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Там с потолка. Письма.

Здравствуйте, Алекс

>Спрашивается, что отличает термодинамику от механики настолько, что 2-ой закон Ньютона не трактуется как неизбежность "механической смерти" Вселенной, а 2-ой закон термодинамики следствием провозглашает "тепловую смерть"? По-моему, мнение, что без Бога Вселенная "остынет", мало чем отличается от мнения, что Вселенная "слипнется" пол действием сил притяжения или "разлетится" под действием сил отталкивания.

Думаю что ничего не отличает. Эта статья у СГ, скажем так, не вызывает у меня гордости за русскую науку. Чтение оригиналов наводит на чуть ли не противоположные мысли. В той статье у СГ основная мысль такова - Энгельс не учел и не учитывал ограниченности объема природных ресурсов, а все остальное в статье направлено на подпорки к этой мысли. Кстати, вы будете смеяться, но в том сумасбродном «следствии», против которого Энгельс протестовал было и про «слипнется» - «that the world is becoming steadily colder, that the temperature in the universe is levelling down and that, in the end, a moment will come when all life will be impossible and the entire world will consist of frozen spheres rotating round one another». Дальше он возмущается, как можно заниматься выводами таких гипотезисов зная только половину того что надо бы знать. На самом деле «половина» это еще мягко сказано, так что правильно Фридрих ругается. Если же кому-то стала известна остальная часть – про сотворение вселенной, разлетание галактик и т.д. и они точно установили, что непринятая им картина однозначно математически доказана... то.. ну в общем так.



Письмо Энгельса о котором идет речь:
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Manchester, 21 March 1869

Dear Moor,

Lizzie [Burns]’s case was pleurisy, which, however, took a remarkably quick course — not till last Tuesday was the exudation on the right lung evident, and by this morning it had already vanished completely. She is getting up again today for the first time. Through a remarkable piece of divination, I diagnosed pleurisy for Gumpert on Sunday, he examined her, found nothing, declared it was bronchitis (which was also present), in addition to catarrh in the lungs, and it was naturally rather annoying for him when the pleurisy declared itself after all. I naturally do not claim that it was present when he could not find it.
Poor Lцhrchen [Laura] must have had a hard time of it. Ten weeks in childbed is no joke, and it is good that it is over. When they get there Tussy and Jenny must give her and Lafargue too my hearty greetings.
The explanation about Castille was very useful to me. The wisdom of Solomon Beesly returned herewith. It is the greatest nonsense. In time, this Comtism will confirm an even stronger version of that remark made by that man from Bonn about the Hegelians: they do not need to know about anything in order to write about everything.
In Germany the conversion of the natural forces, for instance, heat into mechanical energy, etc., has given rise to a very absurd theory, which incidentally follows with a certain inevitability from Laplace’s old hypothesis, but is now displayed, as it were, with mathematical proofs: that the world is becoming steadily colder, that the temperature in the universe is levelling down and that, in the end, a moment will come when all life will be impossible and the entire world will consist of frozen spheres rotating round one another. I am simply waiting for the moment when the clerics seize upon this theory as the last word in materialism. It is impossible to imagine anything more stupid. Since, according to this theory, in the existing world, more heat must always be converted into other energy than can be obtained by converting other energy into heat, so the original hot state, out of which things have cooled, is obviously inexplicable, even contradictory, and thus presumes a god. Newton’s first impulse is thus converted into a first heating. Nevertheless, the theory is regarded as the finest and highest perfection of materialism; these gentlemen prefer to construct a world that begins in nonsense and ends in nonsense, instead of regarding these nonsensical consequences as proof that what they call natural law is, to date, only half-known to them. But this theory is all the dreadful rage in Germany.
I've not yet seen the Zukunft.
Tomorrow I shall send you stamps for one pound for the E. Jones demonstration.

Best greetings.
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Письма упомянутые СГ: «Энгельс внимательно изучил работу Подолинского и в двух письмах в 1882 г. изложил свой взгляд Марксу. Он повторил общий для марксизма тезис о том, что "производство" энергии человеком может быть почти неограниченным, если производственные отношения это позволят (Прим: Я то с этим «общим для марксизма» тезисом согласен – термояд, атом, ветер, течения, геотерм, солнышко в «почти неограниченных» объемах доступны только на высших уровнях произв. отношений ... Но где это у Энгельса в письмах? ). Общий вывод был таков: попытка выразить экономические отношения в физических понятиях невозможна. Описать известный факт зависимости между промышленностью и сельским хозяйством на языке физики можно, но мало что дает.»

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London, December 19, 1882
My idea of the Podolinsky business is as follows. His real discovery is that human labour has the power of detaining solar energy on the earth's surface and permitting its activity longer than would be the case without it. All the economic conclusions he draws from this are wrong. I have not got the thing by me but recently read it in Italian in the Plebe. The question is: how can a given quantity of energy in a given quantity of food leave behind it a greater quantity of energy than itself? I solve it in this way. Assume that the amount of food daily necessary for one person represents an amount of energy expressed as 10,000 H.U. (heat units). These 10,000 H.U. remain for ever = 10,000 H.U. and in practice, as is well known, lose in the course of their transformation into other forms of energy, through friction, etc., a part of their availability. In the human body this is even considerable. The physical work performed in economic labour can never therefore = 10,000 H.U. but is always less.
But this does not mean that physical labour is economic labour; far from it. The economic labour performed by the 10,000 H.U. in nowise consists of the reproduction of the same 10,000 H.U., wholly or partially, in this or that form. On the contrary, most of these are lost in the increased heat and radiation of the body, etc., and what remains available of them are the fertilising potentialities of the excrements. The economic labour which a man performs by the employment of these 10,000 H.U. consists rather in the fixation for a greater or less time of new H.U. radiated to him from the sun, which have only this labour connection with the first 10,000 H.U. Whether, however, the new quantity of H.U. fixated by the application of the 10,000 H.U. of daily nourishment reaches 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 or 1,000,000 H.U., depends solely on the degree of development attained by the means of production.
This can only be represented arithmetically in the most primitive branches of production: hunting, fishing, cattle-raising, agriculture. In hunting and fishing new solar energy is not even fixated, only what has already been fixated is turned to use. At the same time it is obvious that, assuming the fisher or hunter to be normally nourished, the amount of albumen or fat he gets by hunting or fishing is independent of the amount of these foodstuffs which he consumes.
In cattle raising, energy is fixated in the sense that vegetable matter, which would otherwise rapidly wither, decay and decompose, is systematically transformed into animal albumen, fat, skin, bones, etc., and therefore fixated for a longer time. Here the calculation is already complicated.
Still more so in agriculture, where the energy value of the auxiliary materials, manures, etc., also enters into the calculation.
In industry all calculation comes to an end: in most cases the work added to the product can no longer be expressed in H.U. If, for instance, this is still possible with a pound of yarn because its toughness and capacity for resistance can just, with a lot of fuss and trouble, be reduced to a mechanical formula, here already this appears as an utterly useless piece of pedantry, and in the case of a piece of unbleached cloth, still more in the case of bleached, dyed and printed cloth, becomes absurd. The energy value of a hammer, a screw or a needle calculated according to the cost of production is an impossible quantity. In my opinion it is absolutely impossible to try and express economic relations in physical magnitudes.
What Podolinsky has entirely forgotten is that man as a worker is not merely a fixer of present solar heat but a still greater squanderer of past solar heat. The stores of energy, coal, ores, forests, etc., we succeed in squandering you know better than I. From this point of view even fishing and hunting appear not as the fixation of new sun heat but as the using up and incipient waste of solar energy already accumulated.
Further: what man does deliberately by work, the plant does unconsciously. Plants--and this is an old story already--are the great absorbers and depositors of sun heat in a changed form. By work, therefore, in so far as it fixates sun heat (which in industry and elsewhere is by no means always the case) man succeeds in uniting the natural functions of the energy-consuming animal with those of the energy-collecting plant.
Podolinsky has strayed away from his very valuable discovery into mistaken paths because he was trying to find in natural science a new proof of the truth of socialism, and has therefore confused physics and economics.


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London, December 22, 1882
To return once more to Podolinsky; I must make a correction, namely, that storage of energy through work really only takes place in agriculture; in cattle raising the energy accumulated in the plants is simply transferred as a whole to the animals, and one can only speak of storage of energy in the sense that without cattle-raising, nutritious plants wither uselessly, whereas with it they are utilised. In all branches of industry, on the other hand, energy is only expended. The most that has to be taken into consideration is the fact that vegetable products, wood, straw, flax, etc., and animal products in which vegetable energy is stored up, are put to use by being worked upon and therefore preserved longer than when they are left to decay naturally. So that if one chooses one can translate into the physical world the old economic fact that all industrial producers have to live from the products of agriculture, cattleraising, hunting, and fishing--but there is hardly much to be gained from doing so....
I am glad that on the history of serfdom we "proceed in agreement," as they say in business. It is certain that serfdom and bondage are not a peculiarly medieval-feudal form, we find them everywhere or nearly everywhere where conquerors have the land cultivated for them by the old inhabitants -- e.g., very early in Thessaly. This fact has even misled me and many other people about servitude in the Middle Ages; one was much too much inclined to base it simply on conquest, this made everything so neat and easy. See Thierry among others.
The position of the Christians in Turkey during the height of the old Turkish semi-feudal system was something similar.

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