ilya_prigogine_isabelle_stengers_alvin_tofflerbookfi-org

117 ENERGY AND THE INDUSTRIAL AGE
Others are more optimistic. In an excellent article on the
energy of the universe, Freeman Dyson has written:
It is conceivable however that life may have a larger role
to play than we have yet imagined. Life may succeed
against all of the odds in molding the universe to its own
purpose. And the design of the inanimate universe may
not be as detached from the potentialities of life and intelligence
as scientists of the twentieth century have tended
to suppose.15
In spite of the important progress made by Hawking and others,
our knowledge of large-scale transformations in our universe
remains inadequate.
The Birth of Entropy
In 1865, it was Clausius' turn to make the leap from technology
to cosmology. At the outset he merely reformulated his
earlier conclusions, but in doing so he introduced a new concept,
entropy. His first goal was to distinguish clearly between
the concepts of conservation and of reversibility. Unlike mechanical
transformations, where reversibility and conservation
coincide, a physicochemical transformation may conserve energy
even though it cannot be reversed. This is true, for instance,
in the case of friction, in which motion is converted
into heat, or in the case of heat conduction as it was described
by Fourier.
We are already familiar with energy, which is a function of
the state of a system-that is, a function dependent only on
the value of the parameters (pressure, volume, temperature)
by which that state may be defined.t6 But we must go beyond
the principle of energy conservation and find a way to express
the distinction between "useful" exchanges of energy in the
Carnot cycle and "dissipated" energy that is irreversibly
wasted.
This is precisely the role of Clausius' new function, entropy,
generally denoted by S.
Apparently Clausius merely wished to express in a new form