A PRIMER ON SELF-ORGANIZATION:

With some tabletop physics you can do at home

William L. Benzon
February 2014

Entropy and Self-Organization on the Table Top ......................................................................................... 3 Chasing Molecules ............................................................................................................................................... 3 Call the Plumber .................................................................................................................................................. 5 Meanwhile, on the Table Top ........................................................................................................................... 6 Beyond Entropy: Phase Space and Attractors .............................................................................................. 11 So, what ABOUT entropy, phase spaces, and attractors? .......................................................................... 13! Abstract: Concepts of self-organization and complexity originating in statistical mechanics have proven useful in many disciplines. This paper gives an informal development of basic concepts of entropy, irreversibility, phase space, and self-organization using a bit of table-top physics anyone can observe. I placed ink droplets into a tumbler of water and photographed the evolution of this system over four hours. Vertical convention cells (self-organization) had appeared by eight (8) minutes but were almost gone by two (2) hours and twenty (20) minutes.

bbenzon@mindspring.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

A Little Bit of Home Brew Complexity

Entropy and Self-Organization on the Table Top

With a note on what to do when you are fascinated by technical concepts but cant do the math: call the plumber!

Matter is not given. In the present-day view it has to be constructed out of a more fundamental concept in terms of quantum fields. In this construction of matter, thermodynamic concepts (irreversibility, entropy) have a role to play. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, 1984 Ive been thinking a lot about entropy lately. It is, of course, one of the foundational concepts of modern thought, haunting our dreams with the prospect of the universe grinding to a halt in heat death, but also animating our hope of understanding how life arose in the universe. In a Latourian context one might even speculate that entropy is the concept that, more than any other (except perhaps biological evolution, with which it has become richly intertwined), gives the lie to the Moderns conceit that they are here and nature is somewhere over there, separated from one another by a sharp line of clear and distinct ideas. For the concept of entropy, unlike relativity and quantum mechanics, has arisen from deep within the world of classical physics. According to the Wikipedia1 the term was coined in 1865 by Rudolf Clausius, but the work leading to the concept originated earlier in the century with the research of Lazare Carnot, a mathematician wose
1803 paper Fundamental Principles of Equilibrium and Movement proposed that in any machine the accelerations and shocks of the moving parts represent losses of moment of activity. In other words, in any natural process there exists an inherent tendency towards the dissipation of useful energy. Building on this work, in 1824 Lazare's son Sadi Carnot published Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire which posited that in all heat-engines whenever "caloric", or what is now known as heat, falls through a temperature difference, work or motive power can be produced from the actions of the "fall of caloric" between a hot and cold body.

There you have it, the machine, a mechanical device with moving parts. We have Newtonian mechanics with its three laws of motion and the grand suggestion that the universe works like a clock,2 a vast device of many parts all ticking away in perfect order, except when they dont. And theres La Mettries 1748 treatise, Man a Machine.3 Oh! how easy our intellectual life would have become if only the universe were nothing but a clock and we but little tick-tocks within it. But it is not, nor are we. The mechanistic vision ground to a halt in the analysis of fire and we became but especially clever monkeys through Darwins elucidation of a pattern he traced though the geological, paleontological, botanical and zoological records.

Chasing Molecules
Though my interest in entropy is long-standing, my recent thoughts have been occasioned by various and numerous remarks the philosopher Levi Bryant has made. Consider this passage from his book, The Democracy of Objects (pp. 227-228)4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clockwork_universe_theory 3 http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/LaMettrie/Machine/ 4 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/9750134.0001.001/1:9?rgn=div1;view=fulltext
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Entropy refers to the degree of disorder within a system. Suppose you have a tightly closed glass box and somehow introduce a gas into it. During the initial phases following the introduction of the gas into the system, the gas will be characterized by a high degree of order or a low degree of entropy. This is so because the particles of gas will be localized in one or the other region of the box. However, as time passes, the degree of disorder and entropy within the system will increase as the gas becomes evenly distributed throughout the box. In this respect, entropy is a measure of probability. If the earlier phases of the gas distribution indicate a lower degree of entropy than the later stages, then this is because in the earlier phases there is a lower degree of probability that the gas will be localized in any one place in the box. As time passes, the probability of finding gas particles located evenly throughout the box increases and we subsequently conclude that the degree of entropy has increased.

This seemed a bit, well, off to me. For one thing Bryant doesnt say just how the gas gets introduced into the box. Surely he doesnt mean that it gets magically whisked there through a Star Trekkian transporter. But what DOES he mean? Well, he probably meant something like poking a small hole somewhere in the box and letting the air rush in. So thats what I did. Not physically, of course, as I have no convenient source of high-vacuum boxes. I imagined doing it. I undertook a thought experiment. I began imagining lots and lots of tiny tiny air molecules going in through the hole. Does that first cohort march in formation like a highly trained marching band or drill team, or do they twist and tumble every which way, pushed by the molecules behind them, and those behind them, and so forth? How fast do they move? Whos the first to make it to the other side? And how do you measure their positions? It seemed reasonable to think that theyd be bunched up near the hole at the beginning and that, at the end, theyd be scattered evenly throughout the box. But howd they get from one state to the other. Getting from New Jersey to New York is easy, theres the Holland Tunnel, the VerrazanoNarrows Bridge, and so forth. But the kind of states were talking about arent geographical regions and moving from one to the other is not like getting in a car, turning the key (or pushing the button) and driving away. And, by the way, just what does evenly mean? It might mean that theyre at the vertices of a cubic lattice, or some other regular structure, but I suspect that thats not what Bryant meant. If not THAT, though, then just what? Perhaps he was, in his imagination, dividing the box into lots of tiny cubes. We then count the number of molecules in each cube. It doesnt matter just where they are in the cube, just so theyre inside it. Some place. And when weve done our count we find that theres approximately the same number in each imaginary cube. Now were getting somewhere, says I to myself, were making progress. But no, were not, were just getting deeper and deeper into the quicksand. Whats the size of our imaginary cubes? Does it matter? And those molecules, theyre moving, right, always moving. Since we cant possibly examine all these imaginary cubes at one time, but have to look at one after another, how do we keep those molecules inside their proper imaginary cubes? And, since the little molecules are identical to one another, how can we be sure that some of them arent sneaking about from cube to cube just to mess up our count? Now, you might say, this is all nonsense, this stuff about imaginary cubes and pesky molecules who are unwilling to sit still for the count. Well, yes, youre right, its nonsense in a way. But, if talk about order and probability is to have any substantive meaning, then we really do have to have some way of locating and counting those molecules. We need some way of taking measurements. My thought experiment is aimed at the informal notion of evenness. If we're going to measure it, well, what does THAT imply? Without measurements were just talking gibberish. Still, its clear that something isnt working. My thinking was at an impasse, thats clear. Im in over my head. What to do?

Call the Plumber

My plumber is Tim Perper. Though hes not a plumber, hes not even a physicist. He was trained as a molecular biologist and geneticist, worked in industry for a bit, worked in academia for a bit, and then decided that he was really more interested in human courtship than in complex molecules. So he spent a couple years hanging out in bars, night clubs, church socials and such and wrote down what he say people doingall courtesy of the Guggenheim Foundation. He wrote that work up in a book, Sex Signals (1985), that work and, of course, a lot more, including Ovid and Durkheim. Tim also has a long-standing interest non-linear dynamics, complexity, and chaos, and has used such methods to analyze the back-and-forth moves of human courtship. Thats entropy territory. So I copied Bryants paragraph into an email, added my own thoughts (including the cubic lattice), and sent it off to Tim: Help! Heres a couple of sentences from his reply:
"Entropy," [Bryant] writes, "refers to the degree of disorder within a system." No, that's not what entropy is: its a measure of how IRREVERSIBLE a physical process is, and disorder has nothing to do with it.

I knew that, said I to myself, meaning the irreversible bit. Sorta. Tims reply continues:
A good physical-chemical example occurs during crystallization as a solution (say of table salt): the water evaporates and one ends up with lovely sparkly white crystals. The crystals are not disordered at all compared to the solution; in fact the crystallized salt molecules have a MUCH higher degree of orderliness than they did when they were dissolved. But the process is IRREVERSIBLE given that the water has evaporated -- no one is going to chase down astronomically huge numbers of evaporated water molecules from where they wandered off when they evaporated. So that process is one way only. But, you say, one can add fresh water -That of course is true, but you are not adding the same water that evaporated. You have not reversed the PHYSICAL processes that led to crystallization -- you have just dissolved the salt in newly added water. It's like saying that Harold the Furniture Salesman isn't irreversibly dead -- we can always have ANOTHER baby! No, that doesn't count. Harold is defunct, and irreversibly so no matter how many babies other people have.

So, as Prigogine and Stengers have taught usby the way, thats one of Bryants favorite locutions, as X has taught usas Prigogine and Stengers have taught us, the concept of order (or disorder) is more complex than was thought (Order Out of Chaos, p. 287). Hoo, boy! Is it ever! The problem with the concepts of disorder and entropy that were ratting about in my brain, as near as I can tell, is that the connection with temporality was not deep enough, not of the right kind, something like that. Beyond that, I offer you the last paragraph of Perpers email:
The gas flowing into a vacuum is a classic example from late 19th century physical chemistry. It's a lot trickier than it looks, but I don't recommend trying to figure it out from a thermodynamic viewpoint, not if you're not PERFECTLY comfortable with statistical mechanics, advanced calculus, and related technical topics.

Of course that knowledgestatistical mechanics, advanced calculus, and related technical topics is what I dont have, nor, I suspect, does Bryant. Thats why I turned to Tim, and have been doing so for well over a decade: Thanks, Tim. His reply certainly didnt give me the technical knowledge I lack. I wasn't expecting that and Perper didn't attempt to provide it. But weve been doing this dance for so long that he was able to read my email and tell me just the what I needed (irreversible plus an example) to clarify my understanding and intuition. The rest was up to me. These days every humanist needs a Tim Perper.

Meanwhile, on the Table Top

Fortunately, thats not the end of the story. I say fortunately because I still feel that things are sort of just, I dont know, hanging in mid-air with respect to the nature of entropy. I mean, we now know that disorder is not a good synonym for entropy and we have some idea of why that is or I do at any ratebut is there something more? I think there is; another example, and examples always help. While I was thinking about those pesky gas molecules I was wondering if there was a simple way of visualizing what those molecules were up to, or at any rate, what I suspected they were up to. What would happen if we were to release a drop of black ink into a glass of water? We all know what would happen, the ink would whirl and twirl and eventually diffuse throughout the water. THAT sort of thing is as familiar as stirring cream into coffee. Its called turbulence.5 No sooner had I thought about it than I realized: I can do this. Now, I dont own the kind of equipment you need to do this sort of thing in a serious way. But thats not what Im after. I just want some pictures that give some useful intuition into the evolution of entropy in a closed system. So, I filled a tumbler with water and set it on a window sill (for the light). I let it settle awhile. Why? Because any joshing and sloshing in the water would add structure to the ink flow and I wanted to see how it would flow into still water. OK, So how long did you let the water settle? Till the reflection stopped moving. What reflection? From the light coming in through the window and reflecting from the surface of the water to the wall, like this:

Oh, I see. As long as the water was moving around, the bright spot on the wall jiggled about. When the light spot stopped moving, you knew that that water had settled. Precisely. I figured the water wouldnt be completely still at that point, but it would be still enough for my purposes.
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http://www.cfd-online.com/Wiki/Introduction_to_turbulence/Nature_of_turbulence 6

I then held an ink dropper in my left hand (Higgins Black Magic Waterproof Drawing Ink, No. 44011, if you care to know), squeezed the bulb, and started taking pictures with the camera I was holding in my right hand. I wasnt able to get the dropsI surmise there was more than onejust as they hit the waters surface but I reckon I took my first shot within a second or two after I squeezed the bulb. I then took further shots at irregular and increasingly long intervals thereafter. I took the last photograph at about four and a half hours after the first. Why so long? Because this is what the tumbler looked like two hours and twenty-one minutes after dropoff:

First, notice the air bubbles that have coalesced and separated out of the water. Second, notice the structure of ink swirls in the water. In particular, look at that darkish area at the lower left where ink appears to have pooled at the bottom. When you look down from the top it doesnt appear dark at all, but looking from the side youre looking through a greater (horizontal) depth of ink, so it appears darker. Now, heres the first photo, and that last one Id mentioned above, the four-and-a-half hour one:

Photograph 1

Last photo Looking at the second photo, the end-state one, ignore those whitish streaks, theyre lighting artifacts having nothing to do with the phenomenon under investigation. How do I know? Because I was there and looked at the tumbler from various angles. No matter what my point of view, the fluid appeared to be a homogenous light grey. (Discriminating between artifacts and the real phenomenon, noise from data, is, of course, a real issue and often enough it is difficult and contentious. Thats one reason why results need to be replicated by other researchers in other laboratories.) Now, the first photo, its not quite the beginning state, but close to it. I DO have a photo of the tumbler before the ink dropped, and Ill show to you if you insist. But really, whats there to see? Nothing, thats what. You see why I surmise there were several drops? That cascade appears like there were three closely spaced drops, and perhaps a fourth (look to the left). The important point, however, is that structure is already evolving. Were not looking at round or tear-shaped drops of ink. weve got stringy blobs. Theres structure there, but structure thats difficult to describe in words. Weve got mathematics that does a better job. Entropy: What it means, as Perper said, is that the evolution of the system from the structure in that first photo to the structure in that next photo is irreversible. Never in a million years will the black ink particles pull themselves together and reform into the structure we see in that first photo nor, for that matter, will that structure go backwards and become the structure that existed when the ink first hit the water. Irreversible. The next three photos are respectively 2, 10, and 31 seconds after the first:

Photograph 2

Photograph 3

Photograph 4 The structure in second photo appears closely related to that in the first photo. Look at the third photo; except for that streak at the upper left, that initial structure appears almost completely gone. The ink is spreading along the bottom of the tumbler and weve got a shoot going up left of center. Now look at photo four. Draw your own conclusions. So far so good. This is pretty much what I expected. What I didnt at all expect is emergent structure. I took these three photos 7:53, 8:52 and 22:20 minutes and seconds after the first one:

Photograph 5

Photograph 6

Photograph 7 If you examine the photographs carefully youll see vertical convention cells.6 The ink particles are now circulating between the top and bottom of the tumbler in side-by-side columns. Where did THAT order come from? It wasnt in the tumbler itself and it certainly wasnt in the ink. It can only have come from the evolution of the system as the ink circulated throughout the water. The structure is selforganized. But relatively short-lived. We perhaps see remnants of it at the 2-hour and 20-minute interval in the first photograph at the top, but it is gone by the very last one. If we now review those photographs we can see, not in our minds eye, but visibly, in these images, why we cannot identify the informal notion of disorder with the formal notion of entropy. We know that as this system evolved from the state depicted in the first photo to the state depicted in the last, the entropy increased. The structure that was there in that relatively early state has completely disappeared by the last state. But it had disappeared well before that. By eight minutes in (and probably before then, but I wasnt photographing or watching continuously), the initial structure had been wiped out and a new structure emerged. That structure was also of a new kind: vertical convection cells. One kind of order had evolved to anotheras in Perpers crystallization example. Unlike the crystallization example, this structure then dissipated, evolving to a homogenous grey fluid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convection_cell 10

Beyond Entropy: Phase Space and Attractors

The notion of phase space is useful in discussing entropy in physical systems. But the concept certainly has other application domains, e.g. neuroscientists use it to characterize brain activity. As the Wikipedia entry indicates a phase space, introduced by Willard Gibbs in 1901, is a space in which all possible states of a system are represented, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point in the phase space.7 So, how do physicists use the phase space concept to characterize the behavior of a volume of gas or a liquid? In this case we have a dimension of space for each molecule. Well, actually we have six dimensions for each molecule; three of those dimensions carry information about spatial position and, as gas molecules move, three characterize a molecules momentum. If a volume of gas contains only three molecules, then the phase space will contain 18 dimensions, way more than we can visualize. But physicists generally are not interested in volumes of gas containing only three molecules. The volumes theyre interested in contain, in the phrase of Carl Sagan, billions and billions of molecules. At least. That requires a space of very high dimensionality indeed. Such a space treats each individual molecule as an autonomous objectsomething which should be attractive to Bryant and to fellow object-oriented ontologists. But it makes for messy math. It is, however, possible to do a great deal of interesting important physics using only two dimensions, temperature and pressure. That is to say, it is possible to project behavior in high-dimensional spaces into spaces of low dimensionality. The two-dimensional projection onto temperature and pressure is said to characterize the macrostates of the system while the full high-dimensional phases space is necessary to characterize its microstates. Consider the system I photographed in above. In a sense it is a very simple system, consisting of a tumbler filled with ordinary tap water into which we introduce a few drops of black ink. But the physics of that system is in fact quite complex and needs to be studied at the micro level, where each molecule is considered to be a quasi-autonomous actor. Thus each molecule is assigned six dimensions (3 position, 3 momentum) in the phase space. Consider this photo, the first one I took:

Photograph 1 Lets do a crude calculation. The system has three spatial dimensions, which the photograph flattens (projects) into two. The original of this photo measures 2670 by 2003 pixels making a total of 5,348,010 pixels. Think of that as a two-dimensional measurement of the evolving system taken at an instant of time. That measurement space alone would then require 5,348,010 dimensions. It contains no momentum information at all and each individual pixel is, in effect, a smear of billions upon billions of molecules, not to mention that the system has three spatial dimensions, not two.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_space 11

So it is a pretty poor proxy for real measurement. But its sufficient to give some intuitive sense of complexity and of the strangeness of these conceptual objects, these phase spaces. In phase space, moreover, that state is represented by a single point. A single point. Heres the fourth photo I took:

Photograph 4 That state too, however rich and complex it appears in the photographic measurement, is only one point in the phase space. Likewise, the final state is but a point in the phase space:

Last Photo The sequence of states a system occupies during its evolution is called its trajectory. That trajectory can be visualized by projecting it into a 3D or 2D space. In the next image I show what such a 2D projection might look like for this system:

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Note that I do not in fact know what that trajectory would look like in 2D projection. I made this image purely for illustrative purposes. The nine points represent the nine photographs I took. Each represents a single microstate of the system, all zillions of dimensions. The red point is the first photograph while the blue point is the last. The light gray line represents a WAG (wild-ass guess) about the whole trajectory. Whether or not its correct is irrelevant. Whats important is that there IS a trajectory. If you were to perform this little demonstration many times, it would become evident that, no matter where the ink was dropped into the tumbler, the final state would always be the same. The different trajectories might be somewhat different in character, but the final point is always the same. That final point is called the systems attractor. The name is unfortunate as it suggests that there is something THERE that is ATTRACTING the system to that state, like bees to honey or iron files to a magnet. There isnt. Nothing is attracting in that way; theres nothing attractive about that point. Its just that, given the internal dynamics of the system, thats how things work out. A metaphor thats commonly used is that of releasing a small ball into a basin from the basins edge. No matter where you place the ball on the edge of the basin it will always roll down the side to the center. The center is the attractor and the basin itself is an attractor basin.

So, what ABOUT entropy, phase spaces, and attractors?

As Ive already said, I dont really know. I cant do the math. All I can do is what Ive done above: Tell you what I know as clearly as I can. If these concepts at all interest you, and you want to use them in your intellectual work, if only as backgroundthen you have to make your own peace with them. If you have the time and inclination, by all means, learn the math. Otherwise you should find yourself someone like Tim Perper and work with him or her. Carefully and closely. Sure, read popular expositions, good ones. Take a look at real physics textbooks. Do as much of that as youve got time for. But that is no substitute for talking with an expert. You cant learn a concept unless you make active use of it, and that means interacting with others. You cant interact with a book. You can with a person. Plato knew what he was doing when he faked those dialogues. But you should not fake YOUR dialogues. Talk with people.

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