A sequence of discoveries for me is: I'd long been listening to Terry Bristol, ISEPP president, wrestle with the twisted story of thermodynamics, the discipline, still ongoing.
Words like "entropy" continue to pick up new spin, as different disciplines, such as Machine Learning, have a go at working it in. I'd say successfully enough, from my angle. As long as there's "noise...".
Terry goes to the Carnot corpus, both father (Lazare) and son (Sadi), and traces the evolution of basic concepts vs-a-vs a more Anglophone corpus, which, although in the same ballpark is not quite the same.
The English and French were tugging the emergent field of thermodynamics in different directions, in ways not always easy to sort out or disentangle.
Careless conflation of subtle differences in meaning, in the rear view mirror, is always the temptation, especially when one's goal is to employ the supposed advantages of hindsight. Thomas Kuhn makes the same point in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions: the storytellers like to airbrush out the messy details.
Thanks to cosmetic censorship, the lay public may think everyone in a subculture is thereby on the same page. A stereotype around mathematics, for example, is it's a universal language and, as such, is hardly marred by the unsightly disagreements that fracture the less settled disciplines.
Put another way: revisionism is endemic to history-telling, especially when the topic is as ephemeral as the meaning of technical terms in co-existing namespaces.
From that trampoline-background, I jump to my General Systems Theory view, echoed by Dorion Sagan and Eric D. Schneider in their book Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life. I see planet Earth as an open system, not as zero-sum. Humans channel the energy, per water wheels et cetera. Plants turn air and dirt into animal-powering edibles by photosynthesis.
Dorion took the stage here in Portland that time (as had his dad Carl Sagan, and his mom Lynn Margulis, all generously sponsored through the Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy, Terry's nonprofit) to give us a coherent picture of where Earth is getting its energy from -- and it's not really controversial once you see it.
Like of course.
So our daily energy budget isn't entirely from taxes and human labor then?
From that last question one can see I'm sounding themes in Economics, one of my interests.
Then, through YouTube, I saw some clips of Steve Keen. His talk sounded more enlightened, and of course I mean from my angle. I'm not claiming some exalted objective authority regarding what matters, so much as narrating a sequence of new-to-me discoveries: from Terry talking thermodynamics, to Dorion, to Keen, not forgetting Paul Romer, another economist Terry would speak highly of.
Plus my GST work traces back to Kenneth Boulding, Bucky Fuller... maybe all the way back to Pharaoh Akhenaten.
Only then, after getting Perplexity, the chatbot API, to fill me in more on Keen's thinking, did I learn, again from YouTube, that Keen and David Graeber were close associates.
Learning that was a "small world moment" for me as I'd already wired in Graeber within my School of Tomorrow namespace (context), the anthropologist who taught at Yale and wrote about Bullshit Jobs, among other topics. Debt: the First 5000 Years and The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity are two others he authored or co-authored.
The picture here is of Earth getting to surf the energy gradient supplied by our star. The star powers the water cycle, keeping the rivers flowing, the turbines turning, the lights on, the TV on, the games going. Games like Rat Race and so on, whatever the humans are into (anthropology goes here).
Ants, other bugs, have their own pattern languages.
