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Why have so many scientists accepted so readily the subjective
interpretation of irreversibility? Perhaps part of its attraction
lies in the fact that, as we have seen, the irreversible
increase of entropy was at first associated with imperfect manipulation,
with our lack of control over operations that are
ideally reversible.
But this interpretation becomes absurd as soon as the irrelevant
associations with technological problems are set aside. We
must remember the context that gave the second law its significance
as nature's arrow of time. According to the subjective
interpretation, chemical affinity, heat conduction, viscosity,
all the properties connected with irreversible entropy production
would depend on the observer. Moreover, the extent to
which phenomena of organization originating in irreversibility
play a role in biology makes it impossible to consider them as
simple illusions due to our ignorance. Are we ourselves-living
creatures capable of observing and manipulating-mere
fictions produced by our imperfect senses? Is the distinction
between life and death an illusion?
Thus recent developments in thermodynamic theory have
increased the violence of the conflict between dynamics and
thermodynamics. Attempts to reduce the results of thermodynamics
to mere approximations due to our imperfect knowledge
seem wrong headed when the constructive role of entropy
is understood and the possibility of an amplification of fluctuations
is discovered. Conversely, it is difficult to reject dynamics
in the name of irreversibility: there is no irreversibility in
the motion of an ideal pendulum. Apparently there are two
conflicting worlds, a world of trajectories and a world of processes,
and there is no way of denying one by asserting the
other.
To a certain extent, there is an analogy between this conflict
and the one that gave rise to dialectical materialism. We have
described in Chapters V and VI a nature that might be called
"historical"-that is, capable of development and innovation.
The idea of a history of nature as an integral part of materialism
was asserted by Mar x and, in greater detail, by Engels.
Contemporary developments in physics, the discovery of the
constructive role played by irreversibility, have thus raised
within the natural sciences a question that has long been asked
by materialists. For them, understanding nature meant under-