What is Exergy, Entropy, Information, Order in relation to buildings? Everything will turn to dust. Inevitable. Except in a subsystem where solar radiation provides just enough energy to (re)create some order. I was once again struggling with a question: the relationship between entropy, exergy, value, and order. Yes, yes, you…
Land is our capital, and everything can be expressed in the space-time needed for the activity, in hectare-years of output to capture and store (solar) energy. This can be as food, as raw material, or as stored energy.But it’s not only ‘raw materials’ that require land; social activities and hobbies…
Dear readers, at the beginning of the year, let’s get some steam out, for a fresh start… Is it really that difficult to understand how the world works in essence, or do we still refuse to grasp it in 2025, or deliberately avoiding the subject?Look, it is still the case…
Since we’re talking about the 1960s, let’s dive a bit deeper and attach some numbers: In the 1960s, things really started to get out of hand. Energy graphs began to shoot up steeply from that point onward. Which made that prime minister Lubbers at the time called for “the living…
Inspired by that book from the 1860s, I was reminded of my own youth in the 1960s and of the bike I used to ride to the secondary school (HBS), which had been established 100 years earlier. Back then, I thought that bicycles must have always existed. I couldn’t imagine…
While browsing through my father’s cabinet, I came across an old book—a Geographical Historical Dictionary from 1862. It described all the countries of the world and their histories, including every municipality in the Netherlands. Naturally, I looked up Maastricht, the city where I grew up. Among the information provided, I…
Recently, I read some interesting books again about developments in quantum physics and space relativity, essentially the micro and macro aspects of physics, and the attempts to unify the two. It’s not entirely my field, but incredibly fascinating. What I struggle with most in the formation the theory are the…
“The EU must invest more, to avoid falling behind”, economists warned this week. “Otherwise, in 50 years we will be the open-air museum for the rest of the world”. Well, if we do, invest more, society might end in a collapse, and in 50 years we will have to go…
Land is our capital; through the sunlight that falls on it, it captures the necessary annual energy and mass of resources. But closely related to this is water, which is essential for that land-sun system to function and is the most important source for humans after air/oxygen. It should be…
The Earth is a physical subsystem of the universe, and the physical processes within it are fairly well-known and describable. For example, concentrated reserves of raw materials are limited, and within such a finite system, infinite growth (organization of molecules) is not possible. This is bound by limits, just as…
