Matt Jones has been worrying about information and energy lately. Here are some energy links for him. According to New Scientist (you can get a free 7 day trial for the NS archives or, if you subscribe to the magazine there’s no charge) Eric Schneider and James Kay think the biologists (and the rest of us, for that matter) have got it wrong about life. We’re not here to reproduce, we’re here to tear up energy, to accelerate the rate of increase of disorder. All of life is just a big entropy machine. This sounds like one of those ideas that’ll be orthodoxy in twenty years. Meanwhile, also from New Scientist, chemical physicists in Australia have shown that, at micron scales and over periods of time as long as a couple of seconds, the second law works in reverse. Blimey.
In which I try, after 25 years of blogging, to drop my ironic stance a bit.