[ExI] Interstellar FedEx

Anders Sandberg asa at nada.kth.se
Wed Sep 30 22:20:32 UTC 2009


Tomaz Kristan wrote:
> >  It seems to be a rather limited view, mostly intended to facilitate 
> education. It doesn't link up at all with the statistical 
> thermodynamics perspective.
>
> It has begun as an educational try, but it is quite a mainstream view now.
>
> http://entropysite.oxy.edu/
>
> At least they say so. I am still thinking about it.
Anybody starting out by claiming to have a "modern view" of some 
fundamental physical concept already get a few crackpot points in my 
book. In fact, he explicitely claims that information entropy is not the 
same as "real" entropy, something that I think the majority of 
physicists would say is just wrong (if they are different, then the 
Szilard-Brillouin-Landauer argument against Maxwell's demon falls). His 
demand that it must always be at the same temperature seems to go 
counter to an awful number of equations in the physics textbooks around 
me. Maybe this has value from an educational perspective, but I think it 
doesn't look like mainstream by any stretch.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute 
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University 




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