Heat Death Research Articles

Classical Marxism and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Today's understanding of the significance of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels's work for the development of both ecological economics in particular and ecology in general has been hindered by persistent claims that Engels (and by imputation Marx) rejected the second law of thermodynamics. It is demonstrated here through textual analysis that Engels criticized not the entropy law itself but the extrapolation of this into the “heat death theory of the universe” hypothesis. The historical debate surrounding this hypothesis is examined, showing that Engels and Marx remained consistent with the natural science of their day. This opens the way to the recognition that Marx's political economy was unique in the 19th century in incorporating thermodynamics into the core of its analysis, thus providing the foundations for an ecological economics. The materialist-dialectical view of classical Marxism led to a dynamic, open, contingent approach to the earth system, reflecting a general evolutionary perspective.

Rescuing Code

Imagine you've experienced project heat death at least once. The term "heat death" comes from the second law of thermodynamics: entropy within a closed system increases over time without bound until the system collapses. In software, the entropy we experience most is in the design. Most of the code we add increases design entropy. Project heat death occurs when the design rots to the point where starting over is cheaper than continuing. Project heat death seems inevitable, yet when a large-scale project dies, people often stand around, surprised, asking "why us?" To do better next time, you need a sense of what problems to look for, and you need to start solving them before they spiral out of control. The author hopes this department helps in both regards.

Maxwell and creation: Acceptance, criticism, and his anonymous publication

Although James Clerk Maxwell’s religious views and discussions on atoms having the properties of “manufactured articles” have been discussed, some aspects of the responses by his contemporaries to his remarks on creation have been neglected. Various responses quoted here include a book from 1878 by “Physicus” (George John Romanes) attributing “arrogance” to Maxwell for his inferences. Relevant aspects of the evolution of the perspective of Romanes are noted. A response by B. F. Westcott indicated that Maxwell was the author of a related anonymous publication concerned with what eventually became known as the heat death of the universe. In his teaching to theology students, Westcott, a friend of Maxwell, emphasized Maxwell’s reasoning based on the dissipation of energy. There are similarities between Maxwell’s perspective on creation and Biblical commentaries by fellow Eranus Club members Westcott and J. B. Lightfoot. Interest in Maxwell’s remarks extended into the twentieth century. The principal Baptist chapel attended by Maxwell and his wife when in London in the 1860s is identified and some relevant attributes of the chapel and of its pastor are described.

AUTOMOBILE SAFETY - CHILD SEAT ENTRAPMENT AND MECHATRONIC WARNING SYSTEM

The entrapment of humans and animals in stationary automobiles can lead to heat stroke and death, especially for young children and infants. The introduction of an occupant warning system would significantly reduce the occurrence of fatal entrapment. In this paper, a smart monitoring system will be integrated into a child safety seat and interfaced with its accompanying vehicle. The primary function of this device is to offer a warning if the child restraint contains an occupant, interior temperature is elevated, and the elapsed time within the automobile approaches a dangerous threshold. Specifically, an occupant detector circuit built into the child restraint certifies the presence of a passenger while a sensor monitors cabin temperature. Using an automobile's interior temperature profile, the system is capable of accurately determining the level of danger presented to entrapped passengers. This ensures that the smart child restraint system can decisively activate warning and rescue devices such as hazard lights, horn, power windows, seat fan, and tele-communication equipment. To assist in system calibration efforts, summer weather testing has been completed to explore cabin heating transients.

INTRINSIC PERIODICITY OF TIME AND NONMAXIMAL ENTROPY OF UNIVERSE

The universe is certainly not yet in a total thermodynamical equilibrium. Thus some law of special initial conditions is needed. A universe or a system imposed to behave periodically will then require "initial conditions." Those initial conditions will not look like the type we already have, which have been suffered the heat death. In other words, the required initial conditions should not have been obtained the maximal entropy — like a random state. The intrinsic periodicity successfully explains why entropy is not maximal but it fails, phenomenologically, in leading to a constant entropy.

General and specific mortality among the elderly during the 2003 heat wave in Genoa (Italy)

The effects of heat waves on health can be serious for elderly persons, especially those in urban areas. We investigated in-depth the mortality excess during the 2003 heat wave among elderly persons (>74 years) in the City of Genoa (Italy). The excess in general mortality was calculated for the period July 16–August 31, as the ratio of observed to expected deaths. To evaluate “harvesting”, we compared observed and expected mortality in the period September 2003–April 2004. We also studied the relationship between mortality and climatic conditions considering daily maximum temperature and Humidex discomfort degrees, as well as “lag-time”. For cause-specific mortality, we considered all pathologies reported on the death certificate. The excess in general mortality was significant and was greatest in the first half of August. During Summer 2003, in Genoa the climatic conditions (described in terms of maximum temperature and Humidex Index) were extremely hot; regarding lag-time, the greatest correlation between the number of observed deaths and the maximum temperature values was observed for the three preceding days ( ρ = 0.568 ; significance level <0.01). The prominent causes of death, for which an excess was observed, were cerebrovascular diseases, severe respiratory diseases, severe renal diseases, dementia; moreover, certain pathologic conditions and symptoms, usually not lethal, were also frequent causes of death (e.g., hypovolemia, hyperpyrexia, decubitus ulcers and immobilization syndrome). The results of this study confirm the relationship between the heat waves and death among elderly, stressing that, because of their poorer physical health and the prevalence of cognitive disturbances that hinder risk perception, it is necessary to properly care for them during heat waves.

Heat waves: health impacts

During the summer of 2003, record high temperatures were reported across Europe, causing thousands of casualties. Heat waves are sporadic recurrent events, characterised by intense and prolonged heat, associated with excess mortality and morbidity. The most frequent cause of death directly attributable to heat is heat stroke but heat waves are known to cause increases in all-cause mortality, specially circulatory and respiratory mortality. Epidemiological studies demonstrate excess casualties cluster in specific risk groups. The elderly, those with chronic medical conditions and the socially isolated are particularly vulnerable. Air conditioning is the strongest protective factor against heat-related disorders. Heat waves cause disease indirectly, by aggravating chronic disorders, and directly, by causing heat-related illnesses (HRI). Classic HRI include skin eruptions, heat cramps, heat syncope, heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Heat stroke is a medical emergency characterised by hyperthermia and central nervous system dysfunction. Treatment includes immediate cooling and support of organ-system function. Despite aggressive treatment, heat stroke is often fatal and permanent neurological damage is frequent in those who survive. Heat related illness and death are preventable through behavioural adaptations, such as use of air conditioning and increased fluid intake. Other adaptation measures include heat emergency warning systems and intervention plans and environmental heat stress reduction. Heat related mortality is expected to rise as a consequence of the increasing proportion of elderly persons, the growing urban population, and the anticipated increase in number and intensity of heat waves associated with global warming. Improvements in surveillance and response capability may limit the adverse health conditions of future heat waves. It is crucial that health professionals are prepared to recognise, prevent and treat HRI and learn to cooperate with local health agencies.

Unification of Cosmology and the Second Law of Thermodynamics: -- Proposal for Solving the Cosmological Constant and Inflation Problems --

We seek to unify the second law of thermodynamics with other physical laws, or, at least to find a law underlying the second law of thermodynamics. Assuming no fine tuning, using a random Hamiltonian, we argue just from the equations of motion — without the second law — that entropy cannot first increase and then decrease except with the rather strict restriction Slarge ≤ Ssmall1 + Ssmall2. Here Slarge is the “large” entropy in the intermidiate era, while Ssmall1 and Ssmall2 are the entropies at certain times before and after the Slarge era. From this theorem asserting that there can exist no strong maximum for the entropy, we argue that an S1 cyclic time model world could have entropy that varies by at most a factor of two and would not be phenomenologically realistic. With an open ended time axis (−∞) = R, some law underlying the second law of thermodynamics is needed if the entropy is not maximal (i.e. that heat death having y occurred at the start). We derive such a law behind the second law — or a unification of the second law with other laws - by assigning a probability weight P for finding the world/system in various places in phase space. In such a model, P is almost unified with the rest as P = exp (−2 SIm), with SIm being the imaginary part of the action. We quite naturally derive the second law for practical purposes, a Big Bang with two-sided time directions, and find that there is a need for a Hamiltonian density with a well-defined bottom. Assuming that the cosmological constant is a dynamical variable in the sense that it is counted as on “initial condition”, we even solve in our model the cosmological constant problem without using the anthropic principle.

Heat stress downregulates FLIP and sensitizes cells to Fas receptor-mediated apoptosis.

The heat shock response and death receptor-mediated apoptosis are both key physiological determinants of cell survival. We found that exposure to a mild heat stress rapidly sensitized Jurkat and HeLa cells to Fas-mediated apoptosis. We further demonstrate that Hsp70 and the mitogen-activated protein kinases, critical molecules involved in both stress-associated and apoptotic responses, are not responsible for the sensitization. Instead, heat stress on its own induced downregulation of FLIP and promoted caspase-8 cleavage without triggering cell death, which might be the cause of the observed sensitization. Since caspase-9 and -3 were not cleaved after heat shock, caspase-8 seemed to be the initial caspase activated in the process. These findings could help understanding the regulation of death receptor signaling during stress, fever, or inflammation.

Modification of Schooling Behavior in Larval Atherinid FishAtherina mochonby Heat Exposure of Eggs and Larvae

We report the effects of short daily exposures to sublethal increases in water temperature during the egg and larval stages on the development of the schooling behavior of the little sand smelt Atherina mochon. The experiments were conducted to simulate the periodic exposure of different developmental stages to a transient thermal plume caused by the discharge of heated effluents into the spawning environment. Exposures were administered for eggs only, larvae only, and both eggs and larvae and consisted of nonlethal increases in water temperature from a 20°C acclimation temperature to 28.5°C over a period of 30 min, maintenance at 28.5°C for 15 min, and a gradual reduction to 20°C over 35 min. Heat treatments were administered to the egg-only and larvae-only groups for 10 consecutive days each; those administered at both the egg and larval stages were for 20 consecutive days. Behavioral testing of larval fish at 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, and 35 d posthatch showed significant modification or retardation of schooling behavior. There was an increase in number of approach–withdrawals (behavior that precedes parallel formation and involves the head-on approach of two fry and immediate veering away) as well as a decrease in parallel orientation (schooling), higher latency for the formation of the first schools, and shorter duration of the longest-persisting schools in most heat-exposed fish relative to the controls. Locomotor ability was diminished and schooling was unstable, with wide fish-to-fish distances and an absence of synchrony in the position and swimming speed of school members. These behaviors were indicative of a reduction in normal social interaction, in which fish swim close together and adjust to each other in a coordinated fashion. Additional research is required to determine whether subtle changes in schooling behavior are as important as immediate heat death to the survival of local fish populations.

ENTROPIC ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY COSMOLOGY

Penrose1has emphasized how the initial big bang singularity requires a special low entropy state. We address how recent brane cosmological schemes address this problem and whether they offer any apparent resolution. Pushing the start time back to t = -∞, or utilizing maximally symmetric AdS spaces, simply exacerbates or transfers the problem. Since the entropy of de Sitter space is S ≤ 1/Λ, using the present acceleration of the universe as a low energy (Λ ~ 10-120) inflationary stage, as in cyclic ekpyrotic models, produces a gravitational heat death after one cycle. Only higher energy driven inflation, together with a suitable, quantum gravity holography style, restriction on ab initio degrees of freedom, gives a suitable low entropy initial state. We question the suggestion that a high energy inflationary stage could be naturally reentered by Poincaré recurrence within a finite causal region of an accelerating universe.We further give a heuristic argument that the so-called eternal inflation is not consistent with the second law of thermodynamics within a causal patch.

Forecast for the Next Eon: Applied Cosmology and the Long-Term Fate of Intelligent Beings

Cosmology seems extremely remote from everyday human practice and experience. It is usually taken for granted that cosmological data cannot rationally influence our beliefs about the fate of humanity—and possible other intelligent species—except perhaps in the extremely distant future, when the issue of “heat death” (in an ever-expanding universe) becomes actual. Here, an attempt is made to show that it may become a practical question much sooner, if an intelligent community wishes to maximize its creative potential. We estimate, on the basis of a greatly simplified model, the rate of loss of potentially useful information due to the delay in undertaking the colonization of the largest gravitationally bound structures in an accelerating universe. In addition, we argue for a natural cosmological extension of the classical taxonomy of advanced technological communities given by Kardashev. New developments in the fields of anthropic self-selection and physical eschatology give, for the first time, solid foundations to such results. This may open some new (and possibly urgent) issues in the areas of future policy making and transhumanist studies generally. It may also give us a slightly better perspective on the SETI endeavor.

Entropy and Eschatology: A Comment on Kutrovátz's Paper "Heat Death in Ancient and Modern Thermodynamics"

Recent intriguing discussion of heat death by Kutrovátz is critically examined. It is shown that there exists another way of answering the heat death puzzle, already present in the ancient philosophical tradition. This alternative route relies not only on the final duration of time (which has been re-discovered in modern times), but also on the notion of observational self-selection, which has received wide publicity in the last several decades under the title of the anthropic principle(s). We comment here on some further deficiencies of the account of Kutrovátz. Although the questions Kutrovátz raises are important and welcome, there are several errors in his treatment of cosmology which mar his account of the entire topic. In addition, the nascent discipline of physical eschatology holds promise of answering the basic explanatory task concerning the future evolution of the universe without appealing to metaphysics. This is a completely novel feature in the history of science, in contradistinction to the historical examples discussed by Kutrovátz.

How Science Is a Resource and a Challenge for Religion: Perspective of a Theologian

Religion is characterized by the attempt to create a worldview, which is in effect the effort of worldbuilding. By this I mean that religion aims to focus on all of the elements that make up a person's world or a community's world and put those elements together in a manner that actually constructs a total picture that gives meaning and coherence to life. In this activity of worldbuilding, science and religion meet each other at the deepest level. Science makes a fundamental contribution to this worldbuilding effort and also poses a challenge. There are good grounds for this twofold role of science: (1) scientific knowledge is basic to any worldview in our time, and (2) science and its related technology engender new and often confusing experiences that require inclusion in any worldbuilding.The challenge of science is that its contribution does not easily accommodate worldbuilding because of the factors of chance, indeterminacy, blind evolution, and heat death that are ascertained through scientific knowledge. Science is a resource for us in that the features of its knowledge can lend actuality and credibility to worldbuilding.Religion needs science for its worldbuilding if its interpretations are to be credible and possess vivid actuality. Science needs religion because, unless its knowledge is incorporated into meaningful worldbuilding, science forfeits its standing as a humanistic enterprise and instead may count as an antihuman methodology and body of knowledge.

Heat Death in Ancient and Modern Thermodynamics

The notion of Heat Death proves to be very useful for the understanding of the behaviour and evolutionary features of various thermodynamic systems. It is closely related to the problems that motivated the birth of modern thermodynamics, but these problems were already present, in different forms, in the scientific and philosophical theories of the distant past. In this paper, I would like to show that one particular and very influential ancient scientific theory, Aristotle's physics, includes a solution to the problem of Heat Death implicitly, and that this solution can fruitfully be compared with the different solution offered by modern thermodynamics.

Heat, heat shock, heat shock proteins and death: a central link in innate and adaptive immune responses

Heat, heat shock, heat shock proteins and death: a central link in innate and adaptive immune responses

Physiological disturbances at critically high temperatures: a comparison between stenothermal antarctic and eurythermal temperate eelpouts (Zoarcidae)

The effect of gradually increased water temperature on the metabolism of temperate eelpout from the North Sea (Zoarces viviparus) and Antarctic eelpout (Pachycara brachycephalum) was investigated. Standard metabolic rate (SMR) was similar in cold-adapted P. brachycephalum and cold-acclimated Z. viviparus in the low temperature range. This indicates that Antarctic eelpout show no metabolic cold adaptation (as originally defined by Wohlschlag); however, they do show a compensatory increase of oxygen consumption compared to warm-acclimated eelpout. SMR increased more strongly with rising temperature in P. brachycephalum than in Z. viviparus, which is reflected in a higher Arrhenius activation energy for oxygen consumption (99+/-5 kJ mol(-)(1), versus 55+/-3 kJ mol(-)(1) for cold-acclimated Z. viviparus; means +/- s.d.). The intracellular pH in the white musculature of Z. viviparus follows alphastat regulation over the whole investigated temperature range and dropped at a rate of -0.016 pH units per degrees C between 3 degrees C and 24 degrees C. In Antarctic eelpout white muscle pH declined at a rate of -0.015 pH units per degrees C between 0 degrees C and 3 degrees C, but deviated from alphastat at higher temperatures, indicating that thermal stress leads to acid-base disturbances in this species. The upper critical temperature limit (Tc(II); characterised by a transition to anaerobic metabolism) was found to be between 21 degrees C and 24 degrees C for Z. viviparus and around 9 degrees C for P. brachycephalum. In both species a rise of succinate concentration in the liver tissue turned out to be the most useful indicator of Tc(II). Obviously, liver is more sensitive to heat stress than is white muscle. Accordingly, the energy status of white muscle is not diminished at Tc(II). Heat-induced hyperglycaemia was observed in Antarctic eelpout (at 9 degrees C and 10 degrees C), but not in common eelpout. Based on our results and on literature data, impaired respiration in combination with circulatory failure is suggested as the final cause of heat death. Our data suggest that the southern distribution limit of Zoarces viviparus is correlated with the limit of thermal tolerance. Therefore, it can be anticipated that global warming would cause a shift in the distribution of this species.

Born's Principle, Action-Reaction Problem and Arrow of Time

We try to obtain Born’s principle as a result of a subquantum heat death, using classical ℌ-theorem and the definition of a proper quantum ℌ-theorem, within the framwork of Bohm’s theory. We shall show the possibility of solving the problem of action-reaction asymmetry present in Bohm’s theory and the arrow of time problem in our procedure.

The Evolution of the Thermodynamic Equilibrium in theExpanding Universe

The paper shows that the energy gained by expansion of the universeis in the order of 1057 J/y. This implies a correspondingdevelopment toward more order and information, or expresseddifferently that the thermodynamic equilibrium of the universe movesaway at a rate of 1057 J/y. The classic interpretation ofthe second law of thermodynamics, that we are moving toward the“heat death” should therefore bemodified.

Nebulous Earth: the origin of the Solar System and the core of the Earth from Laplace to Jeffreys

Preface Part I. Nebular Birth and Heat Death: 1. Introduction 2. The Founders: Laplace and Herschel 3. Followers and critics 4. The Nebular Hypothesis and the evolutionary worldview 5. Thermodynamics and the cooling Earth 6. Saturn's rings (with C. W. F. Everitt and Elizabeth Garber) 7. Revisions of the Nebular Hypothesis, 1860-85 8. Poincare and cosmic evolution 9. The Nebular Hypothesis in the 20th century Part II. Inside the Earth: 1. A journey to the center of the Earth 2. Nineteenth-century debates: Solid, liquid or gas? 3. Discovery of the Earth's core 4. Chemical history of the core 5. Geomagnetic secular variation (with S. K. Banerjee) 6. Time and tide Index.