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3 books match the query 'Entropy'

cover of Entropy Economics: The Living Basis of Value and Production

Entropy Economics

The Living Basis of Value and Production

James K. Galbraith and Jing Chen

University of Chicago Press, 2025

Economists dream of equilibrium. It’s time to wake up.

In mainstream economics, markets are ideal if competition is perfect. When supply balances demand, economic maturity is orderly and disturbed only by shocks. These ideas are rooted in doctrines going back thousands of years, yet, as James K. Galbraith and Jing Chen show, they contradict the foundations of our scientific understanding of the physical and biological worlds.

Entropy Economics discards the conventions of equilibrium and presents a new basis for thinking about economic issues, one rooted in life processes—an unequal world of unceasing change in which boundaries, plans, and regulations are essential. Galbraith and Chen’s theory of value is based on scarcity, and it accounts for the power of monopoly. Their theory of production covers increasing and decreasing returns, uncertainty, fixed investments over time, and the impact of rising resource costs. Together, their models illuminate key problems such as trade, finance, energy, climate, conflict, and demography.

Entropy Economics is a thrilling framework for understanding the world as it is and will be keenly relevant to the economic challenges of a world threatened with disorder.

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cover of Evolution As Entropy: Toward a Unified Theory of Biology

Evolution As Entropy

Toward a Unified Theory of Biology

Daniel R. Brooks and E. O. Wiley

University of Chicago Press, 1988

"By combining recent advances in the physical sciences with some of the novel ideas, techniques, and data of modern biology, this book attempts to achieve a new and different kind of evolutionary synthesis. I found it to be challenging, fascinating, infuriating, and provocative, but certainly not dull."—James H, Brown, University of New Mexico

"This book is unquestionably mandatory reading not only for every living biologist but for generations of biologists to come."—Jack P. Hailman, Animal Behaviour, review of the first edition

"An important contribution to modern evolutionary thinking. It fortifies the place of Evolutionary Theory among the other well-established natural laws."—R.Gessink,TAXON
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cover of The Children of Time: Causality, Entropy, Becoming

The Children of Time

Causality, Entropy, Becoming

Remy Lestienne

University of Illinois Press, 1995

    "A work of scientific substance and critical wisdom, developed in
        the urbane idiom of a French scholar." -- J. T. Fraser, founder,
        International Society for the Study of Time
      "This is the book for those of us who couldn't wade completely through
        Hawking's A Brief History of Time and now have it collecting dust
        on our bookshelves. Well written, thought-provoking, and, most important,
        understandable." -- Michael Epstein, analytical spectroscopist/chemist,
        National Institute of Standards and Technology
      What is time? Does it really pass? These and other fascinating questions
        about the nature of time animate a continuing philosophical and scientific
        debate. In this popular French book, now available for the first time
        in English; my Lestienne moves to make the bewildering concepts
        of time accessible--and interesting. He uses Galileo, Newton, Einstein,
        and others to demonstrate how the concepts of causality and entropy became
        so pervasive that they eventually were substituted for time itself. He
        also shows how recent advances in astronomy, particle physics, developmental
        life sciences, and the neurosciences are helping to shape a new philosophical
        vision of time.
 
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