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The Amazing Journey of Reason

Mario Alemi

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mathematics

Introduction

  • "Cult anthropology is that branch of natural science which deals with matter and motion,i.e. energy , phenomena in cultural form, as biology deals with them in cellular, and physics in atomic, form."

Preface

  • Erwin Schrödinger's, one of the parents of quantum mechanics, gave this definition in his booklet What is life (1944):Life is organized matter which evades the decay to equilibrium through absorption of energy
  • John von Neumann2 (1956), linked entropy and information with that definition:Entropy … corresponds to the amount of (microscopic) information that is missing in the (macroscopic) description.3
  • Let us put this definition together with the one given by James Maxwell (1902), one of the founders of thermodynamics:The greater the original entropy, the smaller is the available energy of the body.Maxwell says that low entropy means being able to extract energy. Von Neumann that low entropy means having information about the system. Therefore, when we have information about a system, we are able to extract energy from it.
  • Charles Darwin stated that asking questions about the origin of life was the same as asking questions about the origin of matter.