Glossary¶

Locked terms. Change only by an explicit decision recorded in Open Questions.

Physics¶

Energy : Conserved quantity (First Law). Never created or destroyed. No process, including evolution, changes energy totals.

Exergy : The part of energy that can still do work relative to an environment. Destroyed in every real process. "Using energy" means degrading exergy. Synonym in this repo: free energy (loosely).

Dissipation : Exergy destruction. The endpoint (equilibrium) is fixed by physics; path, rate and timing are not.

Gradient : A difference (temperature, concentration, pressure, charge, height, chemical potential) whose relaxation can do work. No gradient, no work.

Constraint : A structure that channels a gradient's relaxation into directed work instead of heat: a membrane, enzyme, machine, process, rule, institution.

Invariant layer : Physics plus selection logic. Everything else in the model (function costs, bottlenecks, work structure) can change.

Laws / boundary conditions : Laws are fixed. Boundary conditions (gradients, arrangements, constraints) are the setup the laws act on. Life and work change only boundary conditions.

Information and persistence¶

Information : Persistent, copyable constraint. A stored description of which constraints to build. Physical: costs energy to write, erase, maintain (Landauer).

Leverage : Ratio between the flow information steers and the flow needed to hold and apply it. Information is the control layer: a small flow steering a much larger one.

Routing : How exergy moves from source to sink: path length, number of work-doing steps, storage, timing.

Self-maintenance : A constraint or information carrier persists if it routes enough exergy into its own maintenance and copying.

Dynamics¶

Reference system : The bounded system relative to which value, waste and selection are judged. Always name it.

Selection : Differential persistence of constraint and information carriers competing for limited exergy. Acts through selectors, which act through metrics.

Selector : The actor or mechanism whose decision determines whether a carrier keeps receiving exergy (customers, capital, managers, labor market, regulators, competitors).

Metric : The measurement a selector actually uses. Can diverge from the real flow (proxy drift).

Variation : Generation of new candidate constraints for selection to filter. Always costs exergy up front for uncertain return.

Waste : Exergy destroyed without contributing to the maintenance, extension or steering of the reference system.

Slack : Surplus exergy above what the reference system needs to persist. Weakens selection.

Transitions¶

Function : One step in the routing chain: access, convert, store, copy, transmit, process, vary, select (plus maintain, steer, allocate at the work level).

Function cost : Exergy, time and constraint needed to perform one unit of a function. Not yet operationally defined.

Bottleneck : The function whose cost currently limits the whole chain.

Transition event : A step change (orders of magnitude) in one function's cost. Moves the bottleneck and reorganizes work.

Exergy event / information event : A transition that mainly increases flow (E) or mainly increases leverage (I).