Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1563

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Erwin Schroedinger, 27 Kincora Road, Dublin, Ireland

November 18, 1955

Dear Dr. Schroedinger:

     The writer of this letter, a layman, has been interested for many years in physical science. He is also interested in biological and social science. For this reason, he was overjoyed not many years ago by the contents of your beautiful little volume, What is Life?. Your discussion in that little volume of “negative en­tropy” I regard as the finest step ever taken by a phys­ical scientist contrary to its negative statement under the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

     With your intimate knowledge of Greek both in letters and philosophy (which few physicists possess), you are of course aware that in its original, the term “entropy” does not denote change of pattern or form in any particular direction, much less in an exclusively negative one as it has come to be considered in physical science. Your recognition therefore of “negative entropy” may be looked upon as a restoration of original signifi­cance.

     Borrowing your conception of a positive trend in the direction of more complex and more enduring (more real) organization, this writer has tried to build up, step by step, from the Planckian unit of energy-in-action to biological units of action similarly indivisible and which, taken statistically in large numbers, may be treated as uniform and equal in magnitude while possessing much variety of composition or kind — by reason of which variety spontaneous organization, through specialization and reciprocal relations, takes place. The period asso­ciated with such biological units is, of course, their life term or span (the “man-year” conception of Eddington, Nature of the Physical World, Cambridge 1932, page 180), and for the colony or interfunctioning group, the average life period of its individuals. Thus the indivi­dual organic being may be regarded as the basic unit of biological energy-in-action, much as the quantum of action is taken as the basic unit in the organization of physical energy.

     At the human level, through their social and non­-coercive relationships, a portion of the physical and biological energy of men is transformed through the psychological process of contract — the spontaneous meet­ing of minds — into social-ized or social energy. This transformed energy is called value, exchange value. It is quantified in the social psychology of the market and is represented, in value units, by the dollar or what­ever symbol may be employed to represent unit quantities in the human “action” which men reciprocally exchange in an interfunctioning and thereby organic (living) human society.

     These are, frankly, a layman’s speculations, con­sisting or not consistent with what is accepted by phy­sical scientists concerning the organization of energy-in-action into quantified events.

     If this attempt to assimilate conceptually the three kinds of energy, physical, biological and social, seems to you to have any significant value, I should be glad to have you make any use of it that you wish, with or without credit to me. In any event, your first im­pressions on the matter would be highly valued and appreciated.

Sincerely,

SH/m

Enc:  “Prefatory Note Concerning the Quantum, the

 Erg-second, the Horsepower-hour and the Life-year”