Excerpt from ‘Filters Against Folly’ by Garret Hardin
Only three categories are required to classify all the many forms of worldly wealth: matter, energy, and information. The most critical question to be settled for each category is this: Is it conserved? That is the amount remain the same through all permutations of state, neither increasing nor decreasing?
The answer is not obvious. If you were to burn Rembrandt’s painting, even if you cared little about art, you would fee that something was being destroyed. Were you to carefully capture and weigh all the products of combustion (principally carbon dioxide and water), you would find that they weighed more than the painted canvas that had disappeared. This is because you neglected to weigh oxygen which entered the system unnoticed.
Matter can be neither created nor destroyed.
Law of Conservation of Matter
Energy is a bit harder nut to crack than matter. It is necessary to distinguish total energy and useful energy. Total energy is totally conserved while useful energy is lost in every change of state for example through heating of parts.
It takes more than conserved energy to run a machine: there must be a difference in energy levels, as there is between water in the higher source (dammed lake) and the lower sink (turbine outflow). It’s the difference between source and sink that runs our machines. Such differences are being continually degraded.
Useful energy decreases over time.
Second Law of Thermodynamics
With the coming of the 20th century, Radium and few other substances were found to produce heat spontaneously which appeared to undermine the conservation laws. Then Einstein, in the year 1905, brought together the two previously separate conservation laws to form a single law, E=mc2. He found the factor that relates the amount of energy to the mass of material that produces energy when it disintegrates.
As far as matter and energy are concerned physicists are confident that conservation rules everywhere. What is not conserved is something that is neither matter nor energy, which is variously called “organisation” or “information”.
Information may be coded in either matter (print on a page) or energy (radio pulses). A minimum amount of one or the other is required but beyond the minimum there is no quantitative relationship between the amount of coded matter or energy and the “quantity of information” conveyed. Multiple identical encodings do not increase the amount of information, though they do increase its availability and hence potential effect.
If half the printed copies of Hamlet were destroyed, the information there encoded would still be with us. Looked at from the other side, when someone writes a new play, something needs to have been created. The very idea of creation contradicts the idea of conservation.
Pundits of the 19th century quite unconsciously slipped from assertions about the accumulation of information in the human mind to assertions about matter and energy. The non-conservation of information was unconsciously carried over into the material realm. The idea of progress became a very materialistic one, leading to the faith that technology would forever increase the amounts of energy and matter available to mankind. We have no firmly grounded theory to guide us whether this kind of material progress will continue indefinitely.
Nuclear Energy: Escape from Conservation? – Because energy is conserved, and useful energy is steadily lost, no perpetual motion machine is possible. During the 1950s the vast amount of energy extracted from only a tiny amount of matter in a nuclear reactor created a euphoria in which the spirit of conservatism was lost.
The very great costs of the research that made atomic power practical were commonized, much of the construction and the cost of really big accidents would be commonized across the nation.
The greatest conservation principle of economics, “There is no such thing as free lunch”. Official calculations have never made adequate allowance for the changes that time brings to the strength of materials under ceaseless atomic bombardment or for the inescapability of human generated failures under the bombardment of boredom or sabotage generating disaffection. The total cost of nuclear power is unknown, perhaps unknowable.
Implications for Non-conservation – Information is not conserved, and that fact has a number of interesting consequences that are not widely appreciated. Because matter and energy are conserved any system of distribution of these forms of wealth is a Zero Sum Game. What I gain, you lose. This lie in the realm of physics.
The distribution of information is not a zero sum game and more often than not it’s a plus sum game. This is why science is best pursued in a completely open manner. Science is international, to restrict science is to weaken it. The same principle, though perhaps with less force, to all information, scientific or not. It is the literate world that carries out most of the redistribution of information, so it is no surprise that they are great supporters of freedom of information. Over most of the realm of literacy, freedom of information is accepted as the best policy. The heard man’s concept of ‘carrying capacity has no meaning applied to the wealth of literature, which can be shared widely without loss – indeed, with positive gain.
Dilemmas of the Literate – Professional writers are caught on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand they want their creations disseminated as widely as possible; on the other hand they are willing to restrict distribution when that is the most effective way to bargain for a payment for the efforts that went into the work. Commonisation of his ideas is the dearest wish, he is less enthusiastic about commonisation of the metrical rewards of his creativity.
Copyright law makes it possible to privatize something that is, by nature, highly susceptible to commonisation. However, Xerox has effectively created a new commons. Music recordings are copied endlessly. Software is copied. The cost differential between copy and original creates the temptation. The idea behind the copyright law is not just to protect the interests of the creator, it is also in the interest of the society that potentially commonizable material be privatized, at least for a while, so that other ingenious people will be motivated to produce in future. Great rewards are great motivators. Technology seems to have thrown morality for a loss.
Pure Research: A Problem for Society – In science, pure research and applied research form a continuum. At the applied end it is easy to generate economic motivation as patents and royalties hold out the promise of fortunes. But pure research is, by definition, investigation at so fundamental a level that it is unlikely to yield a financial payoff for many years, perhaps for generations. In the long run applied research (called R & D) depends on pure research, but the payoff for the pure can be painfully long in coming – too long for a small business to risk financing pure research. Only a handful of our largest corporations have been able to support a significant amount of pure scientific research.
The costs of pure research in this generation may be more than matched by benefits in generations to come. But the double question “Who benefits? Who pays?? Only this generation is capable of paying, though the benefits go to people who are incapable of paying because they do not exist. When the beneficiaries finally come into being they will find it impossible to repay their benefactors, who will have long been dead. A society of “bottom-liners”, wholly oriented to the present, cannot justify the support of pure research.
Until this century many were lovers of learning, not people paid to devote their lives to study and investigation. Many were men of independent means (e.g. Darwin, Cavendish). Others held jobs that imposed light demand on their time which allowed them to turn out first rate science (e.g. Einstein). In addition, research in earlier days did not require expensive equipment it does now. First rate research could be carried out with only marginal support by society. Now society has to pay for pure research. Since few industrialized concerns can afford such philanthropy, most of the support has to come from the nation as a whole. The time between investment and payoff is so long, and the connection between the two so tenuous there is little chance of economically tying one to the other.
This means pure research presents us with a new distribution system: Privatized Costs and Commonized Profits – with the commons extending over the whole world. Those who dream of One World, a world of commonized wealth, should know that, with respect to information, such a world is already in being. Though friction in the distribution system (e.g. patents, copyright) can delay the communication of new information for a while, in the long run information is passes around among all those who are capable of absorbing.