“This site has been created without agreement of Sarah Wolf, who does not see her work about a social energy concept as being part of ‘human thermodynamics’.”
A 2010 “change potential” graph from Carlo Gaeger’s “From Detergents to Multiple Equilibria” GSDP discussion on social energy, used in the workshop. [6] |
See main: Social energy landscapesIn a 2011 GSDP.eu posting about the origin of the social energy discussion, Wolf stated the following about social energy landscapes: [3]
“The idea of social energy arose in discussions at various GSDP related meetings. It is an analogy that suggests to describe social systems using some mathematics applied when speaking about energy in a physics context.
One example is a so-called potential function [see: thermodynamic potential and potential], used to describe the behaviour of a dynamical system. One can imagine the system’s state as a particle that moves around in the “potential landscape” [see: energy landscape] driven by the force of gravity and some random perturbation. The potential function provides the form of the landscape, and gravity tends to pull the particle towards the lowest places within the landscape. However, due to the perturbation the particle may also move upwards, and can thus transit from the basin of attraction of one local minimum to another one. This behaviour seems useful for describing economic systems that often stay close to one “equilibrium” for a long time but may also experience major shifts, which could be interpreted as transitions to different equilibria. By analogy, the landscape given by the potential function could be seen as a “social energy landscape”.
What exactly this social energy landscape, or the term “social energy” itself, represents, and how it can be described mathematically in more detail, are open questions. Also, it is yet to be found out how far this analogy carries and what can be learnt from investigating it.
Since quite a few people involved in previous discussions are part of the GSDP network, I propose to continue discussing this topic here. Of course, others are kindly invited to participate in the discussion as well. Apart from the discussion of concepts and possible models as regards content, this webspace might also be a convenient place to exchange ideas on the possibility to organise workshops or other meetings, submit texts, or grasp other logistic opportunities to further develop research on the topic.”
South African physical chemist Adriaan De Lange's 2001 free energy landscape of evolution, employing a mixture of chaos theory, Prigoginean bifurcation theory, order-disorder logic, time (past vs future), free energy barrier, path functions, and discussions of high and low values of entropy change. [4] |