In animate thermodynamics, Robert Frenay (1946-) (DN=4) is an American nature-technology writer noted for []
Overview
In 2006, Frenay, in his Pulse: the Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things, attempted to outline a “new biology” presentation, thematically similar to Kevin Kelly’s 1994 Out of Control, each chapter stitched together with passing mention to the second law and related neighbor topics, such as Goethe’s 1794 moving order, Samuel Butler’s 1863 “Darwin Among the Machines”, Vladimir Vernadsky’s 1926 living matter / inert matter divide of the elements theory, Alfred Lotka’s 1926 free energy-available energy ideas, John Neumann’s automaton theory, among others. [1]
Living things
See main: Living chemical reaction
A salient issue with Frenay’s book is that, having been written in the pre defunct theory of life (2009) years, it is frocked with mentions of a “living thing”, which Frenay loosely defines as a jumble of connections of random elements that drifted together, four billion years ago, after the formation of RNA (which Frenay defines as “not alive”), forming bonds, according to a tendency or desire, that “came alive”, a premise which he attempts to justify throughout the book using the worn-out terms, such as emergence, self-organization, complexity, and information theory. Resultantly, some of Frenay’s passages are nearly inchoate in their backwardness: [1]
“Nonliving chemical reactions are driven by thermodynamics (heat) explore the possibilities open to them in an ergodic fashion—that is, by a process in which every exploratory sequence is the same. Life, on the other hand, explores its possibilities through evolution. It accumulates information—first in genes, then in memory—to help guide its search down narrower and more productive paths. How and when did information come to dominate the energetic processes of the physical world, and in doing so give rise to life?”
The errors in the passage are multitude, to say the least. Firstly, there is no such thing is a "nonliving chemical reaction", just as there are no "living chemical reactions", there are only chemical reactions, reactions are neither alive nor dead, but rather only atomic processes. Secondly, Frenay is unaware, as many are, that information is not thermodynamics and that information theory, which is but a descriptive language, has not overtaken the laws of thermodynamics. [2]
Gray goo catastrophe
In discussion of nanomachines, Frenay discusses how researchers such as English molecular scientist Michael Gross, have begun to evoke the second law as a block against the so-called “gray goo catastrophe”, the science fiction idea that some nano-scientist will invent or build, atom by atom, a “self-replicating” nanoscale machine that will grow and spread over the plant like a goo. Yet, conversely, Frenay also cites Stuart Kauffman whose auto-catalytic closure theory is such a gray goo catastrophe model.
References
1. Frenay, Robert. (2006). Pulse: the Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things (gray goo, pg. 49; nonliving chemical reactions, pg. 142). MacMillan.
2. Thims, Libb. (2012). “Information theory ≠ Thermodynamics” (link), Journal of Human Thermodynamics, 8(1):1-#.
External links
● Robert Frenay – Wikipedia.
