Independent scholar · practitioner · cybernetics, energy & information
The foundations
Two entropies, two cornerstones.
My research interest is the economics of sustainability, or homeostasis in a system kept far from equilibrium by a constant supply of solar radiation. This research is informed by energy and material flows and by cybernetic regulation.
“What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy.”— Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?, 1944
“You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name … In the second place, and more important, no one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.”— John von Neumann to Claude Shannon (recounted in Tribus & McIrvine, 1971)
1844–1906Ludwig Boltzmann
“The struggle for existence … is a struggle for entropy.”
S = k log W
thermodynamic entropy
1916–2001Claude Shannon
“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing … a message selected at another point.”
H = −Σ pᵢ log pᵢ
information entropy
1880–1949Alfred J. Lotka
“Natural selection tends to make the energy flux through the system a maximum.”
evolution
1903–1972W. Ross Ashby
“Only variety can destroy variety.”
cybernetics
“The teaching must, I think, commence with a study of evolution, natural selection, and homeostasis.”— W. Ross Ashby, Cybernetics Today and its Future Contribution to the Engineering Sciences, 1961
The programme
Lotka’s World Engine to today’s AI.
It starts with Lotka’s World Engine (1925) and runs to today’s AI through Cybernetics, in pursuit of an economics of sustainability in a complex evolving system.
Writing