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In hmolscience, Randall Schweller (c.1960-) is an American political scientist, an "entropy only applies" theorist, known, in some circles, for his “work as a grand theorist of international relations and as a founder of neoclassical realism” (Ѻ), noted for his 2014 Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple, wherein he seems to argue about growing global discord using a metaphorical political thermodynamics platform.| Camus Model (incorrect) | Gate Model (correct) | |
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“One of the core ideas of the book will strike readers as counterintuitive. Large, destructive wars a re not always or in all ways bad; they serve the function of providing world order. Indeed, the time-honored solution for rising global disorder—as well as for rising discord among nations and what political scientists refer to as system disequilibrium—is a large an total war fought among all the great powers. These so-called hegemonic wars have regularly ensued every hundred years or so.”— Randall Schweller (2014), Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple (pg. xi)
“Great catastrophes may not necessarily give birth to a genuine revolution, but the infallibly herald them and make it necessary to think, or rather to think afresh about the universe.”— Fernand Braudel (1950), “Inaugural Lecture”, College of France, Dec 1; cited by Randall Schweller (2014) in Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple (pg. 140)
“War is a political instrument: a continuation of political activity by other means. The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.”— Carl Clausewitz (1830), On War; cited by Randall Schweller (2014) in Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple (pg. 143)
“As power diffuses throughout the international system, questions about ‘which order should prevail’ become relatively more important than fondness for ‘any order rather than chaos’, so the assumption that international order is a public good becomes less tenable.”— Randall Schweller (2014), Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple (pg. 149)
“The science of energy and entropy changed everything from commerce to religion to culture. The universe would now be understood neither in terms of ‘action-at-a-distance’ forces, nor in terms of discrete particles moving through a void. Rather it was a universe of continuous matter possessed of kinetic energy—a cosmos, in contrast to Laplace’s deterministic astronomy, that ensured a role for human free will in directing energy during its transformation from states of intensity to diffusion.”
“Principles developed in the natural sciences should apply to the international social and political system. We should recognize that the international system, like all complex systems composed of a large number of interacting parts—whether they be physical, biological, economic, political, or social systems—operates somewhere between order and randomness; it exists on ‘the edge of chaos’ in the phrase of computer scientist Christopher Langton.”The ignorance and contradiction in this statement is profound. Not only is computer science not a natural science, i.e. it is but mathematics (Boolean algebra in particular), but there is no physical thing that exists at the edge of chaos; this is what is called hypothesis gone wrong, i.e. misunderstood and misapplied chaos theory.
“The world is undergoing transformation. We are entering the age of entropy, a chaotic period where most anything can happen and little can be predicted; where yesterday’s rule takers become tomorrow’s rule makers, but on one follows rules anymore; where competing global visions collide with each other; where remnants of the past, present, and future coexist simultaneously.”
“Chaos and randomness abound as history enters the age of entropy. It will be a world defined by a considerable breakdown of order, covering a wide range of social and political relations.”
“What is entropy? Invented in the field of thermodynamics, the term entropy measures the ability of a system to perform work or activity in the future. A system with no entropy has a lot of potential; a system with high entropy has little.”
“The second law of thermodynamics states that as work is performed, entropy increases, i.e., energy becomes less and less available to do work, and so the potential to perform further work declines. As the capacity for activity gets used up, the system eventually comes to a point of equilibrium at which time no further activity can take place. Thus, water at the top of a hill performs work, turning mills and turbines. Once the water is at the bottom of the hill, however, it has exhausted its capacity to perform work.”
“Social systems and institutions, too, exhibit a tendency to originate with an outburst of potential energy that runs down over time. Thus corporations, churches, and empires arise from the energetic activities of gifted entrepreneurs, prophets, and conquerors. They may flourish for a time, but all will eventually decline and sometimes disintegrate altogether as the initial energy that created them dissipates.”Schweller, here, footnotes this paragraph to chapter seven "Entropy Trap" of Kenneth Boulding’s 1946 The Meaning of the 20th Century. [4] Schweller, to note, correctly, regarding “rise of empires”, would have been wise to consult the work of physical chemist Thomas Wallace (2009), to get his bearings, rather than Boulding, an economist. An economist teaching a political theorist about entropy is like a physicist teaching a farmer about how to grow corn. Schweller continues:
“In short, the performance of work diminishes the system's ability for future activity. As the system runs down, it eventually reaches a point of maximum entropy when no more work can be done.”
“Entropy can also be thought of as a measure of chaos, which is, oddly enough, the most probable state of a system.”
“The random and indeterminate nature of the current unipolar world suggests a condition of increasing entropy. There are two reasons for this claim. First, relative capability advantages under unipolarity do not translate as easily as they once did into power and influence over others. Second, systemic constraint is a property that limits actors’ freedom of action by imposing costs and benefits on certain kinds of actions. Unlike past multipolar and bipolar systems, the current unipolar system exerts only weak, if any, systemic constraints on the unipolar power and all other actors as well. Thus, polarity has become a largely meaningless concept. Today, system process rather than structure best explains international politics, and this process is one of entropy. Finally, I suggest two pathways from unipolarity to a more balanced system: one is fairly consistent with standard balance-of-power realism but adds an ideational component; the other restores equilibrium by means of entropy.”
“Whether entropy's indefinable quality—its inherently ambiguous nature—is the source of its greatest strength or greatest weakness or both, it probably explains why the concept has proven to be such a seductive and persistent metaphor (I say metaphor because entropy only applies to closed or isolated systems). To be specific, entropy has been variously associate with: (1) disorganization, disorder, or what the nineteenth-century American theoretic physicist Willard Gibbs called ‘mixedupness’; (2) nature's ‘arrow of time’; (3) positive information, that is, information that makes a difference; (4) ignorance or lack of information; (5) uncertainty, randomness, and indefiniteness; (6) information overload and distortion; (7) unbounded freedom and the absence of constraints; (8) homogeneity and a flattening effect; (9) the dissipation of mechanical energy, enervation, and ennui, and (10) the universe's inevitable heat death (the Big Chill).(add summary)
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| The photo, entitled: “Computer simulations by University of Michigan researchers Pablo Damasceno, Sharon Glotzer, and Michael Engel have shown how entropy can nudge nanoparticles into organized structures; they can even predict what kinds of structures will form”, from the University of Michigan press release of American chemical engineering professor Sharon Glotzer’s 2012 work on entropy-based nano-ordering simulations. Libb Thims, of note, mistakenly emailed Glotzer thinking that she had “consulted” Schweller and therein formed a rare ChE + H coupling, which is not the case. |
“Further complicating matters, recent computer simulations by University of Michigan scientists and engineers trying to herd tiny particles into useful ordered formations have found entropy, to be an unlikely ally. Incredible but true. Under certain conditions, the property of entropy actually induces order from disorder—in the computer simulations, it nudged tightly packed particles to form organized structures. Professor of chemical engineering Sharon Glotzer cautions, however, that this is not really about disorder creating order. Rather, entropy needs its image updated: it is a measure of possibilities rather than disorder. ‘It's all about options. In this case ordered arrangements produce the most possibilities, the most options. It's counterintuitive, to be sure’, Glotzer explains. This conceptualization of entropy as possibilities is important and relevant to global politics in the age of entropy.”
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Scientific terms Sciences Religious terms Metaphysical Power (Ѻ) | 86+
Entropy (Ѻ) | 78+
Energy (Ѻ) | 43+
Force (Ѻ) | 38+
Work (Ѻ) | 31+
Heat (Ѻ) | 12+
Temperature (Ѻ) | 6+
Volume (Ѻ) | 5+
Pressure (Ѻ) | 3+
Reaction (Ѻ) | 1+Thermodynamics (Ѻ) | 17+
Physics (Ѻ) | 7+
Chemistry | Chemical (Ѻ) | 1+God (Ѻ) | 5+
Spirit (Ѻ) | 4+
Soul (Ѻ) | 1+Good (Ѻ) | 28+
Evil (Ѻ) | 2+_________________ ---------------------------------------- ______________ ----------------------
“William Thomson invented the new world ‘energy’ as a science but never took credit for it.”— Randall Schweller (2014), Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple (pg. 28); although Schweller cites Crosbie Smith (1998), energy was “as a text-book science” by Rudolf Clausius (1875), defined scientifically by: Joseph Lagrange (1811), Thomas Young (1802), Denis Papin (1690), and defined in proto-terminology etymology by: Aristotle (322BC) and Heraclitus (450BC)
“From the Greek energeia (‘activity’, ‘working’), energy in physics means ‘the power a thing has of doing work arising from its own motion or from the ‘tension’ subsisting between it and other things.”— Randall Schweller (2014), Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple (pg. 30); here Schweller cites literature scholar Bruce Clarke (2001), the errors of which become apparent in “from its own motion”, aka self-motion, which is code for perpetual motion
“The point is that, unlike nature, human beings can undo the disorder caused by the introduction of a random element; we cannot only shuffle absent-minded but also sort, order, and arrange.”— Randall Schweller (2014), Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple (pg. 136); here, of abysmal ignorance, he asserts that “humans are unlike nature”, which is endemic of the flaw that his entire theory of what constitutes “nature” is incorrect
“Chaos [is] the law of nature; order the dream of man.”— Henry Adams (1909), The Education of Henry Adams; cited by Randall Schweller (2014) in Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple (pg. 136)
“Leaving aside security as a motive for grabbing territory, opportunistic expansion is a core principle of power politics. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, great powers — motivated by an irresistible temptation to cash in on an opportunity to make gains relative to their competitors — move quickly to fill power vacuums with their own influence.”— Randall Schweller (2014), Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple (pg. 88)
