Libb Thims | 6 May 2013 | Email

FQ1. I'll just need two homework problems (fixed@ 6 May 2013).

FQ2. And I'll need a variables table, in which you give your definition of a human and correlative explanations of any thermodynamic variables you discuss and or employ in your article; historical examples shown here (human thermodynamics variable table).



Jeff Tuhtan | 6 May 2013 | Email

Re: FQ2: Comment: I don't use any deviations from the classical intepretations of work, heat, temperature or pressure in my paper. The human particle is described as an ideal sphere, but there are no formulations thus far which seem to warrant such a table. Pending reviewers comments, I can add the table if equations become necessary.

Whenever I see such tables, it reminds me of Ingo Müller's oft-quoted statement on the subject: "for level-headed physicists, entropy (or order and disorder) is nothing by itself. It has to be seen and discussed in conjunction with temperature and heat, and energy and work. And, if there is to be an extrapolation of entropy to a foreign field, it must be accompanied by the appropriate extrapolations of temperature, heat, and work.”

Beware the pull of the "foreign field", for therin lies the womb of alchemy, vitalism, phlogiston, and the luminiferous aether! ;)



Libb Thims | 7 May 2013 | Post

Re: FQ2: I still have to go though your paper in detail, but the need for variables table—see for instance Percy Bridgman’s 1914 ten fundamental quantities table (here)—is for the reader to know exactly, firstly your theoretical definition of a human, e.g. Irving Fisher, under the direct supervision of Willard Gibbs, in his 1892 variables table, states explicitly “a particle (in mechanics) corresponds to an individual (in economics)”. There is no ambiguity past this point. Tom Schneider sent me the following quote when I was writing my "Thermodynamics ≠ Information Theory" (quote added, pg. 90) article last year, which seems apt here:

“The first thing needed is the rectification of names”

— Confucius, Analects 13:3

You state above that a human, in your paper, is an "ideal sphere", which solves that part of the problem. The second need of variables table is clarification of thermodynamic terms, e.g. if you say in your article the "pressure" or "entropy" on this school or system of fish in this so-and-so ecosystem causes this much effect, etc., I need to know are you referring conceptually to the use of some kind of barometer device (or entropy measuring device) attached to some fish you are monitoring, or are you referring to the classical interpretation of pressure as "force per unit area" in respect to particles impacting on a surface, such as in the original Daniel Bernoulli 1738 Hydrodynamica definition of pressure:

“The weight P holding down the piston in [a given] position is the same as the weight of the overlying atmosphere, which we shall designate P in what follows.”

which in this case would mean, e.g., fish impacting on a territorial boundary (e.g. see: chimpanzee war and the pressure issues at the boundary of the rock formation where the two warring factions of chimpanzee troops would meet up and hurl rocks at each other, etc., occasionally crossing over into the other tribe's territory). In short, in respect to this example, is your use of the term "pressure" (if this is in your article), some oceanic pressure at some depth in some water system or is it of the type of force per unit area, in respect to the movement of a number of fish, normal or force normal to some boundary?

Hence, for my myself as well as likely for readers I need to know, if the author is employing standard thermodynamics terms in non-standard scenarios (a river or a human society), what exactly we are talking about, in plain speak.

Thermodynamics, historically, is rich in confusion; James Maxwell's famous misunderstanding of entropy (see: entropy misinterpretations) and later editorial retractions is a prime example. To quote from Ingo Müller again (see: information theory), the aim in employing these variable tables is to eliminate "obfuscation":

“Indeed, it may sound philistine, but a scientist must be clear, as clear as he can be, and avoid wanton obfuscation at all cost.”

I'll comment more on this "variables tables" requirement issue after reading your paper in detail.



Libb Thims | 8 May 2013 | 3:24 AM CST | Post

Editorial note: I'm presently going through your article, and a few points to take note of in regards to future JHT submissions, which all have to do generally with readability issues:

(a) Don't use inline citations.
(b) Use full names, e.g. "American engineer Willard Gibbs" (good) vs. "Gibbs" (less clear to new readers).
(c) Use first name in citations.
(d) Full journal article spelling.

These issues are explained fully in the "JHT formatting" page.

Yes, the formatting of my submission (13th Nov 2012) was based on the formatting of a paper you had sent me as a template. Now that I see you have changed the formatting, I will adjust my future submissions accordingly.

Libb Thims | 8 May 2013 | 8:11 AM CST | Post

Editorial note: the table I need filled in is the following, as shown in the formatted version of your submission, being that you use the terms in your article in quotes and terms such as "societal enthalpy" or "free energy of a society" are not standard terms, which is why an appendix section is needed with term clarification/definition:

Libb Thims | 8 May 2013 | 8:24 AM CST | Post

Editorial note: as shown in the formatted article (which is now linked), the following editorial clarifications are in need of answering:

Q1. Re: ‘a ‘social system’ can best be seen as relaxing towards equilibrium, but never actually achieves it’, what is this supposed to mean?

A1. A social system in this work is a system of interacting human particles. If we were to plot the position and momenta of each particle as a function of time, we would create a graph of the phase space of the particular society under study. The attractor of this phase space is a state of minimum entropy, or equilibrium. However, because any given society is not ideal in the sense that is never perfectly enclosed by some arbitrarily defined boundary, we can only view the effects of the attractor (equilibrium) over a finite time period as relaxing towards equilibrium. Equilibrium can be seen a sort of "moving target" but such systems can never achieve equilibrium.

Q2. (a) Re: ‘Society and ecosystems are fundamentally nonequilibrium systems’, what does this mean? Can you graphically, e.g. potential vs. extent graph (ref b), explain what you envision here?
(b) eoht.info/page/HCT+|+Fitness+landscapes

A2. Please refer to A1.

Q3. Explain Markov model in more detail, for readers not familiar with this, and in particular how you envisage this model applying to social/ecosystems.

A3. The approach taken by Willard Gibbs can be generalized in two different ways: The first is to look at the dynamics of the system in contact with an equilibrium bath, the second is to view the system as being in a steady-state but in contact with a nonequilibrium environment having a fixed difference in the chemcal potential. The Markov model is a relatively new approach which allows for the study of both generalizations. The Markov model represents a molecular system (here the molecules are further reduced to the aforementioned spheres) having a unique long-time stationary probability distribution which corresponds to the ideal equilibrium state under conditions i at energy e. From this formulation it is possible to derive a free energy function relating the probability distributions of a given state to the equilibrium distribution and to the thermodynamic variables internal energy, U, temperature, T and entropy S:



Thus if it were possible to model or map the probability distributions of a human society under given conditions, then their current state could feasibly be described in terms of changes in the free energy of the system. However, due to the huge number of degrees of freedom of such systems, it remains to be seen if such an approach will ever be practicable. Please refer to my quote by Willard Gibbs on this matter.

Furthermore, notice the lack of time as a variable in the formulation. For closed systems (an idealization here is required for viewing a society or ecosystem as truely closed) the free energy dissipation (spontaneous irreversibility) and the entropy production (total irreversibiltiy) are identical. For open systems (driven systems) there is a difference between the free energy dissipation and entropy production, called the "housekeeping heat". This quantity may be considered to be time-dependent.

Q4. (a) Re: ‘our systems are fundamentally irreversible and never reach equilibrium’, what exactly do you mean by this statement? What variables, differentiation conditions, or description do you use to justify this point of view?
(b) Historical excursions down this line of reasoning often tend to yield absurd conclusions, e.g. Prigogine theorists often model social formations and people as being so far far away from equilibrium that they (we) are continuously at the ‘edge of chaos’. When I walk my door today will I find downtown Chicago out of equilibrium and or happily at the edge of chaos (Len Fisher and his 2009 The Perfect Swarm, comes to mind here). Only rarely will one hear a finger raised objection to these types of questionable statements. In 2005, authors Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan, in their Into the Cool, ask, in question of the term far-from-equilibrium:

“Is life a far-from-equilibrium system? If so, how far are organisms from equilibrium? And what does this phrase mean? In fact, the term far-from-equilibrium may be more applicable to backfiring engines than smoothly running life-forms.”

“Life is made up of [so] many reactions in the near equilibrium range [that it] may not be so ‘far’ from equilibrium as has been suggested.”

(c) eoht.info/page/far-from-equilibrium

A4. Your quotations, although interesting, do not appear to be relevant to my submission. I have no mention of life, nor have I attempted to describe it in thermodynamic terms. The focus of the paper is on some thermodynamic issues surrounding how the many-body problem applies to large aggegates of humans, organisms, etc. The fact that these systems are irreversible and not at equilibrium is however germane to the submission topic.

Societies and ecosystems are not in mechanical, thermal, or chemical equilibrium. Thus they are not in thermodynamic equilibrium. They generate entropy via a myriad of ways: friction, heat exchange, chemical reactions, etc. and are thus irreversible. A river is not a reversible system, a human system containing cars on the road is also not reversible. Abstractions of these systems to ideal equilibrium states may in some cases be necessary, but in no way should be considered true to the physical nature of the systems themselves. The quote from Willard Gibbs was carefully chosen to reflect his opinion on this matter to the reader.

This is a very good comment. I am not sure how one would go about determining the distance from equilibrium for a system as complex as an ecosystem or human society. I am not confident that an "equilibrium displacement distance" metric would even make physical sense, since it would ultimately depend on the integrated interactions between all entities of the given system, and could thus deliver identical values for very different configurations.

Jeff Tuhtan | 9 May 2013 | Post

Re: Variables Table. Below is the requested table, including entries for the specific catagories requested. The changes are with respect to the amount of work performed or energy transduced, and are not changes in time.

Thermodynamics	Societies / Ecosystems
Particle / Ideal Sphere (1-m in diameter)	Individual organism, person, etc.
Change in Societal Enthalpy	Total energy change of the system, including boundary work (pressure volume work).
Change in the Free Energy of a Society	Measure of the work performed or required to build the structure of some evolving system, e.g. an ecosystem or a human society. This work is connected to the energy of work a person invests into the efforts related to the evolution of such a system.
Change in the Entropic Contribution	That portion of the total system energy change which cannot do work.
Boundary	An imaginary region in space with finite volume.

Peer review

Reviews | Review board | Other

Curtis Blakely | 14 May 2012 | Email

Comments: Here are a few comments about “On the Differences between a Person and a Particle”:

I really enjoyed this article. Once of the reasons it resonated so well with me is that the first real socio-physics paper that I composed was on this very topic, so it is a subject that is close to my heart.

Having said that, I offer a few brief comments. First, I enjoyed the background that Tuhtan provides. Mention of Comte, Lucretius, Goethe, Mimke and Gibbs quickly provided credibility and a much needed review of the thoughts and progress that has been made in our discipline(s).

I especially liked the notion of the adult as a particle with a radius of 1 m (i.e. human sized particles). This permitted me to visualize Tuhtan’s conceptions more clearly than if he had he not provided this suggestion.

I also found the author’s discussion of one of the fundamental differences between the particle and a person being that of “control” intriguing. In my particular area, the goal of applying physics and thermodynamic principles to human behavior is that of “control and prediction”. While we can much more accurately predict the behaviors of groups, we are much less capable at predicting the behaviors of individuals. The author is precisely correct, control and prediction are fundamental differences, but that is where we can make our greatest contributions. Yes, individuals have desires, motives, feeling and thoughts that make their control and behaviors difficult to understand and predict, but with continued work, we may make progress into these areas, provided we continue to push ahead.

I applaud the author on a job well done and would refer his attention and that of his reader’s to those editorial questions that are offered on page 74 of his article. I always read these thoughtful comments - they continue to guide both my writings and thought-processes.



Libb Thims | 31 Dec 2013 | 12:56 PM CST | Post

Comments: Per a quick retrospect skim of the article, overall it seems cogent, as a piece on human statistical thermodynamics (statistical thermodynamics or statistical mechanics) vs. human chemical thermodynamics (or chemical thermodynamics) applied to the aquatic world (fish as particle vs. fish-as-molecule); although, as I recall, the original aim was to do a piece on internal force vs. external force, but as I understand this is a more involved topic.



Exercises | Problems

Exercises | Homework problems | Other

On the wise protocol of Swedish physical chemist Sture Nordholm's penning of eight homework problems to his 1997 Journal of Chemical Education article “In Defense of Thermodynamics: an Animate Analogy”, the submitting author has provide (6 May 2013) two homework problems and or exercises, shown below, that will be added to the finial version of the submitted article, if published:

● Problem #1: What impact would changing the shape of ideal human molecule have on the large-scale interactions between human particles?

● Problem #2: In this paper, there is little discussion on the topic of individual behavior. Try to describe human behavior in quantities such as work and heat.

JHT editor Libb Thims, in his university lectures to thermodynamics students, frequently assigns students the task to attempt to solve one of the problems on the Hmolpedia "homework problems" page; Thims also, down the road, may end up writing a Chemical Thermodynamics: with Applications in the Humanities textbook, built on Gilbert Lewis' famous 1923 Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances; some of these newly-proposed JHT end of article problems/exercises may find their way into the end of chapter exercises and or into the Hmolpedia homework problems page.

References
1. Thims, Libb. (2013). “Econoengineering and Economic Behavior: Particle, Atom, Molecule, or Agent Models?” (abs) (main), University of Pitesti Econophysics and Sociophysics Workshop (UPESW) 2013 / Exploratory Domains of Econophysics News (EDEN V) (organizer: Gheorghe Savoiu). University of Pitesti, Pitesti, Romania, Jun 29.