Business, Life and Thermodynamics

The Universe is a hyperdimensional standing-wave in n-dimensional Brownian motion.

There … I said it.

No, I have no idea what the above image has got to do with it either … but you try finding a suitable one!

I quite liked this one …

… but, actually, that’s not the idea at all — for a start, the cube is wrong … it should be a sphere … and, secondly, its standing waves are planar not 3D.

This one has something of what I mean about it too …

It’s an acoustic hologram … an example of shaping sound waves in 3-D … from an entirely unrelated, but nevertheless interesting article here.

But it’s still not right either — that ‘paper boat’ couldn’t be on top of the wave but would be a pattern inside the wave.

So … in the end, rather than give everyone the wrong idea, I plumped for the image at the top, on the basis that it was the least misogynistic of the less misleading ¹ ones — many of which were of an altogether unfortunate manga/anime ‘babe’ variety, for some reason that eludes me.

Anyway … the reason I’m posting this is because it was easier than the thing I started writing about Business, Life and Thermodynamics and how the ultimate goal of any business is total monopoly — 100% of all government contracts + 100% of citizens’ disposable income.

Obviously, no business achieves total monopoly but, any business striving for less than that is on a downward trajectory as other businesses outperform it on the way to the total monopoly they are striving for — businesses, like any other life form, have to compete for domination or go extinct … the laws of Thermodynamics dictate it be thus.

I have long been of the opinion that absolutely everything … not merely material/energetic particulate entities, but abstract phenomena such as War, Love, Happiness, Life etc. … obeys the laws of Thermodynamics.

But that’s one hell of a topic to take on and start writing about.

So I opted to procrastinate instead and started thinking about the nature or the Universe and how to model it — and, before I knew it, I found myself looking at pictures like the one above and thinking “WtF … what has that got to do with hyperdimensional standing-waves in Brownian motion?”

So … there you go, now you know.

Fundamentally, Jeff Goldblum is to blame for this particular piece … he’s the one who drew my attention to the fact that Life itself … the very phenomenon of Life, not merely any specific life form … obeys the laws of Thermodynamics — address any complaints to him.

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¹ The other two are misleading in the same way a little knowledge is a dangerous thing — they make you think you see what I mean when, actually, they’re leading you astray ².

² Because …

“Each separate charged particle contributes to the total electric field. The net force at any point in a complex electromagnetic field can be calculated using vectors, if the charges are assumed stationary. If charged particles are moving (and they always are), however, they “create” — are accompanied by — magnetic fields, too, and this changes the magnetic configuration. Changes in a magnetic field in turn create electric fields and thereby affect currents themselves, so fields that start with moving particles represent very complex interactions, feedback loops and messy mathematics.“

Exactly.

In fact, simply replace the words ‘charges’, ‘electric’, ‘electromagnetic’ and ‘magnetic’ with the word ‘energetic’ / ‘energy’ and what you have is the definitive explanation of complex systems:

Each separate particle contributes to the total energy field. The net force at any point in a complex energy field can be calculated using vectors, if the particles are assumed stationary. If particles are moving (and they always are), however, they “create” — are accompanied by — energy fields, too, and this changes the energetic configuration. Changes in an energy field in turn create energy fields and thereby affect currents themselves, so fields that start with moving particles represent very complex interactions, feedback loops and messy mathematics

Scale this up, such that the component elements (‘particles’) are complex combinations of elements and it does not break down — subroutines in computational algorithms are examples of complex systems that are themselves ‘particles’ within more complex systems, for instance ³.

³ See?