Berlin 2012 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 3: Complex and Open Systems

AGPhil 3.5: Vortrag

Dienstag, 27. März 2012, 12:30–13:00, H 2033

Thermodynamics excludes a physical origin of life in open systems — •Thomas Seiler — Stuttgart

Entropy determines that all processes in nature proceed from less probable distributions to more probable ones. An objection to this premise is that the constraints of thermodynamics are not valid for open systems - in which biological structures exist.

However, the limits of open systems can be illustrated by the example of machines that reduce entropy such as refrigerators. They transfer heat from a cold volume to a warm volume. This highly improbable phenomenon can only happen because a complex cooling mechanism exists already. A further example of order increasing in open systems is the formation of crystals, e.g. snow-flakes. When heat is removed, a phase-transition leads to the appearance of macroscopic regularity which reflects a molecular regularity.

The emergence of life does not belong to such processes since these are the physical ways in which a hidden pre-existing order is made visible. No really new order or information is generated in open systems. Either the information content was already present in a complex machine or it already existed in the symmetry of the underlying molecules or in the feedback mechanism of a dissipative structure.

On the other hand, there is no physical arrangement containing the information needed to built up life from non-life or complex creatures from simpler creatures. Their physical emergence is excluded by the second law of thermodynamics because they do not belong to those pre-programmed structures which open systems can form.