Chaos and Entropy: Lectures by Prof. Alfonso Albano

Last Thursday, July 30, 2009, Silliman University was graced with the opportunity to listen to two lectures by Professor Alfonso M. Albano. Prof. Albano is among the balik professor lecturers of the DOST. He received his undergraduate degree in Physics from UP, and his Masters in Physics from the University of Iowa. His current study is focused on nonlinear dynamics and Chaos.

Professor Alfonso M. Albano's lectures were entitled:
THREE DECADES OF CHAOS:
Nonlinear dynamics, time series analysis, & applications to medicine & biology
and
ENTROPY IS WHAT YOU DON'T REMEMBER


The lectures were held at the Silliman Hall from 10am-12pm, and from 2pm-4pm. The lectures were attended by the faculty, staff and students of the Physics department; Dr. Gerardo Maxino and his students from Maxino college; SU president, Dr. Malayang; faculty and students from philosophy, biology, mathematics, chemistry, political science and engineering.

In his 1st lecture, he discussed about chaos theory, its background and uses. He discussed the three-body problem of Henri Poincare, Edward Lorenz' theories - model atmosphere, Lorenz attractor, Lorenz butterfly (butterfly effect). He discussed how a chaotic system can manifest order; an order which provides information that other techniques may not give. This order in a chaotic system is applied to medical uses such as electroconvulsive therapy, electromyography, and electroencephalogram. However, he also pointed out that these information provided by nonlinear dynamics is not enough.

In his 2nd lecture, Prof. Albano described entropy in terms of missing information. He presented the views of Shannon, Boltzmann & Landuer. He also discussed about Maxwell's demon and it's violation to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. He described how forgetting or destroying information could increase the entropy of the universe.

His lectures were respectively followed by an open-forum in which students from different disciplines actively asked questions. The number of questions asked even surprised Prof. Albano since he usually has trouble making his students ask questions after a lecture.