The Importance of Space in Physics

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The second law of thermodynamics is that not supposed to govern the unfolding of the universe including living with things. fluctuations and unlikely events are hugely important at the level of cellular biology they're completely irrelevant at thelevel of what goes on in your internal combustion engineYeah so i guess the thing that's been bothering me about entropy has been this apparent subjectivity yeah The other thing i've struggled with is the way in which it requires space to be meaningful because all of the descriptions of entropy at the sort of thermodynamic level involves space, he says.

Our observable universe started out in a highly non-generic state, one of very low entropy, and disorderliness has been growing ever since. How, then, can we account for the appearance of complex systems such as organisms and biospheres? The answer is that very low-entropy states typically appear simple, and high-entropy states also appear simple, and complexity can emerge along the road in between. Today’s podcast is more of a discussion than an interview, in which behavioral neuroscientist Kate Jeffery and I discuss how complexity emerges through cosmological and biological evolution. As someone on the biological side of things, Kate is especially interested in how complexity can build up and then catastrophically disappear, as in mass extinction events.

There were some audio-quality issues with the remote recording of this episode, but loyal listeners David Gennaro and Ben Cordell were able to help repair it. I think it sounds pretty good!

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Kate Jeffery received her Ph.D. in behavioural neuroscience from the University of Edinburgh. She is currently a professor in the Department of Behavioural Neuroscience at University College, London. She is the founder and Director of the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience at UCL.

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