Those who have read my regular column on these pages would be familiar with the thermodynamic definition of entropy as the energy not available to do useful work. I constructed a bridge between physics, biology and society and found that social entropy can also be interpreted as the energy not available to do useful work in society. What exactly is missing? Is it just energy, or something else we must have overlooked? Brian Greene, a famous physicist wrote a book he titled ‘The Elegant Universe’. The adjective ‘elegant’ triggered me to research universal elegance, which in fact is keeping us alive. When one realises how one’s life depends on precise planetary conditions one cannot but be in total awe. And yet, there seems to be more killing and destruction this year than ever before. People are obviously not in awe or don’t respect life because their greed blinds them. Another famous physicist Fritjof Capra wrote in 1991 that the main cause for social disorder (entropy) is a crisis of human perception. People believe that they can take things that belong to others by force using weapons of mass destruction and get away with it. But this is a dangerous miscalculation, which can now be demonstrated by information physics. I discovered a general law of functionality based on universal biological and physical principles. By following the advice of Aristotle by seeking knowledge of cause, I listed the natural conditions for functionality of every living system e.g. a cell, a body, a city, an organisation, an oil storage terminal, a company including the universe itself and found they all depend on and function only through optimal information. Function or malfunction is determined by the quantity and quality of information available and used. If a worker in an oil terminal misses information by lacking knowledge his task can’t be performed safely. If one drives a car through heavy traffic, optimal information in the form of feedback needs to be used in real time, because ignoring it will cause accidents. A seemingly complex universe functions or malfunctions according to two elegant algorithms which were hidden, but always were available because I looked for them:
Probability Malfunction (m-i)>r→∆S>0
Probability Function (m+i)≤r→J>0
When you look at these, you will probably not be able to understand them yet. I will explain them in simplicity: m = mass/matter; people live in a house, a city or a company. The i is the information how to live within mass/matter (one can’t walk through a closed door, or when one is late, ones miss his train) The r is the day-to-day reality as being experienced and accepted (realimiteit or the boundaries of and for functionality). The symbol ∆S denotes disorder, entropy, malfunction. J denotes negentropy (order) functionality.
In nature, the universe, our planet which contains human society nothing can or will ever function without optimal information i.e. truth. All ideologies are unattainable, whilst war is a zero sum games, no one wins.
Van Campen's Law is my 2024 Christmas gift to humanity, so we’d better apply it and survive or ignore it and perish.
