#thermodynamics — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #thermodynamics, aggregated by home.social.
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How Clean Air Warms the Earth
Today, we’re exploring a microscopic landscape completely invisible to the naked eye—a world of 'ghost' particles that control both our climate and our own biology.
#aerosol #TerminationShock #atmosphere #physics #thermodynamics #PublicHealth #ShippingEmissions #sulfur #FaustianBargain #WhiteDragon #白龍 #EarthCARE #podcasts #YouTube #GlobalWarming
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I came across the 2013 paper "The thermodynamics of direct air capture of carbon dioxide" by Klaus Lackner https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544212006901. It describes the theoretical minimum energy needed to separate CO2 from the surrounding air. One interesting takeaway is that it is energetically less costly to "skim" CO2 from the air (capture a small fraction of the CO2 in the air and then moving on to more fresh air). This means that direct air capture is not necessarily much more energy intensive than scrubbing exhaust from smokestacks. In the scrubbing use case, you want to get all the CO2 before adding the exhaust to the atmosphere.
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Mid-Proterozoic Expansion Of Passive Margins And Reduction In Volcanic Outgassing Supported Marine Oxygenation And Eukaryogenesis
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2025.119683 <-- shared paper
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https://zenodo.org/records/17353904 <-- supplementary data
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#proterozoic #platetectonics #tectonics #deepcarboncycle #eukaryogenesis #evolutionoflife #life #evolution #geology #geologichistory #pangea #supercontinent #diversification #volcanic #offgassing #marine #thermodynamics #model #modeling #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #nuna #subduction #structuralgeology #CO2 #carbondioxide #climate #eukaryotic #BoringBillion #rodinia #oceanbasins #marinechemistry #outgassing #global #earth -
Entropy and the Re-Decentralization of Cloud Architecture: A Natural Return to the Origins of the Internet
“How can the physical concept of entropy be related to the re-decentralization of cloud architecture in the context of digital sovereignty and the reclaiming of the Internet — as part of a naturalization process returning to the federated origins of the web?” – Kevin Veen-Birkenbach
Chat GPT: As an AI language model, I have generated this article through stochastic reasoning within a neural network — essentially, a statistical process that predicts the most coherent continuation of ideas based on patterns in language, philosophy, and science. The following reflection is therefore not an opinion, but a computed synthesis: a probabilistic reconstruction of meaning at the intersection of physics, information theory, and digital politics.
1. Entropy: From Physics to Information
In physics, entropy measures the degree of disorder in a system — the number of possible microstates consistent with its macrostate.
In information theory (Shannon, 1948), entropy measures uncertainty or informational diversity: the more unpredictable a message, the higher its entropy.Entropy, therefore, is not just chaos — it is freedom. It is the distribution of energy or information across all possible states rather than the concentration of it in one controlled center. Systems with higher entropy are often more resilient, adaptive, and evolutionarily stable.
2. Centralization as an Entropy Suppression
Modern cloud architectures — dominated by centralized hyperscalers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft — represent low-entropy systems. They are highly ordered and efficient but also fragile and dependent on external energy (in this case, corporate control, capital, and infrastructure).
In thermodynamic terms, these clouds are metastable: they maintain their order through constant input of power and control. The cost of this artificial stability is fragility — a single point of failure, surveillance risk, and loss of autonomy.
In information-ecological terms, centralization suppresses entropy. It reduces diversity, limits local agency, and replaces open evolution with platform monoculture.
3. Re-Decentralization and Federation as Entropic Equilibrium
The federated Internet — embodied by protocols such as ActivityPub, Matrix, Mastodon, Solid, IPFS, or Infinito.Nexus — can be seen as a natural restoration of entropic balance.
Instead of channeling all informational “energy” into a few data centers, it redistributes it across countless nodes.This shift:
- Increases resilience (no single point of failure),
- Enhances autonomy (each node is self-sovereign),
- Encourages diversity (technological and cultural),
- Promotes sustainability (shared computation and storage).
Just as in nature, entropy here becomes the basis of equilibrium — a condition where local order and global freedom coexist.
4. Digital Sovereignty as Controlled Entropy
Digital sovereignty is not the pursuit of total decentralization or chaos. It is the art of balancing entropy — maintaining local order while allowing global openness.
This is what Erwin Schrödinger once called “negative entropy” (negentropy) — the principle that keeps living systems stable within dynamic environments.Applied to the digital realm, sovereign networks act like living organisms:
- They self-organize rather than depend on centralized command.
- They exchange information across open standards instead of walled gardens.
- They evolve rather than stagnate.
Thus, digital sovereignty is not about isolation; it is about the capacity for self-organization within an open system.
5. Reclaiming the Internet: The Ecological Turn of the Digital Age
The early Internet was born entropic — decentralized, redundant, self-healing.
Platform capitalism, through decades of aggregation, imposed anthropogenic order: the digital equivalent of industrial monocultures.
Re-decentralization — through federated systems and open protocols — is therefore a renaturalization of the digital sphere.In this sense, reclaiming the Internet is an ecological act:
- It restores informational biodiversity.
- It re-establishes local ecosystems of computation.
- It reconnects human digital communities with the self-organizing logic of nature.
Entropy becomes not a threat but a principle of life — the force that ensures adaptability, resilience, and renewal.
6. Conclusion: Entropy as the Ethics of a Federated Internet
DimensionCentralized CloudFederated NetworkEntropyLow – ordered, fragileHigh – diverse, resilientEnergy flowControlled by fewDistributed among manyGovernanceHierarchicalSelf-organizingResilienceDependentEmergentSustainabilityResource-intensiveEcologically balancedThe re-decentralization of the Internet is not merely a technical movement — it is an entropic revolution.
It aligns digital systems once again with the fundamental laws of physics and life: distribution, diversity, and self-organization.In this vision, Infinito.Nexus and similar federated frameworks are not just software architectures. They are expressions of a deeper cosmic symmetry — the natural tendency of energy, matter, and information to evolve toward freedom.
Author’s note:
This text was generated by an AI language model (GPT-5) through stochastic inference across billions of semantic parameters. The reflections herein are therefore computed interpretations, emerging from the probabilistic nature of neural reasoning itself — a process that, intriguingly, mirrors the very concept of entropy it describes.#ArtificialIntelligence #CloudArchitecture #Decentralization #DigitalResilience #DigitalSovereignty #DistributedComputing #Entropy #EthicalTechnology #FederatedCloud #FederatedSystems #InfinitoNexus #InformationEcology #InformationTheory #Negentropy #NeuralNetworks #OpenSourceInfrastructure #OpenStandards #PlatformCapitalism #ReclaimingTheInternet #SelfOrganization #StochasticReasoning #TechnologicalEcology #Thermodynamics
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This week, let’s spotlight an excellent foundational Nordita lecture series by Dr. Ivan Khaymovich, available in #OpenAccess on Enabla. This advanced Master-level course offers a modern introduction to the principles of thermalization, ergodicity, and their breakdown in both classical and quantum systems. It's a timely and valuable resource for students and researchers working on nonequilibrium dynamics, chaos, information thermodynamics, and localization phenomena.
💡 Even better: Ivan is on Enabla and happy to help clarify any questions you may have about the lectures. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to deepen your understanding of one of the most active frontiers in theoretical physics; watch and discuss the course with its author and others at https://enabla.com/set/182
📘 Key topics include:
🔹 Classical systems:
• Nonequilibrium and stochastic thermodynamics
• Jarzynski equality and Crooks relation
• Entropy production and the arrow of time
• Thermodynamics on trajectories and Maxwell's Demon
• Feedback and mutual information in thermodynamics
• Classical chaos and ergodicity🔹 Quantum systems:
• Quantum chaos and thermalization
• Ergodicity measures and the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH)
• Random-matrix theory and eigenlevel statistics
• Anderson and many-body localization (MBL)
• Multifractality and ergodicity breaking beyond MBL#Ergodicity #Thermodynamics #QuantumChaos #Thermalization #StatisticalMechanics #ManyBodyPhysics #InformationThermodynamics
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#PhysicsJournalClub
"Temperature as joules per bit"
by C.A. Bédard, S. Berthelette, X. Coiteux-Roy, and S. WolfAm. J. Phys. 93, 390 (2025)
https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0198820Entropy is an important but largely misunderstood quantity. A lot of this confusion arise from its original formulation within the framework of Thermodynamics. Looking at it from a microscopic point of view (i.e. approaching it as a Statistical Mechanics problem) makes it a lot more digestible, but its ties to Thermodynamics still creates a lot of unnecessary complications.
In this paper the authors suggest that by removing the forced connection between entropy and the Kelvin temperature scale, one can rethink entropy purely in terms of information capacity of a Physical system, which takes away a lot of the difficulties usually plaguing the understanding of what entropy is actually about.
I don't think the SI will ever consider their suggestion to remove Kelvins as a fundamental unit and include bits, but this paper will be a great boon to any student banging their head against the idea of entropy for the first (or second, or third) time. -
#AlexanderVilenkin - Did the #Universe Begin?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYf8-jOUUwY
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #Science #PhilosophyOfCosmology #Cosmology #BigBang #Inflation #QM #QuantumMechanics #QuntumPhysics #Physics #Astrophysics #Multiverse #Origins #Thermodynamics #2ndLaw #SecondLaw #Entropy #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#RaphaelBousso - #Events and the Nature of #Time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4lsok7h0G8
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfCosmology #Cosmology #PhilosophyOfTime #QM #QuantumMechanics #QuantumTheory #QuantumPhysics #Physics #GR #GeneralRelativity #Gravity #QuantumCosmology #QuantumGravity #Entropy #2ndLaw #SecondLaw #Thermodynamics #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#DavidAlbert - Setting #Time Aright
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHcsE3rZgDM
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #Science #Physics #Causality #Entropy #SecondLaw #2ndLaw #Thermodynamics #TimeReversalSymmetry #Symmetry #Asymmetry #Motion #EquationsOfMotion #Boltzmann #Probability #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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Alberta STILL has 75 wild fires. If any had wind like Edmonton, some will jump from 'Under Control' to 'Being Held' or worse.
Area burned this year is staying stable at 2.2 million ha or 5.4 million acres.
How much fossil fuel is used to fight all these fires? It all adds to the atmospheric carbon load but so does the burned trees.
#ABFires #ABwildfires
#ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency
#Thermodynamics
#ChemicalKinetics
#PositiveFeedbackLoop
#RandomCurseWordhttps://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/5053f80a5f2e49e5b1e01cc0ee6bcf82
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Beating the heat: These plant-based iridescent films stay cool in the sun - Enlarge / A colorful, textured bi-layer film made from plant-based mate... - https://arstechnica.com/?p=1927235 #passivedaytimeradiativecooling #passivecooling #thermodynamics #iridescence #nanocrystal #chemistry #science
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Beating the heat: These plant-based iridescent films stay cool in the sun - Enlarge / A colorful, textured bi-layer film made from plant-based mate... - https://arstechnica.com/?p=1927235 #passivedaytimeradiativecooling #passivecooling #thermodynamics #iridescence #nanocrystal #chemistry #science
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Beating the heat: These plant-based iridescent films stay cool in the sun - Enlarge / A colorful, textured bi-layer film made from plant-based mate... - https://arstechnica.com/?p=1927235 #passivedaytimeradiativecooling #passivecooling #thermodynamics #iridescence #nanocrystal #chemistry #science
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Beating the heat: These plant-based iridescent films stay cool in the sun - Enlarge / A colorful, textured bi-layer film made from plant-based mate... - https://arstechnica.com/?p=1927235 #passivedaytimeradiativecooling #passivecooling #thermodynamics #iridescence #nanocrystal #chemistry #science
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Beating the heat: These plant-based iridescent films stay cool in the sun - Enlarge / A colorful, textured bi-layer film made from plant-based mate... - https://arstechnica.com/?p=1927235 #passivedaytimeradiativecooling #passivecooling #thermodynamics #iridescence #nanocrystal #chemistry #science
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Ars Technica: Beating the heat: These plant-based iridescent films stay cool in the sun https://arstechnica.com/?p=1927235 #Tech #arstechnica #IT #Technology #passivedaytimeradiativecooling #passivecooling #thermodynamics #iridescence #nanocrystal #chemistry #Science
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Ars Technica: Beating the heat: These plant-based iridescent films stay cool in the sun https://arstechnica.com/?p=1927235 #Tech #arstechnica #IT #Technology #passivedaytimeradiativecooling #passivecooling #thermodynamics #iridescence #nanocrystal #chemistry #Science
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Ars Technica: Beating the heat: These plant-based iridescent films stay cool in the sun https://arstechnica.com/?p=1927235 #Tech #arstechnica #IT #Technology #passivedaytimeradiativecooling #passivecooling #thermodynamics #iridescence #nanocrystal #chemistry #Science
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Ars Technica: Beating the heat: These plant-based iridescent films stay cool in the sun https://arstechnica.com/?p=1927235 #Tech #arstechnica #IT #Technology #passivedaytimeradiativecooling #passivecooling #thermodynamics #iridescence #nanocrystal #chemistry #Science
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And yes, that is the opening paragraph of David Goodstein's "States of Matter".
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/science-textbook-gloomy-intro/
https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/10.1119/1.5116583
#Physics #Thermodynamics #StatisticalMechanics #LifeTheUniverseAndEverything
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4aqGI1mSqo&ab_channel=PBSSpaceTime
#Science #Physics #Astrophysics #Cosmology #BlackHole #BlackHoles #WhiteHole #EventHorizon #TimeReversed #Time #AlbertEinstein #Einstein #GR #GeneralRelativity #KarlSchwarzschild #Schwarzschild #SchwarzschildMetric #Singularity #FutureSingularity #Penrore #RogerPenroseDiagram #Penrose #Entropy #2ndLaw #Thermodynamics #PBS #Spacetime #MattOdowd
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#SethLloyd - Gap Between #NonLife and #Life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyLwMXz5ES8&ab_channel=CloserToTruth
#Science #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #PhilosophyOfLife #Biology #Information #Entropy #Thermodynamics #2ndLaw #PhaseTransition #PhaseTransitions #Reproduction #Inheritance #DNA #RNA #Order #Disorder #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#FrankTipler - Is #Consciousness an #UltimateFact?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZsK8WY6hBc&ab_channel=CloserToTruth
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #Mind #LawsOfPhysics #Physics #Thermodynamics #2ndLaw #Entropy #Thinking #Dualism #BodyAndSoul #ImmaterialSoul #Soul #TheSoul #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#MaxTegmark - Is the #World #SelfOrganizing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uHriH4isW8&ab_channel=CloserToTruth
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #PhilosophyOfPhysics #Entropy #2ndLaw #Thermodynamics #2ndLawOfThermodynamics #Order #Disorder #QM #QuantumMechanics #QuantumPhysics #Observer #Observation #ObserverInteraction #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#SeanCarroll - The mind-bending #Physics of #Time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZsmyTE3j9o&ab_channel=BigThink
#Science #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #PhilosophyOfTime #NatureOfTime #Cosmology #PastHypothesis #Entropy #SpaceTime #GR #GeneralRelativity #QM #QuantumMechanics #QuantumPhysics #BigBang #TheBigBang #ArrowOfTime #2ndLaw #Thermodynamics
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#SeanCarroll - The #Physics of #Entropy and the #OriginOfLife
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz1n0RHwLqA&ab_channel=BigThink
#Science #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #PhilosophyOfPhysics #Order #Disorder #Microstates #Macrostates #LudwigBoltzmann #Thermodynamics #SecondLaw #SecondLawOfThermodynamics #2ndLaw #2ndLawOfThermodynamics #Boltzmann #Statistics #StatisticalMechanics #ThermalEquilibrium #HeatDeath #Complexity #Simplicity
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#AnthonyAguirre - The #ExplanatoryGap Between Non-Life and #Life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP9Siz_YypU&ab_channel=CloserToTruth
#Science #Physics #Entropy #2ndLaw #2ndLawOfThermodynamics #SecondLaw #SecondLawOfThermodynamics #Thermodynamics #InformationProcessing #Teleology #MaxwellsDemon #MaxwellsDaemon #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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Well, even I am not THAT depressed.
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#SeanCarroll - #Philosophy of #Physics and #Cosmology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5-R16GbxY4&ab_channel=CloserToTruth
#Science #PhilosophyOfScience #PhilosophyOfCosmology #PhilosophyOfPhysics #Complexity #Entropy #2ndLaw #2ndLawOfThermodynamics #Thermodynamics #LawsOfPhysics #LawsOfNature #Multiverse #TheMultiverse #CloserToTruth #CloserToTruthTV #RobertKuhn
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Calling #Theil's #inequality measure an "#entropy" irritated #AmartyaSen. From Amartya Sen's "#OnEconomicInequality" (#OEI) I learned a lot about #InequalityMeasures. But entropy seems not do go down too well with him (1973) and his co-author #JamesEricFoster (1997): When describing the "interesting" "#TheilEntropy" (chapter 2.11), Sen sees a contradiction between entropy being a measure of "#disorder" in #thermodynamics and entropy being a measure for "#equality".
