ENTROPY versus Improbability
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(1) |
| ID | ◀ 1116 ▶ |
| Object type | General information, Epistemology, ontology or semantics |
The apparently impossibility of any type of structurating and ordering evolution that seemed to result from the 2nd. principle of thermodynamics, anguished many scientists during the first fifty years of the 20th century, as for example the French biologist P. LECOMTE DU NOUY. Biologists were the most desperate. H. SIMON, citing an article by H. JACOBSON, published as late as 1955, (JACOBSON, 1955) comments: “The essential idea in JACOBSON's models is that the expected time required for the system to reach a particular state is inversely proportional to the probability of the state — hence increases exponentially with the amount of information (negentropy) of the state.
- “Following this line of argument, but not introducing the notion of levels and stable subassemblies, JACOBSON arrived at estimates of the time required for evolution so large as to make the event rather improbable. Our analysis carried through in the same way, but with attention to the stable intermediate forms, produces very much smaller estimates” (see the “Hora and Tempus parable”).
SIMON demostrated the possibility of the progressive emergence of organization step by step, through successive levels of accumulation.
This concept must be connected:
1) with the appearence of dissipative structures in systems overfed with an excessive quantity of energy, which push them through instability thresholds.
2) with the concept of negentropy, which, in the words of SIMON, “can be interpreted as the logarithm of the reciprocal of the probability — the ”improbability“.
3) the understanding that higher complexity in systems implies a higher level of entropy production.