2002-04-10
Leif Andersson
Henriksbergsvägen 104
136 67 HANINGE
Tel 08/777 45 33
e-post leif.andersson@haninge.mail.telia.com
Hemsidor http://go.to/lean1
http://come.to/lean
Carrier
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We live in an ever changing world and our aim is to make the
changes occur according to our will.
A change can be divided in small changes. The smallest detectable
change is called a "unit-event". Thus every change can be expressed
as a number of unit-events.
The number of all unit-events that has ever occured in the whole
universe is called "abolute time", and the number of unit-events
that occur in the universe while something happens in our neighbourhood
is the time that something takes.
The number of unit-events that occcur during a timeperiod is constant
(the timeperiod is nothing else than that number) which means that
if we make something happen something else will not happen. This
is called "The first law of thermodynamic".
A predictable change is called "energy". A desired change is called
"value".
There are rules that makes it possible to predict changes. We can
realize that if change A occurs then change B will follow. We say
that A is the cause of B and that B is the result of A.
Our ability to cause changes is very small. But if we can predict
that the small change A will cause the large event B then we can
make B happen by causing A. Thus we can make what we want happen by
causing the cause or the cause of the cause or ...
But how do we predict which changes will occur?
The first law of thermodynamic gives the world some predictability
but far from enough. We need more methods to predict events. Some
methods are inborn. We have inborn programs for how to eat and walk.
But we have found that we can do much more than that.
A very useful tool when we try to predict what will happen has
turned out to be to use the concept of carriers. We connect the
ability to cause a change to some substance. Then we can separate
the quantity of the substance and the ability for each unit of
the substanc to cause change. We can talk about quantity and
intensity. And the total ability to cause change is the produkt
of quantity times intensity. For instance in electicity the
quantity charge (Q) times the intensity voltage (U) is the change
energy W = Q U. We say that the quantity carries the energy in the
form of its intensity.
The carrier itself does not bring about any desired change and hence
it has no available value. But it can carry value. A truck can carry
valuable load, an electron can carry voltage, entropy can carry
temperature, money can carry moneyvalue.
Many times we do not use single carriers but rather a flow of
carriers. In electricity we use flows of electrons, i e currents,
rather than single electrons.
In some cases the number of carriers is constant. For instance the
number of electrons in an electric circuit is always the same. That
means that we can predict what will happen if electrons flow to a
point. The result will be that the same number of electrons will
leave the point. This is called "Kirchhoffs first law".
And if we use the load of a carrier we must restore the load if we
will come back to the starting point. This is called "Kirchhoffs
second law".
Kirchhoffs laws are powerful tools for predicting what will happen.
But they do not always hold.
When a company builds a road they use a flow of trucks between the
gravel-pit and the road. This flow obeys Kirchhoffs laws. As long as
the company use the same number of trucks we can predict that when a
truck goes into the pit a truck will, sooner or later, come out from
the pit. And the trucks unload their value (gravel) at the road and
they are reloaded in the pit. So we can predict that trucks going
from the pit will carry valuable load while truck going from the
road will run empty.
Trucks are very seldom destroyd or created during such an operation.
Like electrons their number will be constant and hence Kirchhoffs
first law must hold. But if we should start production and/or
destruction of trucks in the pit we could no longer be shure that
Kirchhoffs first law would hold.
Heat is molecule movement. Thus heat is carried by molecules. But it
is not the molecules, it is the degrees of freedom of the molecules
that carry heat. The carrier for heat, that is the molecule degree of
freedom, is called entropy.
Unlike electrons and trucks the entropy may change. The number of
degrees of freedom per molecule is not the same for the gaseos state,
the liquid state and the solid state. Quite often Kirchhoffs first
law does not hold for entropy.
Money is a carrier for economic value. If we only used cash to
pay for all production and all consumption then it might be possible
to keep the total amount of money constant which would make
Kirchhoffs first law hold. But the total amount of money is not
constant and not even known. Of all the things and services that
we produce and consume very little is payed for in cash.
Another problem is the concept of saving. A truck that goes into
the gravel-pit is bound to come out again. But a coin that goes
into my purse might stay there for ever.
Very often Kirchhoffs first law does not hold for money. But that
does not mean that the law is useless. It is a powerful tool in
accounting.
When a coin circulates in the economy it is unloaded and reloaded
with value. Like a truck that is loaded and unloaded or en electron
that takes and leaves voltage or entropy that takes and leaves
temperature the coin is loaded and unloaded. But what kind of
value does the coin carry?
Value is "desirable change" so the amount of value depends both on
the change and on the desire.
There is no simple relation between physical and psychical change.
And the desirability of a psychical change might vary. Hence we can
not derive value from physical quantities e g the weight of a piece
of gold. Instead we have invented the market as a value-giver for
money.
We believe in the "Myth of the material deficit". No matter how much
we have got it will still not be enough. We believe that we will
always have a desire for more. But we have no material deficit and,
except for very rare occassions, we have never had any material
deficit. So we create deficit to produce moneyvalue.
And we have adopted the concept of taxes that means that we are not
allowed to unload the value from more than a part of the money we
get.
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