MY ADVENTURE WITH ENTROPY
a measure of uncertainty or randomness; lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder. Entropy may be seen both from the point of view of thermodynamics and from the information theory, as an expression of system heterogeneity. > Information theory, and specifically the entropy, is essential for understanding and treating cancer.
My fascination with entropy has started almost six decades ago in Kraków while reading the first edition of > Stanisław Lem, SUMMA TECHNOLOGIAE, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1964. Today, this fascination has advanced much further, in particular around what a chapter of the book titled “A Lampoon of Evolution" concludes: all known processes in Universe are occurring with increased entropy, by moving from less probable to more probable state, ie. to chaos, while all living organisms result in the strong negative entropy, ie. they escalate to the states of least probability. By other words, the second law of thermodynamics (the law of increase of entropy) is sometimes used as an argument against evolution. Evolution, the argument goes, is a decrease of entropy, because it involves things getting more organized over time, while the second law says that things get more disordered over time. So evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics.
> Lem’s reflections on evolution are still so up to date in 21st century, today when the literature of genetics and molecular biology is gargantuan and consistently out of date. As it is published, each book, article or scientific paper requires updating or revising.
This enormous scientific process, Lem says, is by no means insulated from our lack of self-determination. Science just happens to be the best of many bad options. Our civilization lacks knowledge that would allow it to choose a path knowingly from the many possible ones, instead of drifting in random tides of discoveries. From this comes the irony of the title, a play on Thomas Aquinas’s SUMMA THEOLOGIAE (1485), our assured knowledge of God replaced by our uncertain advances into physics and technology. Having gained conscience, we are the only knowing gods around, though mostly ignorant and powerless.
Science is our way of discovering and understanding the world, which exists perfectly well outside our knowledge. Today, astronomy, the oldest science, stands out as one of the most advanced and sophisticated discipline contributing to our overall knowledge of Universe, specifically due to a large scale global cooperation, like > European Southern Observatory, in the Atacama Desert, Chile, the largest and revolutionary astronomy project in existence. Science is an engine of human prosperity. For centuries scientific process has been a driving force behind the advances in knowledge and well-being of our species. And, today despite continuing attempts of distorting the value and achievements of science; social media amplifying misinformation on an unprecedented scale; politician reversing critical environmental regulations; denying basic fact about climate change, …. we are still capable of mounting defence against destructive narratives to secure survivability of our civilization on this beautiful planet Earth.
More on our ability to cooperate > SURVIVAL OF THE FRIENDLIEST
However, with all these immense scientific advances, the ultimate truth seems far from our reach. For years physicist attempting to resolve mathematical discrepancies between quantum mechanics and relativity theory. A strange tendency is building into the entire project of unification. The deeper physicists dive into reality, the more reality seems to evaporate. Physical explanation replaces nouns with verbs: what things are is a product of what their components do. Taken to its logical end, this reasoning suggest that no nouns will be left at all.
Perhaps part of a challenge comes from mathematics, basic tool used to explain almost everything. Philosophers cannot agreer on whether mathematical objects exist or are pure fictions. One aspect of the controversy is the simple philosophical question: Was mathematics discovered by humans, or did we invent it? And all these fascinate me even further. In the recent years, more and more mathematicians have transitioned to biology, medicine, genetics, genome, immunology and cancer research. And cancer is treated less and less as a diseases but rather an information theory construct.
So being a patient of Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University in Atlanta since July 2019, my fascination moves towards advances in information science ... with unbelievable amount of resouces for bedtime reading > BIBLIOGRAPHY
Photo of NEOWISE comet above was taken on July 12, 2020 at Masurian Lakeland in Poland by Bartosz Kubica using 400mm lens.
✤ Origin
✤ Entropy Arguments
✤ Survival of the Friendliest
✤ Recent Therapies
✤ Intergalactic Polemic
✤ Bibliography
Why Entropy?