A field and circuit thermodynamics for integrative physiology. II. Power and communicational spectroscopy in biology.

This paper continues the development begun in Part I (15), to show in what way it is meaningful to reduce biological phenomena to physical theory at any level of organization. The appropriate level-independent physics is comprised of thermostatics, thermodynamics of irreversible processes, statistical mechanics, and nonlinear mechanics. Generalized, these approaches lead to a spectroscopic description of the constellation of periodic processes that constitute the living states. The spectroscopic description is here applied also to the inputs received by living systems, from lethal, high-energy, nuclear particles and radiation to low-energy communicational signals that make up languages understandable at the various levels in an hierarchical system. The concept of language is then itself generalized, showing how the empirical relation discovered by Zipf can be derived from a thermodynamic basis. It is demonstrated that certain linguistic and statistical-mechanical distribution functions can be related. Applications of the field thermodynamic approach to two problems in transport phenomena are given in APPENDIX I; applications of field thermodynamics to language and communication are given in APPENDIX II.