François Roddier, thermodynamics and society

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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by sen-no-sen » 29/01/18, 20:52

Ahmed wrote:The interpretation of this table is not so simple: it is about income and aggregate assets, which does not shed light on disparities in wages and wealth. As this is a relationship between these two values, each variation of one or the other affects the ratio: from this point of view, I do not find it necessarily the most relevant.


I have not yet studied in depth the question *, however the notion of economic cycle is particularly enlightening and could largely explain the different periods in the contemporary era and their ideological consequences.



* I am currently reading "Capital in the XNIXXth century de Thomas Piketty"and its 950 pages! : Lol:
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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by Ahmed » 30/01/18, 18:33

It would surprise me that you find "enlightenment" in this work with a pretentious title and copious content, but based on questionable assumptions ...
The idea of ​​a cycle is interesting, but what is more important is its mechanism and its explanation.
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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by sen-no-sen » 30/01/18, 21:15

Ahmed wrote:The idea of ​​a cycle is interesting, but what is more important is its mechanism and its explanation.


Yes and the central thesis develop by F.Roddier (from the work of Ulanowicz ) is the degree of connection of a society.
From this point of view, we can see that today's society is ultra-connected, but that the quality of the resulting reports is very low.
This is logical since the multiplicity of connections is necessarily at the expense of their intensities.
The result is a society turned towards individualism where relations are superficial but all dependent on each other, a consequence of economic saturation.
Thus a sufficiently important event may result in a series of effects, the latter may in their turn amplify and weaken all.This is typically what happens during a cap on the highway * or. ..of a financial crisis.


* On a motorway, the degree of connection can be symbolized by reduced safety distances between vehicles, the smaller these are, the more the impact of an event (eg a narrowing) is transmitted to others, resulting in inertia an effect of and it can come very far.
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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by sen-no-sen » 18/03/18, 13:27

the 12 April 2018 at 18h45, at the Ecole des Mines in Paris, 60 Bd. Saint Michel, the association Dynamose organizes an annual event on the theme "Thermodynamics, Globalization & Sovereignty: Which Europe for which ecological and economic transition in a France and a world in systemic crisis? "In which the economist will participate Jacques Sapir. I will make a presentation myself on the subject: "Thermodynamics and de-globalization". Registration on the website of the association Dynamose. The presentation will be recorded and published on Youtube.

http://www.francois-roddier.fr/
To note the presence of François Roddier, Jean-Marc Jancovici and Jacques Sapir.
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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by sen-no-sen » 11/05/18, 16:12

121 - The Carnot yield of a company.
6 May 2018GeneralFrançois Roddier

The diligent reader of this blog should now be convinced that a human society is a dissipative structure: it organizes itself to dissipate energy. The second principle of thermodynamics requires that it describes cycles called Carnot cycles between a hot source of absolute temperature T1 and a cold source of absolute temperature T2. In the case of a steam engine, Carnot has shown that its yield is limited. Its maximum value is given by the expression (T1 -T2) / T1. The greater the difference in temperature, the higher Carnot's yield.

What about a human society? We have identified its cycles with the economic cycles and historical cycles of Turchin and Nefedov (90 note). What about his temperature? By analogy with fluids, we have defined the temperature of an economy as the energy dissipated per monetary unit. Similarly, the temperature of a society can be defined as the energy it dissipates per bit of stored information. In what follows, we will assume that the cost of energy is fixed. This is what happens if we index the currency to the available energy, which should be done for an international currency like the Euro. We can then measure energy in Euros (its cost) and examine the role of non-monetary information.

In my presentation at the Mining School (slide 11), I showed that a neural network such as a human society receives energy from its hot source and information from its cold source. This means that the temperature of the hot source can be expressed in Euros of energy supplied by bits of stored information. That of the cold source is measured in Euros spent per bit of information received. In both cases, it is measured in Euro / bit.

For a given energy flow (measured in Euros per year), the less the hot source requires stored information, the higher its temperature. This favors "low tech" energy sources [1]. The development and maintenance of a nuclear power plant requires a lot of technicality (many bits of information per Euro of energy supplied), which reduces the "temperature of this hot source" (less than Euro energy per bit of information). From this point of view, wind turbines are better placed because they are less complex. They produce more energy Euros per bit of stored information. Their "temperature" is therefore higher.

Similarly, the colder the source of information at low cost, the lower its temperature. In this case the problem is that of the cost of education. The lower the cost of education, the lower the temperature of the cold source (few Euros / bits). In summary, a company's Carnot performance can be written:

r = (maintenance cost - development cost) / maintenance cost

or, if we limit ourselves to the staff:

r = (wages - cost of education) / wages

This return tends to zero when the salary of a young employee allows him to just repay his studies.

In his book "The Collapse of Complex Societies" [2], the American anthropologist Joseph Tainter shows that the more complex a society becomes, the more it tends to collapse. We now understand better why. The complexity of its energy sources decreases the "temperature" of its hot source (too many bits of information per Euro of energy supplied) while the complexity of its education increases its cost, therefore the "temperature" of its source cold (too much Euro per bit of information taught). Thus, the more complex a society becomes, the lower its Carnot yield.

The work of Joseph Tainter shows that this is the main cause of the collapse of societies. It invites us to rebuild a less complex society, with an education system that is both more efficient and less expensive.

[1] Philippe Bihouix. The age of low tech, Threshold, 2010.
[2] Joseph Tainter. The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge U. Press, 1990.


http://www.francois-roddier.fr/
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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by sen-no-sen » 11/05/18, 16:14

122 - The cost of scientific and technical progress.
9 May 2018GeneralFrançois Roddier

In the 2.5 section of my book "Thermodynamics of Evolution" (bottom of the 36 page), I wrote that human societies "self-organize by forming a global brain capable of memorizing ever more information. This information allows them to dissipate more and more energy. This is what we call scientific and technical progress.

In my recent presentation to the mining school, I said that a neural network receives information from its cold source: this is the case of the global brain that our society forms. In my previous post I showed that the temperature of this cold source can be expressed in Euros spent per bit of stored information. This raises the problem of the cost of scientific research. The higher the cost, the higher the temperature of our information source and the lower the Carnot efficiency of our company. My previous post suggests that human societies collapse when their Carnot performance is too low. This gives me the opportunity to discuss here some traits of my personal scientific career.

I started my scientific career under the direction of Jacques Blamont, one of the fathers of space research in France. While the researchers in his laboratory were mounting their experiments on balloons or rockets, I preferred to study the sun from the ground. I put together my own experience behind the 25 cm diameter lens that fitted the small siderostat at the Marseille Observatory in the city center. Four years later, I had publishable results, while the balloons of my comrades burst in flight or their rockets crashed on the ground. It was a heroic time, where the cost of complexity was already high.

After having created the astrophysics laboratory at the University of Nice where we developed helioseismology, I went to the United States to develop adaptive optics. This makes it possible to compensate for the optical effects of atmospheric turbulence and to compete, at least partially, with the observation in space. It was the time when the Hubble Space Telescope was launched. We then realized that he was not working. An error had been made producing what is called an aberration of sphericity. He was also poorly aligned. It was necessary to build and install in orbit a corrective optics. My team was among those who determined the corrections to make.

Adaptive optics allowed us to see infra-red what the Hubble telescope saw in the visible. Sometimes we had the discovery of a discovery, confirmed by Hubble, like the ring around the star GG Tau whose image is at the top of this blog. Most of the time we only detected infra-red what the space telescope already saw in the visible. This is the case, for example, with the Neptune ring and its Protée satellite. In some cases, the infra-red observation gave us a decisive advantage: our infra-red images of Neptune's clouds were displayed in the corridors of the NSF, which competed with NASA.

There is no question of denying here the contributions of space research. They are out of proportion to what we could do on the ground. But if you divide this contribution, measured in bits of published information, by the cost of putting into orbit followed by the repair of a telescope in space, then space research may be sad. If you now think of the 800 millions of people still suffering from hunger in the world, how have we improved their lot? Do scientists not have some responsibility?

I have only described here the area of ​​research I know for participating. It is easy to imagine that the same is true of nuclear research. I am not only talking about fission research but also about the merger in the south of France, where our country has specialized in this area. Have you ever tried to measure their cost in bits of useful information per Euro of money spent?

Sylvestre Huet introduced the presentations at the School of Mines (120 ticket) by mocking the general public who think that nuclear plants produce greenhouse gases. This shows the state of education in France: the number of Euros spent per bit of assimilated information confirms that our society does have a problem of cold source. But that's not what Huet meant. For us, our society has a problem of hot spring, our source of energy, and nuclear power is the solution. Only here it is: the public does not want it.

Just as each of us has an unconscious, the global brain of our society has a collective unconscious. The psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung showed it very well. When we speak of nuclear, this collective unconscious immediately associates words like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl or Fukushima and he does not want it. In other words, it calls into question scientific and technical progress. This unconscious tells us that our social problems are linked to scientific and technological progress and doubt that we can solve these problems by even more progress. My personal experience of financing scientific and technical research tells me that this subconscious is right.

Joseph Tainter confirms this: human societies are collapsing by excessive technical feats. The civilization of Easter Island survived the eradication of all its trees, but it collapsed for erecting statues as impressive as they are useless. Our civilization will survive both the end of oil and global warming; but she will collapse for wanting the moon, a dead star, useless for her. Civilizations collapse when the cost they pay for scientific and technical information becomes too high. Their yield of Carnot then goes down too low. More successful civilizations are replacing them.


http://www.francois-roddier.fr/
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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by Ahmed » 13/05/18, 11:51

Economic flows are maximum when production (hot source) and consumption (cold source) have a high potential difference. This supposes that the reverse flow of goods (production => consumption), that is to say that which represents the quantity of production work (and therefore money) and goes towards the destruction of goods is also very high. . Therefore, this presupposes a situation of full employment, high productivity and rapid technological development leading to the appearance of new products.
It will be understood that this stage of development can only be fleeting, since several of the preceding factors evolve in a contradictory manner. Thus, the destruction capacity of individuals gradually decreases under the influence of two factors: equipment goods tend to saturate this capacity (they have a certain duration * and "new things" tend to decrease), on the other hand, the continuous increase in productivity pushes out of the system many producers who, as consumers, become less efficient, as the return flow slows down.
So we see that the system can only tend to zero from its optimum and because of its success.
There is no need here to invoke the usual physical limitations: it is a purely intrinsic phenomenon to a system. That's what I tried briefly to explain here.
We also understand why a system which "succeeds" encourages its agents to persevere in the same direction, even though the action becomes counterproductive and it is futile to expect the same consequences as those observed previously. The illusion then leads to believe that the reason that the efforts are not crowned with success does not result from a bad orientation, but from an insufficient effort in this direction.
We perceive the triumph of this blindness in the theory of "runoff" invoked by the reigning macronism ...

* There is a growing gap between the productivity of production labor and that of labor labor.
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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by sen-no-sen » 13/05/18, 13:01

Yes, which confirms that the causes of an economic crumbling or collapse are not necessarily linked to factors that could be described as "apocalyptic".
The mere fact of having a high-level connection society alone leads to a systemic collapse.

So we see that the system can only tend to zero from its optimum and because of its success.


Systems of all kinds fluctuate around a point of equilibrium.
So more a model tends to move away from the aequilibrium the more an accumulation of contradiction pushes it towards an opposite direction via a phase transition which in turn induces all possible modifications: ecological, economic, social or societal.

There is no need here to invoke the usual physical limitations: it is a purely intrinsic phenomenon to a system. This is what I tried briefly to explain here.

Indeed, in any case rare are the cases where systems collapse with the end of resources, the phenomenon occurs well before.
The problem is that it is difficult to get this idea into the mind of a politician, especially when this one is cornucopian *.


* I voluntarily impregnate this term! 8)
Last edited by sen-no-sen the 13 / 05 / 18, 13: 29, 1 edited once.
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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by Ahmed » 13/05/18, 13:17

I hardly understand your last sentence: is there a non-Cornucopian politician?
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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by sen-no-sen » 13/05/18, 13:24

Ahmed wrote:I hardly understand your last sentence: is there a non-Cornucopian politician?


There are a lot of politicians who actually do not earn anything and are there only by cronyism.
As an example I do not think that Nadine Morano ou Francois Hollande either "cornucopian" within the strict term, I just think they are "incompetentists" : Lol: .
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