Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
AppendixE
An Interview with Nicholas
Georgescu-Roegen
By Antonio Valero (http : ==habitat:aq:upm:es=boletin=n4=aaval:html)
In November 1991 an American colleague and I went to visit professor Nicholas
Georgescu-Roegen at his home in Nashville. He had been a lecturer at Vanderbilt
University and had since retired. He lived in a typical American chalet. It was
enormous and most curiously was completely full of open topics scattered around
various tables, denoting the intensity at which he worked. At this time his discreet
wife was alive, although she was not in good health. I could not image the
grumpy Prof. Georgescu-Roegen, without the help of her wife. It was evident
that he really needed her and they were alone in that house, almost lost in a large
urbanisation.
A few years before (back in 1986) I had published The General Theory of Exergy
Saving when I realised that in using the Second Law to conceptually approximate
Economics one would obtain results that had already been written by Nicholas
Georgescu-Roegen at the beginning of the 1970s his topic the Entropy Law and the
Economic Process which took him on an intellectual path which ran the opposite
direction to the norm - from Economics to the Second Law.
I will always consider Thermodynamics to be essentially an economic theory of
Nature and I have worked in this creating a logical extension from the Second
Law that includes the ideas of cost and that of irreversibility and with these the
concepts of purpose, e
ciency and causality. I did it with my collaborators with
the old Carnotian style, focusing on how one could improve “thermal machines”.
The surprise came when I realised that professor Georgescu-Roegen, who from
a completely opposing camp (from Economics), had managed to criticise their
doctrine for not including the concept of irreversibility but instead the concept
of total capital substitutability for natural resources. Jokingly, Herman Daly
referred to this as the magic trick of making a cake with a chef and a kitchen but
without ingredients.
Georgescu-Roegen is the Father of Ecological Economics, in which both Ther-
modynamics and the Second Law play a fundamental role. We (a scarce few
Thermodynamic engineers) contributed to the creation of Thermoeconomics, a
tool which is used to improve and optimise energy systems and which is based
on the systematic application of the Second Law, using the ideas of cost and ef-
ficiency. The connection was evident. For this reason I decided to get to know
professor Georgescu-Roegen personally.
He was not up for much intense activity when I went to visit him in his home
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