

In chemistry we've been learning about a concept called entropy, designated by the letter S.  The statistical definition of entropy is dependent on how many microstates a substance can have.  Microstates are determined by how spread out particles in the substance are, how much energy they have (velocity), the number of rotational and vibrational movements they can have, etc.  Entropy, in other words, measures disorganization.  Entropy also helps to measure spontaneity. 

Here's the important part:  every reaction increases the entropy of the universe.

There's a tradeoff in every reaction necessary to accomplish work.  We like the fridge to be cold, but we can't except it to get that way on it's own.  Why?  Because systems seek to maximize entropy.  In this case, the maximum entropy level of the fridge and the surroundings exist when the fridge is the same temperature as the surroundings and thus all particles are as disorganized as they can be.  If we want to cool the fridge down, we have to put work/energy into it using the compressor and the chemical properties of the Freon-like material.  By putting work in, we can cause the entropy level of the fridge to decrease and, therefore, it can sustain a colder temperature than the surroundings.

Take note of the important fact that even in this process, the entropy of the universe is still increasing.  The fridge decreased, but where did the energy come from to do it?  The power company, which produces energy by one of several means.  Each way will increase entropy in the universe more than the fridge will decrease it. The overall S of the universe will increase.

Life is not spontaneous.  Life works against entropy.  Our bodies are builders, not "sparsifiers."  Thus life has a problem.  If everything has to increase the universe's entropy, what do we do?  The truth is, we work the same way as the fridge.  We offload our entropy problem.  It's like an entropy chain.  We use the energy from the food we eat to build proteins and to do work.  That food is built from plants, which take a ton of energy from the sun to build sugars.  If we follow the chain back, we realize that we can only survive if the sun increases in entropy more than we decrease in entropy.  Essentially, we offload our entropy problem to the sun.  The only way life can exist on earth is if we take our problems and let something else deal with all of them.  Of course, we do deal with some of it; we will die eventually and our particles will be dispersed.  We are all subject to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, but at the same time, we can use another Law (a less defined law) and transfer our problem to the sun.  It's a law because it works, and it always works.  It's what allows us to live.  Yet the first law, the law defining entropy, is not violated.  In fact, if we define life in terms of a system that auto-perpetuates a lower entropy state even with complete material turnover, the sun becomes the enabler of that.  The sun becomes not only the light, but the life of the world.

Now, as I'm sure you predicted, comes the ol' vowel switcheroo.  'u' becomes 'o' in the sun.  The only enabler of life on this planet is the Son.  The only way we can survive is if we offload our problems to Him.  Sometimes it goes through the chain - hometeachers, the bishop, etc - until it finally reaches Him, but it will eventually.  Through the Son the Law of Justice can still be fulfilled while letting us use the Law of Mercy (less defined - more abstract) to transfer the full effect of the Law of Justice to Him.  As our bodies have to do work to let the entropy changes slow and transfer the change away, so do our spirits have to do work to let our problems transfer to Christ.  It's called repentance, prayer, fasting, commandment-keeping, etc.

Now, scientifically, the sun of this world will ultimately fail.  Entropy will wear it down until it stops giving off the light and the energy the world needs.  That is where the comparison stops.  Unlike this temporal sun, the Son of Man (exalted Man) will not fail.  He has already completed the mission that allows us to apply the Law of Mercy.  It is an infinite and eternal sacrifice.  Jesus Christ, the true Son, will never wear down and we can partake of his infinite light, power, and goodness forever.  Life is not spontaneous.  We were created by God through his Son, Jesus Christ, and by Him and through Him we live.  He is the ultimate light and life of the world.

If You Blog It......

they will come.

Do you ever? Thoughts on thoughts

Do you ever finish a sentence with yourself? I seem to always start a sentence in my head, but I never recall ever getting to the final period. I think it's because I already know exactly what I'm going to say. It makes things awfully hard when writing, because when thinking of what to say, I only draft the first half of sentences in higher order brain levels. The rest kind of gets made up on the way from brain to fingers, and usually I don't have much of a say unless I concentrate on the ending of the sentence, which sometimes takes too much energy.

You know, I think that our brains thrive on pure thought. Pure thought is so pure that it cannot be expressed, but only...thought. I think that we each have our own "format" of thought, which might be one reason why we are all unique. However, our brains have a "translator," wherein that pure thought is transcoded into various forms.
One of these forms might be language, or, more specifically, the muscle impulses sent to our lungs, vocal chords, and tongue that will produce language. The translator also receives impulses from our ears and eyes and translates that language back into pure thought. Language is the intermediary pool that human beings contribute to and pull from. I bet it is the sub-perfect level of translation (for we have all seen evidence of misunderstanding one another or not producing lucid sentences) that also gives rise to some creativity. If our translators are different and interperet things differently, a new thought might be introduced into our brains and incorporated into our thought processes even if we don't realize it.
Another form that thought can be transcoded into could be the language that we think in our head. Imagine a chord plugged in directly from the headphone out port on a computer to the line in port on that same computer. It's a loopback. That is kind of like what our thoughts can be. It's a little like saying something outloud so we can here how it sounds. Out the mouth, and straight back to our brain through our ears. Kind of like that, but all within our brain. It may help our thoughts run through the logic machine that makes up a great portion of our brain, because our brain probably evaulates all of the thoughts it gets from the translator in a different way than it evaulates thoughts spawning in our own, local, brains. Running our thoughts through the loopback may help with viewing them in different ways.
It is too bad that all of our pure thought has to be interfaced through translation mechanisms. However, it shows again the wonder and grandeur of the human race and how amazing our minds really are, to enable this sort of communication.
But how awesome would it be to be able to interface with each other so purely we exchange pure thoughts and are able to attain perfect understanding? However, I think all of our hardware is different enough to be incompatible with each other, so we must go through intermediary devices.

Biased Randomness?

You know, I've been thinking.

It is so typical to choose randomly at fun, casual sporting events. For example, everybody lines up and are numbered off, or names are randomly drawn from a list or something. This is supposed to be the most unbiased way to make teams, right? Wrong. Here's an important fact about "randomly" drawing teams:

The drawing is always biased toward the winning team, especially in a tournament structure.

The teams are already biased! The best team is going to win, regardless of the method of choosing! The teams will always be biased in a tournament structure, because one team will end up as the winner. They're already better than everybody else, they just haven't proved it yet. A tournament always has unfair teams. Nobody starts on a footing commensurate with anybody else. The only thing a tournament is for is to tell everybody where they are in relation to everybody else. Then the question becomes: what is the motivation for joining a tournament? If one team is already better than everybody else, why does everybody think they have a chance?

I tell you, we all see things wrong when it comes to selecting teams.

Still Alive, Just Very Busy

The title says it all! I haven't posted any real meat up here, and today I just got back from State Solo & Ensemble, and it's pretty late, and so I'm going to bed. I'm just letting everybody know I haven't forgotten and will hopefully post when things aren't so hectic.

Here's a question to keep you busy 'til next time:
Which would you rather be extremely large? Your ears or your nose?

What is the present tense....

...of wrought?