{"id":87,"date":"2014-06-13T03:39:55","date_gmt":"2014-06-13T03:39:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/?p=87"},"modified":"2014-06-13T03:39:55","modified_gmt":"2014-06-13T03:39:55","slug":"a-foundation-for-environment-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/?p=87","title":{"rendered":"A Foundation for Environment Science"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A team of us students in the sustainable development program are trying to revamp our core science course. For a group of mathematically sophisticated, intellectually bold, and cutting-edge-research-focused people, our current &#8220;introduction&#8221; to science is far too lax and disorganized. We want to put it on surer ground.<\/p>\n<p>The class needs to go into quite a few topics; minimally, it needs to include climate, hydrology, ecology, and public health. Disasters, energy, rocks and soils, and agriculture would be nice too.<\/p>\n<p>The goal of the class is to prepare us to struggle through any sequence of PhD-level classes in a science of our choice, and to let us engage academic papers written by, well, anyone. The first response that we got from the Earth Institute post-docs, when we asked their advice, was that a class like this is impossible. But then, we&#8217;ve been doing exactly that with far worse for years.<\/p>\n<p>We decided that we should start the first class with Thermodynamics, as a foundation for the rest. I&#8217;m in charge of writing up the topics for that day.\u00c2\u00a0 I think there are a few other pieces that are similarly foundational to all environmental science: dimensionality, stocks and flows, equilibria, industrial ecology, and path-dependence.\u00c2\u00a0 I&#8217;m not sure how it all fits together, but here&#8217;s what I&#8217;ve got so far.<\/p>\n<p>Dimensionality<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Pi-Products<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Thermodynamics<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Foundations\n<ul>\n<li>Forms of Energy<\/li>\n<li>Principle of least action<\/li>\n<li>Lagrangian Dynamics<\/li>\n<li>Noether\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Theorem<\/li>\n<li>Path-dependent derivative<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>First Law\n<ul>\n<li>Energy Conservation<\/li>\n<li>Thermal energy and temperature<\/li>\n<li>Thermal energy transfer<\/li>\n<li>Temperature and phase changes<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Second Law\n<ul>\n<li>Entropy<\/li>\n<li>Equilibrium<\/li>\n<li>Irreversibility<\/li>\n<li>Fundamental Equation and its derivatives<\/li>\n<li>Legendre Transforms<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Terminology:\n<ul>\n<li>system, boundary, environment, primitive properties, derived properties, thermometric temperature, event interaction, adiabatic, diathermal, phase, restraint, thermodynamic processes, path and state<\/li>\n<li>open, closed and isolated system<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Topics to leave out:\n<ul>\n<li>Enthalpy, work, 3rd law of thermo<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Stocks and Flows<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Industrial Ecology<\/li>\n<li>Emergy<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A team of us students in the sustainable development program are trying to revamp our core science course. For a group of mathematically sophisticated, intellectually bold, and cutting-edge-research-focused people, our current &#8220;introduction&#8221; to science is far too lax and disorganized. We want to put it on surer ground. The class needs to go into quite [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Zh9E-1p","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}