I owe a great debt of gratitude to Clayton Crockett for recommending Eric Schneider and Dorian Sagan’s Into the Cool:  Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life in response to my recent talk at GCAS, where I sketched the cartography of United States higher education and discussed, among other things, the central place of entropy in my thought.  Throughout their book, Schneider and Sagan explore the role non-equilibrium dynamics play in the production of organization in the universe.  Working on the hypothesis that “nature abhors a gradient”, they try to show how forms of organization ranging from tornadoes to life, cities, societies, and economies arise from the way in which organization arises from the way in which being is drawn toward the production of equilibriums that resolve energetic disequilibriums that exist in the world.  As they write, for example,

A barometric pressure gradient in the atmosphere, the difference between high- and low-pressure…