Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice by James Lee Hoover

Dear James Lee Hoover,

Hope you will spend some more time on Dynamic Universe Model...

Best Regards

=snp.gupta

Dear James Lee,

Thank you for the lessons I learned from your essay.

Indeed survival (and procreation) is for living agants the most important thing, but beside of that we are also worrying about the WHY, one of the reasons of this contest.

You had a very clear goal in your work : The goal of the Universe our reality.

In my perception it is "outside" our emergent reality that we have to search for the WHY.

I hope that you will find some time to read/comment and rate my essay "The Purpose of Life. (I rated your essay a 7).

Best regards and awaiting your comment

Wilhelmus de Wilde

This dissipation driven adaptation idea is a fascinating topic. It is hard to see how life can be organising itself in order to dissipate heat more effectively. After all, a dark rock sitting in the sunshine dissipates heat very well. However Jeremy England's calculations seem to suggest that the idea is right.

This seems to leave open the question of what physical mechanism is making this happen. Thermodynamics says that entropy must increase but is there a law of thermodynamics that says a system will adapt to do it more efficiently? How can this be shown in general terms rather than just by examples?

Dear James,

Very interesting essay, high dialectic and deep ontology of the "LifeWorld" (E.Husserl). This is what is needed today to overcome the total crisis of understanding in science and society. Successes in the Сontest! Sincerely, Vladimir

Dear Jim

I enjoyed your essay - its quiet tone and range, and its being refreshingly well-written and also on-topic (unlike mine) contributed to that. I tried to read England's paper following your endorsement, but it was too technical for my immediate understanding. I would like to see his simulations. I get the feeling it describes how local causal molecular interactions can evolve into self-replicating living cells via a faster route than thought possible.

As to dark matter In my Beautiful Universe Model dark energy and matter may be simply due to the internal pressure of mutually repulsive Universal lattice nodes.

Cheers

Vladimir

Hi James,

A very creative essay. For your idea collection I consider dark energy and dark matter the source of gravity (and it mostly fits with GR). See http://prespacetime.com/index.php/pst/article/view/1188/1163

In this contest you go for the endgame of fire or ice! An intellectual adventure.

Thank you for your essay,

Don Limuti

Dear Jim!

I invite you to familiarize yourself with New Cartesian Physic

I appreciate your essay. You spent a lot of effort to write it.

If you believed in the principle of identity of space and matter of Descartes, then your essay would be even better.

I wish to see your criticism on the New Cartesian Physic, the founder of which I call myself.

The concept of moving space-matter helped me:

- The uncertainty principle Heisenberg to make the principle of definiteness of points of space-matter;

- Open the law of the constancy of the flow of forces through a closed surface is the sphere of space-matter;

- Open the law of universal attraction of Lorentz;

- Give the formula for the pressure of the Universe;

- To give a definition of gravitational mass as the flow vector of the centrifugal acceleration across the surface of the corpuscles, etc.

New Cartesian Physic has great potential in understanding the world. To show this potential in his essay I gave The way of The materialist explanation of the paranormal and the supernatural . Visit my essay and you will find something in it about New Cartesian Physic. Note my statement that our brain creates an image of the outside world no inside, and in external space. Hope you rate my essay as high as I am yours. I am waiting your post.

Sincerely,

Dizhechko Boris

Hello James,

Yours are always one of the essays I look forward to most in these contests, and I certainly enjoyed your latest.

Although I took a more literary approach than you my essay discussed Jeremy England and the Second Law as well. Please check it out when you get the chance.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2817

Best of luck,

Rick Searle

Dear James,

Thank you for attention on my work. I appreciate your support!

Coming to your essay I will just emphasize some points that you says: "Such laws are not mindless ..." Then you says "they not dictate the aim ...". This almost is enough to me to understand your vision on the contest question. Then you goes a little on side and you linked the aim with the entropy. This I can welcome only (I think not me only!) because the connection of the entropy with system organisation it should be obvious to everybody. And, the purposefulness cannot be without organisation. So, this also is nice!

But let me just tell you friendly that I am a little bit sceptical to dark matter. If you will ask my advice here then I will say - It will better to wait until we understand the physical essence of gravity phenomena, the elementary particles etc. I mean, it maybe that time we just will see that the ''dark matter" becomes not so necessary!

And, in the common sense your essay are one of nice works in the contest. So, I can wish you success only!

Best regards

I see here are many partisans targeted to you, also...

Dear Jim, throwing in Jeremy England's ideas adds a nice twist. Maybe they will eventually make our seemingly exceptional situation appear as less unlikely than we thought it was. Cheers, Stefan

Hi Jim,

Nice Essay which approaches the topics of the Essay Contest in a very original way. I had fun in read it. Thus, you deserves a high score that I am going to give you. Good luck in the Contest.

Cheers, Ch.

Jim,

I teach and there are a few students, who might ask questions or just look interested, which make waking up and driving to class worth the effort; I feel that way when reading your essay. You have humanized the general topics of life, entropy and the state of the universe.

A few notes: the oceans are more of a heat sink with the sun being a heat source. "Organisms are intrinsically bound to increase in complexity through evolution." There must have been a period early in the history of life where complexity increased, but after that, life mostly tended to the simplest state with a few exceptions (like us).

Best of luck,

Jeff

Hi James,

Interesting article, and I agree with the observation that all self-organizations from a grain of sand to galaxies are striving to keep the dynamic equilibrium in optimization relative to their state in the environment.

In my philosophical essay "we are together, therefore I am", I explain how it is possible to ratify reality and how the self-organization' from sub particle to a human to galaxies maintain their self-organization.

Thanks again

Yehuda Atai

Hi James,

This is Ted Christopher and I am getting back about your essay and also comment.

You cover a lot of interesting ground in your essay. The work of England I had never heard of.

I just read an article that might be of interest to you. The January Scientific American has an article ""Tangled Up in Spacetime" about the growing interest in 'It from Qubit". This is drawing a lot of attention from physicists.

I think that the DNA connection to mental specifics will be a surprising setback for science. The differences between twins (even conjoined ones) and some unusual behavioral phenomena suggest that there is more to it.

I hope your work goes well.

Ted Christopher

Hi,

Several people have discussed Jeremy England's ideas. I think your explanation is the best. I wonder if his work can be proven theoretically or does it necessarily need experiments. If it is true, it is fascinating.

Thank you.

Noson

James,

Excellent essay deserving the high rating I gave it.

Peter

Hi Jim,

I appreciate you mentioned "life's higher meaning". Don't you think that the biggest discoveries and inventions of humanity happened in following this meaning, not the goals of survival and comfort? If so, would it be correct to try to explain the core of human beings by means of entropy and survival? In our essay we are trying to show that this approach leads to the Epimenides paradox. One more question relates to the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics": how it can be accounted in the framework of your paper?

Cheers,

Alexey Burov.

Hello James,

This is a really lucidly written and interesting essay - thank you for an enjoyable read focussing on a wide variety of phenomena in the natural sciences. I definitely agree that the second law of thermodynamics is likely intimately connected with life. You refer to England's work, which is one we encountered but did not develop in detail in our essay with my coauthor. Instead we focussed on another interesting examination of maximising entropy production based on Kleidon's work and how a holistic thermodynamic view can help us understand how life emerged on Earth.

It is interesting that you allude to our marching towards a unifying theory of everything and understanding natural phenomena in an ordered way as a a goal-oriented behaviour. I find it very interesting how such awareness of physical laws even arose in humans out of evolutionary or entropy maximisation principles. As a particle physicist by day, it is striking how we as living systems emerging from likely thermodynamic principles, came to describe the microcosm at such exquisite levels of empirical precision. As you mention the arrow of time, it is intriguingly even somewhat present at colliders as muons always fly away from the collision point never towards it.

Thanks again for an interesting read!

Best,

Jesse