The second law of thermodynamics as a unifying theme of geosciences

Hi Kim,
Once again you've written a very thought-provoking post. I am in the process of re-designing my Environmental Geology and Natural Hazards class for the fall, and I might just take up this idea as some kind of unifying theme. (Inspired by Tom Hickson's example of teaching a course with no lectures, I am aspiring to that goal.) In the same way that natural hazards are processes stemming from the dispersion of energy, management of environmental hazards can be seen as attempts to concentrate (or scatter) various substances where they do the least harm... I am trying to think of ways to communicate to my students that there is no such thing as "throwing something away." Thanks for your thoughts!

Thanks, Christa,

I would be fascinated to hear about what happens if try to intertwine this idea into your Environmental Geology and Natural Hazards class. Dave Mogk gave me a pointer to a fascinating (but heavy-duty) book called "Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialog with Nature," by Ilya Prigogine, which also features entropy as one of the organizing principles of nature.

Kim

Hi Christa: I've tried to teach my Environmental Geology class using an Earth System approach since ca. 1992. Half the course is focused on hazards (all our favorites), and half the course is focused on resources. Transfer of mass and energy are central themes in all of the topics I cover, and I ask these questions in each unit: What are the Earth materials? What processes are at work? What is the source of energy? What are the energy and mass pathways and reservoirs? Temporal questions are focused on rates, fluxes, residence time, recurrence intervals. And finally, what happens when humanity gets in the way of these natural processes? (And then, how can we live safely and sustainably on Earth)

At the Complex Systems workshop, in my introductory essay I described my emphasis on work done by or on the Earth system. This can be mechanical work (e.g. earthquakes), chemical work (driven by thermodynamics, chemical reactions), biological work, and increasingly, anthropocentric work (humans are definitely harnessing energy and altering the system). Work requires consumption or liberation of energy (e.g. PV work done in a piston cylinder).

I would just note that nature hates gradients, and there is always the tendency to drive towards the lowest energy state. Any time there is a concentration of energy (e.g. heat) in one part of the system, there is necessarily flow to normalize the distribution of that energy. Another way to say this for students: Things fall downhill. This is true for kinetic energy (boulders rolling downhill), transfer of heat on a global scale (i.e. weather systems; high pressure flowing towards low pressure), and of course there are many more examples in Nature. This also opens the question of stable, metastable, and unstable states (e.g. diamonds are thermodynamically not forever, but the kinetic rate of back reaction is excruciatingly slow, thus diamond is metastable at the surface of the earth). And it also begs the question of how you define the system (open, closed, isolated), and with what boundary conditions.

This all gets back to the question of entropy (which might be considered to be the energy in the system that is not available to do work). Even though local "order" is established in one part of the system (e.g. minerals crystallizing in a magma chamber) and higher order structures emerge (life itself), the universe on the whole loses its ability to do work. Read Prigogine (but set aside about a month to work through this text....very dense, but worth the effort).

Hi Dave,
I wish I could have taken your Environmental Geology course in my misspent youth; it sounds awesome. I don't think that energy and entropy are up front and center in most people's Earth Systems approaches, especially in courses for non-specialists. If we were to succeed in establishing the idea in our students' minds that energy underlies everything, it would be easier for them to comprehend and anticipate the significance of peak oil and energy descent.
Kim

This post was editted by Tom Parsons on Jul, 2010
IMO the second law of thermodynamics makes a fine unifying principle for the driving force behind geophysical activity, but even something that general can't be thought of in isolation.

When energy goes from one place or form to another, always trying to become more diffuse or less well organized, it can't do this by magic. Students need to know the menu of available physical mechanisms, or they won't be able to visualize the processes and know why certain ones might predominate in certain situations. Without a viable mechanism to do something or go somewhere, energy is trapped, or at least forced to act on very different timescales depending on the routes it can and can't follow. Good thing, too, or we couldn't find any live batteries to put into our portable electronics.

With respect to the teleology problem -

Back before email, in 1984, I wrote James Lovelock to call his attention to Don L. Anderson's paper in Science "The Earth as a Planet: Paradigms and Paradoxes"(27 Jan, 1984, v223, No 4634, p 347). The sentence (on p 348) "Thus there is the interesting possibility that plate tectonics may exist on the earth because limestone-generating life evolved here" seemed like something Lovelock would enjoy, even though the term "Gaia" was scrupulously avoided. He had in fact missed seeing the paper, and we exchanged a few letters, of which one paragraph of his seems relevant here:

"So you also find it helpful to imagine yourself reduced to the existence of an electron and to wonder then what it might do. Doing just this 25 years ago gave me a very happy time inventing the so called electron capture detector. A cheerful disregard of the [scorn heaped on the] teleological fallacy and its offspring anthropomorphism does seem to give one a mean advantage. Perhaps this is why it is condemned."

In the same spirit, I feel sure that it is helpful to think about "what energy wants". Anthropomorphizing lets us use some very well developed neural circuitry that we have evolved to model the likely behavior of others.

If this be the teleological fallacy, make the most of it!



As an old chem/physics/math teacher and lifelong fan of science and education, I love the way you guys think and I'm really glad that I happened to find your blog! Sadly though, I fear that things will get worse before they get better in science education.

I have a couple of ideas on the questions you raise about motivating students and presenting material, and a couple of geoscience questions of my own that I hope you can help me with.

THE SHORT VERSION:

Young humans emulate people they admire, envy, and want to be like. Unless they feel this way about scientists, science teaching will always be an uphill battle and most of the best students will go where they see payoffs they can understand: money, power and glamor.

To make them into good students destined to become scientists: show them real examples of scientists who are visibly having fun doing science, and who get at least enough money and respect to enjoy *some* of what society offers as rewards to the favored. Tell them stories with scientists as fun-loving heroes. People are evolved to learn from stories and to imitate storied behavior.

Consider the last time that a lot of money and talent went into such an effort, post-Sputnik. Enjoy Hume and Ivey's classic films, "Random Events" and "Frames of Reference" (dated in style, but both quite enlightening on issues still poorly understood by undergrads). Show geoscience students Munk's classic "Waves Across the Pacific", which is still not too badly dated despite its now primitive-looking technology.

Too long already - Longer version and questions - maybe later.

Best regards,
Tom
(PS - Utterly coincidental that when googling myself just now, after fighting my way past a couple of more prominent 'Tom Parsons' I came upon this total-surprise reference, relevant to storytelling and learning http://globalmitch.com/post/607599368/we-are-the-stories-we-tell-ourselves. Which reminded me of the principal who accused me of not being a teacher, but an entertainer. Maybe not a bad thing to be.

Hi Tom, Welcome to Earth & Mind; thanks for your comments and please visit again.

With respect to the idea that it would be "helpful to imagine yourself reduced to the existence of an electron and to wonder then what it might do," there is some research that makes the case that scientists at the frontiers of knowledge do exactly this, imagine themselves as actors inside their data sets. Ochs et al (1994, 1996) observed six months of discussion among a lab group in physics, and the scientists describe themselves as moving around in their data, for example in a phase transition diagram. The authors consider this as a "liminal state" with one foot in the world of the lab group and one foot in the world of the atoms.

Ochs, E., S. Jacoby, P. Gonzales, 1994, Interpretive journeys: How physicists talk and travel through graphic space, Configurations, v. , p. 151-171.

Ochs, E., P. Gonzales, S. Jacoby, 1996, "When I come down I'm in the domain state": Grammar and graphic representation in the interpretative activity of physicists, p. 328-369, in Interaction and Grammar, Cambridge University Press,