Physical History and Economics

& Fast Entropy Research Site

Thermodynamic Playground—Hubbert Meets Carnot

This page contains a few Flash animations to help illustrate several concepts regarding Fast Entropy and PHE. These animations are "under development", but if you are desperate for graphics and animations on this site, this is where you'll find them.

 

Heat Engine

A simple heat engine is shown here. The puffs of steam represent producing entropy in order to make the wheel turn so that it can do work.

 

Heat Engine Operating Across A Thermodynamic Potential

Here, the heat reservoirs required to power the heat engine are shown. In accordance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, heat must flow from the warmer (red, left) reservoir to the cooler (blue, right) reservoir, so that the magnitude of the thermodynamic potential is decreased.

 

Heat Engines Begetting Heat Engines

Here, part of the work produced by each heat engine is utilized to build additional heat engines, thus allowing for an exponential increase in the rate of entropy production. Reproduction of heat engines is favored under the Principle of Fast Entropy, since doing so will maximize the rate of entropy production.

 

Formation of a Hewett-Hubbert Curve

Here, a Hewett-Hubbert curve is shown.

In a social system involved a conserved (fixed quantity) resource such as a regional deposit of metal or petroleum (or even a conserved social resource), that social system will experience exponential growth in its consumption of the resource.

Growth is nearly purely exponential at first, but efficiency decreases at the potential tied to the resource decreases. In other words, on average, each additional unit of the resource is more difficult to extract and consume. Therefore, the cost of building more "heat engines" (e.g. mining operations) and maintaining them becomes increasingly greater,so that growth levels off and eventually production decreases.