technology:thermodynamics

Yes, Your Brain Does Process Information - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/yes-your-brain-does-process-information

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Do you know what information is? No worries if you don’t. Clarity on the concept is apparently hard to come by. In a May cover story, New Scientist wondered, “What is information?” The answer: “a mystery bound up with thermodynamics” that “seems to play a part in everything from how machines work to how living creatures function.” Plausible enough—genomes, immune systems, and brains all seem to process information. Yet published the next week was an essay on Aeon by Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, explaining, “Your brain does not process information” (emphasis mine). “We are organisms, not computers. Get over it. Let’s get on with the business of trying to understand ourselves, but without being encumbered by (...)

The Mystery of Time’s Arrow - Issue 9: Time
▻http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/the-mystery-of-times-arrow

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As conscious beings, we are constantly aware of the relentless march of time. You can make an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet back into an egg. Dropped glasses shatter and do not reassemble themselves. Above all, we age and become decrepit; there is no return to youth. But this is a great scientific mystery. There is nothing in the form of the laws of nature at the fundamental microscopic level that distinguishes a direction of time. They are time-symmetric. But the behavior of macroscopic objects around us is subject to the famous second law of thermodynamics, according to which disorder (as measured by entropy) always increases with time. This puts a direction, or arrow, of time into phenomena. The classical studies by Maxwell and Boltzmann in the second half of the (...)