AJP - Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, Vol 234, Issue 1 3-19, Copyright © 1978 by American Physiological Society
A field and circuit thermodynamics for integrative physiology. II. Power and communicational spectroscopy in biology
A. S. Iberall, H. Soodak and F. Hassler
This paper continues the development begun in Part I (15), to show in what
way it is meaningful to reduce biological phenomena to physical theory at
any level of organization. The appropriate level-independent physics is
comprised of thermostatics, thermodynamics of irreversible processes,
statistical mechanics, and nonlinear mechanics. Generalized, these
approaches lead to a spectroscopic description of the constellation of
periodic processes that constitute the living states. The spectroscopic
description is here applied also to the inputs received by living systems,
from lethal, high-energy, nuclear particles and radiation to low-energy
communicational signals that make up languages understandable at the
various levels in an hierarchical system. The concept of language is then
itself generalized, showing how the empirical relation discovered by Zipf
can be derived from a thermodynamic basis. It is demonstrated that certain
linguistic and statistical-mechanical distribution functions can be
related. Applications of the field thermodynamic approach to two problems
in transport phenomena are given in APPENDIX I; applications of field
thermodynamics to language and communication are given in APPENDIX II.
