Principles¶

The invariant layer: physics (P1–P10) plus selection logic (P11–P13). Compact by design: the purpose is precision, not persuasion. Each principle is tagged.

Energy and exergy¶

P1. Energy is conserved; exergy is destroyed. [Established] Every joule entering Earth leaves. What changes is quality: concentrated sunlight in (low entropy), infrared out (roughly 20 photons out per photon in). Work is exergy degradation.

P2. The endpoint is fixed; the path is not. [Established] With or without life, exergy ends dissipated. Life and work change path, rate, timing and which gradients are used.

Gradients and constraints¶

P3. Work requires a gradient plus a constraint. [Established] Energy alone is insufficient: a room at uniform temperature holds energy and can do no work. A constraint channels relaxation of a gradient into directed work.

P4. Many gradients are kinetically locked. [Established] Wood doesn't burn by itself; uranium doesn't split by itself. Opening locked gradients (catalysis in the broad sense) is a central thing life and work do.

Dissipation and life¶

P5. Life is a dissipative structure with heredity. [Framing] Like convection cells and storms, life persists only while energy flows through it. Unlike them, it stores a description of how to rebuild itself, so improvements accumulate.

P6. Life both dissipates and stores. [Established] Oxygen atmosphere, fossil fuels, seeds, fat: life creates gradients and defers dissipation. "Life maximizes dissipation" fails on these counterexamples; "life controls access to and timing of gradients" does not.

Information¶

P7. Information is physical. [Established] Erasing a bit costs at least kT·ln2 (Landauer, experimentally verified). Memory, genomes, documents and models are physical states with maintenance costs, and they decay.

P8. Information is persistent, copyable constraint. [Framing] Following Kauffman, Deacon, Pattee. Shannon information is a different (statistical) notion; this repo uses the constraint sense.

P9. Information has leverage. [Framing] It is cheap to hold relative to the flows it steers. A ~20 W brain steers a body, tools and power plants.

Laws and boundary conditions¶

P10. Life and work change boundary conditions, never laws. [Established] Everything this model describes operates by rewriting gradients, arrangements and constraints, so fixed laws produce different outcomes.

Selection logic¶

P11. Selection logic is substrate-neutral. [Established] Wherever carriers vary, variations are copied, and carriers persist differentially under limited exergy, the population shifts toward whatever persists (Lewontin). It is not a physical law but a logical consequence, so it holds on any substrate: molecules, organisms, practices, organizations.

P12. Physics has no persistence criterion; selection logic supplies it. [Established] Thermodynamics says what can happen and at what cost. It does not say what accumulates. A convection cell neither maintains nor copies itself. Both layers are needed to explain life and work.

P13. Physics bounds what selection can produce. [Framing] Selection acts only on boundary conditions (P10), and every carrier pays maintenance and copying costs (P7). Selection cannot select its way past exergy limits.

Rough magnitudes (order of magnitude; verify before citing)¶