Thermoeconomics

Energy is like money. Or perhaps, moving energy around efficiently requires suitable energy carriers that function like money. (Think ATP!) Or perhaps the ability to capture larger proportions of energy is like money – wealth grows when one can funnel resources into objects (material or experiential) that can be subsequently utilized. Bartering is inefficient. The right people have to meet at the right time with the right objects and agree on the right price of exchange. But with money – ah, you can do so much more and so much more quickly!

 

Salt, grain, and gold, have been used as money in times past. Then we started using paper as proxy IOUs. And now we move 1’s and 0’s around in a seemingly ephemeral digital cloud. Does money really exist? For a quick, humorous, engaging, educational romp through this story, I recommend Jacob Goldstein’s book Money: The True Story of a Made-up Thing.

 

Energy seems to be ephemeral and nebulous, as my students are learning this semester. Is there a connection between energy and money? Between the second law of thermodynamics and economics? Maybe there used to be, and maybe we should move away from it. So says Peter Corning in his article “Thermoeconomics: Time to move beyond the Second Law” (Prog. Biophys. Mol. Biol. 2020, 158, 57-65).

 

The story starts out with Schrodinger’s Paradox, and moves through dissipative structures (à la Prigogine) and views that life is inevitable because of, and not despite, the second law of thermodynamics (à la Schneider & Kay). The confounding link between Boltzmann and Shannon entropy is described as a confusion in communication (pun intended). And Maxwell’s Demon makes its appearance for being taken too seriously by physicists. To quote Corning’s acerbic wit: “As an increasing degree of realism was introduced into the debate, along with various doomed attempts to add technological improvements to the demon, the physics community ultimately converted the experiment into a problem in information theory and, lately, into a pedagogical tool in introductory physics courses.”

 

Corning’s thesis sounds more like my first paragraph. He wants to excise the notions of order and disorder associated with the second law of thermodynamics. He argues for an economic view of how life evolves and utilizes energy: “Living systems must capture, or harvest the energy required to build biomass and do work; they must invest energy in their own development, maintenance, reproduction, and evolution over time. Life is a labor-intensive activity, and the energetic benefits must outweigh the costs (inclusive of entropy) if the system is to survive.” This is Corning’s First Law of Thermoeconomics.

 

You can’t get ‘order’ for free in your system from the second law even if you posit larger entropy increases in the universe. There are economic constraints. Free energy is not so free. Corning argues that thinking about energy in economic terms, and using its terminology (capital costs, amortization, operating cost, economic surplus) is more useful when it comes to explain Schrodinger’s Paradox: What is life? And why does it seem ordered and even purposeful? Corning thinks “the notion that there is some inherent economizing influence embedded in the laws of physics” is very limited to special cases in specific physical systems. (“Tornado in a Bottle” might be a good example, although Corning doesn’t specifically refer to it.)

 

Having read a chunk of the literature cited by Corning, I don’t think his view is diametrically opposed to those he criticizes, although I appreciate his witty polemic. I do think his reminder that we should be careful not to extend the notion of entropy too far, and perhaps just stick to its “energy dissipation” definition. Corning thinks that theorists caused the confusion by assuming “an equivalence between statistical order, energetic order, and physical order.” I think they are connected, but I agree with Corning that they are not equivalent and we should be careful when we throw around these terms. It’s a wonder our students are confused, possibly because so are we as scientists and teachers.

 

So what’s this business of energy dissipation? I end with a money analogy that popped into my head this morning. Imagine you received $20,000 in cash. You spread it around to a thousand friends passing them twenty bucks each. Later you want to buy a $20,000 car. To get your money back (let’s assume no easy internet banking or pay apps, and physical banknotes must be used), you’ll need all your friends to pass you back their twenty bucks. Not so easy. But not impossible. Possibly low probability if some of your friends are hard to track down. Now if only you had a mechanism to corral more money into your account… ah, now you’re talking evolution and economics!