Until recently, prospects for useful extremal principles in this area have seemed clouded. C. Nicolis (1999) concludes that one model of atmospheric dynamics has an attractor which is not a regime of maximum or minimum dissipation; she says this seems to rule out the existence of a global organizing principle, and comments that this is to some extent disappointing; she also points to the difficulty of finding a thermodynamically consistent form of entropy production. Another top expert offers an extensive discussion of the possibilities for principles of extrema of entropy production and of dissipation of energy: Chapter 12 of Grandy (2008) and chemical reactions do not obey extremal principles for the secondary differential of entropy production, hence the development of a general extremal principle seems infeasible. | Until recently, prospects for useful extremal principles in this area have seemed clouded. C. Nicolis (1999) concludes that one model of atmospheric dynamics has an attractor which is not a regime of maximum or minimum dissipation; she says this seems to rule out the existence of a global organizing principle, and comments that this is to some extent disappointing; she also points to the difficulty of finding a thermodynamically consistent form of entropy production. Another top expert offers an extensive discussion of the possibilities for principles of extrema of entropy production and of dissipation of energy: Chapter 12 of Grandy (2008) and chemical reactions do not obey extremal principles for the secondary differential of entropy production, hence the development of a general extremal principle seems infeasible. |