Computer Science
Scientific paper
May 1942
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1942natur.149..551k&link_type=abstract
Nature, Volume 149, Issue 3785, pp. 551 (1942).
Computer Science
Scientific paper
PROF. F. G. DONNAN'S review in NATURE of April 11 of my book ``Science versus Materialism'' embodies a few statements about order, organization and energy which ought not to pass without a challenge. He speaks, for example, of ``the potency for producing order residing in the disequilibrium between the `hot' radiation of the sun's photosphere and the relatively cool surface of this planet''. Can a scientific man really believe that the difference in temperature between two surfaces (for this is all this statement amounts to) has a potency for producing order? The remark reads like a parody of present-day fashionable philosophies. Again, Prof. Donnan speaks of the ``sun's enormous store of `organized' energy'', and one is bound to ask what his criterion of organization is, and for what reason he considers the energy in the sun to be more organized than energy elsewhere ? Later he speaks of ``this disequilibrium (and consequent potency for producing order) ''. This remark is made with special reference to ``the part played by the electro-magnetic field and electro-magnetic radiation''. So Prof. Donnan really does seem to believe that disequilibrium can by itself produce order, and that electro-magnetic phenomena have special virtues and accomplishments, such as powers of organization and orderliness.
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