Entropy calculation to help understand societal change
Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, The University of Sheffield
A missing ingredient in our understanding of human influence on global environmental change is the quantitative measure of the energy interactions of societies operating under varied technological and geographical conditions. This project seeks to employ the archaeological and historical data for the comparative investigation of energy use in different societies.
The project lies at the interfaces between physics, archaeology and ecology and it will be addressed by developing models to calculate entropy generation rates within the case study systems. Entropy generation (as opposed to energy use) allows the “quality” or “usefulness” of different energy resources to be measured. Learn more.
