Technology and Thermodynamics

Here’s an interesting bit of information. “Our entire technology is based on the principles of thermodynamics.” There is something fundamentally imperative about it. To understand it you have to understand our incessant dependence on technology and the negative effects of thermodynamics on it. We are bound and at the mercy of those principles.

Our entire world is technologically based, from the farms that grow our food to the purification plants that clean our drinking water to the energy we consume and the medicines that keep us healthy. We couldn’t communicate with each other or travel or have office buildings or television or governing systems if it wasn’t for technology. And if we didn’t guard our technology against the ravages of thermodynamics we wouldn’t have any of it. So we’ve had to take protective measures to maintain our technology from this persistent predator.

The real serious business of thermodynamics lies in its second law, the so-called law of entropy. It states that inevitably everything declines or falls into disrepair. That means that the technologies, techniques and systems we rely on to survive and continue sooner or later ware out and collapse. That means that if we want to survive and continue we must renew, repair or replace our technologies constantly, like the replacing of batteries.

Perhaps some of you are wondering what thermodynamics has to do with technology and systems when it specifically deals with the the subject of energy. Well, Einstein taught us that everything is made of energy and that it is interchangeable with matter. Technology is matter. Therefore matter is also energy and thus is equally susceptible to the ‘law of entropy’ which says that its decay is also inevitable. We can’t see it but matter is energy moving in such a way that it creates solid objects. What we also can’t see is that some of that energy which we see as solid objects is slowly dissipating, making the object older and weaker. If we want to control and prevent that happening we can either repair the object/matter or we can replace it. And that leads us to thermodynamics first law which states that energy can neither be destroyed or created but shifted from one state to another.

There is something comforting about the first law because it says%2