Department of Statistics and Data Science, University of Central Florida, Orlando, 32816, USA.
Laboratory of Applied Thermodynamics, Thermal Engineering Sector, School of Mechanical Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Heroon Polytechniou 9, Zografou, 15780, Athens, Greece.
Sci Rep. 2023 Mar 17;13(1):4419. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-31585-w.
Political polarization has become an alarming trend observed in various countries. In the effort to produce more consistent simulations of the process, insights from the foundations of physics are adopted. The work presented here looks at a simple model of political polarization amongst agents which influence their immediate locality and how a entropy trace of the political discourse can be produced. From this model an isolated system representation can be formulated in respect to the changes in the entropy values across all variables of the system over simulation time. It is shown that a constant entropy value for the system can be calculated so that as the agents coalesce their opinions, the entropy trace in regards to political engagements decreases as the entropy value across non-political engagements increase. This relies upon an intrinsic constraint upon agents imposing a fixed number of activities per time point. As a result the simulation respects the second law of thermodynamics and provides insight into political polarization as a basin of entropy within an isolated system without making assumptions about external activities.
政治极化已成为各国观察到的一个令人担忧的趋势。为了更一致地模拟这一过程，人们采用了物理学基础的见解。这里介绍的工作着眼于一个简单的政治极化模型，其中代理人影响他们的直接环境，以及如何产生政治话语的熵迹。从这个模型中，可以针对模拟时间内系统所有变量的熵值变化，制定一个关于系统隔离的代表。结果表明，可以计算出系统的恒定熵值，因此随着代理人意见的融合，政治参与的熵迹减少，而与政治参与无关的熵值增加。这依赖于代理人内在的约束，即每个时间点都要进行固定数量的活动。因此，该模拟尊重热力学第二定律，并为政治极化提供了一个孤立系统内的熵盆地的见解，而无需对外部活动做出假设。
