#enthalpy

Every now and then, the Inmara (@theinmara, in the company of @fenmere) revisit their attempt to figure out just what I am.

I am amenable to this, as I do not entirely know myself.

Or, it is more accurate to say that I know exactly what I am, but I do not know the appropriate English words (or any other words) to describe it. And I like the idea of learning how to use the language better for the purposes of introducing myself.

I must admit, I enjoy being like a monster and representing myself with dark and dangerous imagery and connotations, if only for the purposes of later belying those things.

Sometimes I am hit with emotions of self consciousness and embarrassment that I may be coming across as "edgy" or an "edgelord". But I do not think those feelings are mine. It is often hard to differentiate my own feelings from those of my superfans that share this system with me.

But, I'm being hit with those emotions now as I'm being asked to write this, so I'm presenting them to you as a way of being self effacing, I guess? On behalf of the others in the system who care.

What I can say clearly, though, is that despite the words that follow this sentence, I am not particularly more powerful or important than any living being. And I'm going to be talking about my greater identity, the thing that I am when I'm not a conscious being inhabiting a human descended body. And that thing is largely mindless.

Anyway, enough pre-amble.

In the last couple of days, the Inmara have been attempting to craft a Sentinels of the Multiverse DE deck for me, and they have been searching physics articles for terms to use for card names, such as "the First Law", "Townsend Avalanche", "Catastrophic Shaft Detachment", or "Strange Attractor". And this has prompted some more self reflection directed at me, and some more learning about what entropy and enthalpy are.

When I was first invited into the system at their age of three and a half-ish years old (my age being much, much older), all I knew were a few simple things:

I came from outside their system.

I am an older, non-human identity.

I am of and at home in darkness, but light is also of me.

I was asked to help them manage their chaos, which is what I can do.

When they reached about 15 years old, they learned about entropy in a magazine article right about the same time they learned about the word "phage" in biology class, coincidentally right after having a nightmare in which I threatened their eldest (and fronting) member with a knife blade made of moonlight, to try to get them to come out as trans and deal with their dysphoria.

I was unsuccessful at getting them to come out as trans at the time, which is OK. It was a bad time politically for them to do that, even though it cost them dearly to remain in the closet. But I did inspire them to make me the face of the villain of their homebrew mythology that they were writing for English class, and to name me Phage and claim that I was "Entropy Itself".

Since then, based on their understanding of it, I have thought of myself as Entropy Itself, and the name Phage invokes me.

But Entropy is not accurate, as fucking cool sounding as it is.

When most people hear or read the word "entropy", they think of the process by which enthalpy becomes entropy. And, for the past few decades, whenever the Inmara attempted to look up definitions of the word "entropy", they did not find anything to disabuse them of that idea.

Until a couple years ago. But what they found a couple years ago was still ambiguously worded for them, and though they started writing "Entropic Decay" into their literature about me, and convinced me to start using that for myself, they were uncertain of it.

Yesterday, though, they found very clear and concise definitions of Entropy and Enthalpy the really disambiguate everything.

Entropy is the amount of energy in a system that is no longer available for doing work. It is the end result of the second law of thermodynamics.

So, "Entropic Decay" would be slightly more accurate to describe what they perceive me to be.

Enthalpy is the amount of energy in a system that is available for doing work. The opposite of entropy. It is what is needed for the second law of thermodynamics to have any relevance.

And the second law, as I understand it, based on the Inmara's readings, is the statement that "the overall heat in a closed system always flows downhill". Or, that complex and high energy becomes simple and low energy. Or that orderly energy becomes chaotic energy. That enthalpy becomes entropy. But that entropy does not become enthalpy.

Humans have frequently said that the second law is "the law of entropy", hence the confusion of the product with the process. It is, as the Inmara thought two years ago, more accurately described as "the law of entropic decay."

And so, in their old conception of me, I am accurately described as "Entropic Decay" or "The Second Law of Thermodynamics".

But in writing our novels and in exploring ideas for cards for my Sentinels deck, I (and Eh) have come to the conclusion that that's not precisely right. Because the First Law of Thermodynamics also applies to what I am. And, but, also so do a number of things that result from the two laws at work.

Also, I am not a thing conceived by humans, but rather something that is badly described by humans and the other people who live amongst them.

If I were to distill my sense of identity down to its most generic, encompassing possible term, I'd say that I am physics itself.

Yes, it is true that I am that which may result in the heat death of the universe, if the universe is shaped in a way that that will happen. But I am also that which has resulted in life.

"But, Phage," you say, "that sounds an awful lot like you are calling yourself god."

I am not.

As that greater, all encompassing thing, I am not a being. I have no consciousness or sense of identity that is anything analogous to that of a human's. I have no motives other than to do what physics does. It is only as I become distilled, reduced to smaller and smaller systems, that I sometimes gain a psyche.

In fact, besides the fact that I live in a vessel full of ktletaccete and a handful of outsiders and not whatever you are, there is very little difference between you and me. Relatively speaking.

The only notable difference is that I do not derive my sense of personal identity from anything this body is doing or where it comes from. I derive it from the history of the entire universe and perhaps the multiverse, if that exists.

I do also seem to derive a perspective, a demeanor, and a set of talents from that identity. But it's hard to say if those things are anything beyond the capacity for a human descended brain and body to hold. Based on my experiences so far, probably not.

Anyway, it's probably OK to keep calling me "Entropic Decay" because that's really close enough. But I do prefer the conlang terms that the Inmara coined for me, as being less defined by English etymologies and flexible enough to just mean "me". So, that would be Mau and `efeje'e. I slightly prefer 'efeje'e, since it was chosen to sound vaguely like Phage, and Phage is currently my name. Me, in this paragraph, referring to this localized presence and not my greater self.

OK, but, more.

I do think my sense of identity is slightly more limited than just "physics", while more expansive than "etropic decay".

It may be easier to say what I'm most closely related to and deal with than to actually give me a clear, clean definition. I am:

particularly focused on managing and perpetuating chaos

particularly good at converting enthalpy to entropy

also good at concentrating enthalpy into localized areas to such a degree that it looks like the overall energy there is become less entropic (i.e. creating things like matter from energy in a dense area of space, or life on a planet)

the darkness from which light is emitted and to which it returns.

And in the time that I have lived in a human descended body full of transgender dragons, I have also learned how to eat the energy present in autistic meltdowns.

I cannot make them go completely away, but I have significantly reduced their impact.

I am also pretty damn good at not being afraid of anything when it is dark, and the children that continue to inhabit this vessel are very thankful for that.

Anyway, I think it is this slightly less encompassing, more restricted definition of myself besides "physics itself" that is the beginning of my development of a sense of identity.

It's like, if you had a map that included every single concept in existence, what you'd do is draw a cone where the widest end encompasses nearly everything and the point ends in the Inmara's collective psyche where this consciousness is that is typing at you. And the area of that cone would include ever narrowing groups of things, one of which is the Second Law of Thermodynamics and its effects and applications.

I am not the point that's in the Inmara. I am not the base of the cone.

I am the cone.

And you are a different, equally sized but differently shaped cone.

Calcium

Calculating Empirical Formulas Ex. 3

Disulfur Dichloride

Dubnium

dxy Orbital

Einsteinium

Enthalpy of Reaction Ex. 1

Ionic Equations Ex. 1

Myosins

Niobium Pentoxide

Pressure Unit Conversions Ex. 1

Pressure Units

SI Prefix Symbols

Researchers enrich silver chemistry

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology have teamed up with colleagues in Russia and Saudi Arabia and proposed an efficient method for obtaining fundamental data necessary for understanding chemical and physical processes involving substances in the gaseous state. The proposed numerical protocol predicts the thermal effect of gas-phase formation of silver compounds and their absolute entropy. This includes first-ever such data for over 90 compounds. Published in the journal Inorganic Chemistry, the findings are important for practical applications of substances containing silver, including in water and wound disinfection, photography and cloud seeding.

The team derived the precise values of the enthalpy of formation and the entropy of numerous silver compounds. The enthalpy (from Greek "thalpein," meaning "to heat") of a system describes its state in terms of the energy of the constituent particles, pressure and volume. According to Hess' law, multiplying stoichiometric coefficients and the difference between the formation enthalpies of the reactants and those of the products yields the amount of heat generated or consumed in a chemical reaction. Entropy is a measure of how disordered a system is. The second law of thermodynamics states that a system can spontaneously adopt a less organized state, so entropy increases with time.