Yes; the relations of being and becoming: I love Plato's cosmology.... Heraclitus thought there must be something that persists changeless, and something capable of change. Leibniz thought the universe fundamentally depends on two principles: (1) that which stays the same and (2) that which is capable of changing.
I see an analogy to these philosophical propositions in the first and second laws of thermodynamics:
Symmetry, Broken-SymmetryI find this so fascinating. :^)
and the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics
The laws of thermodynamics are special laws that sit above the ordinary laws of nature as laws about laws or laws upon which the other laws depend (Swenson & Turvey, 1991). It can be successfully shown that without the first and second laws, which express symmetry properties of the world, there could be no other laws at all. The first law or the law of energy conservation which says that all real-world processes involve transformations of energy, and that the total amount of energy is always conserved expresses time-translation symmetry. Namely, there is something that unifies the world (constitutes it as a continuum) which if you go forward or backward in time remains entirely the same. It is, in effect, through this conservation or out of it that all real-world dynamics occurs, yet the first law itself is entirely indifferent to these changes or dynamics. As far as the first law is concerned, nothing changes at all, and this is just the definition of a symmetry, something that remains invariant, indifferent or unchanged given certain transformations, and the remarkable point with respect to the first law is that it refers to that which is conserved (the quantity of energy) or remains symmetric under all transformations.Although intuited at least as early as the work of the Milesian physicists, and in modern times particularly by Leibniz, the first law is taken to have been first explicitly "discovered" in the first part of the last century by Mayer, then Joule, and later Helmholz with the demonstration of the equivalence of heat and other forms of energy, and completed in this century with Einsteins's demonstration that matter is also a form of energy....
The second law was formulated in the middle of the last century by Clausius and Thomson following Carnot's earlier observation that, like the fall or flow of a stream that turns a mill wheel, it is the "fall" or flow of heat from higher to lower temperatures that motivates a steam engine. The key insight was that the world is inherently active, and that whenever an energy distribution is out of equilibrium a potential or thermodynamic "force" (the gradient of a potential) exists that the world acts spontaneously to dissipate or minimize. All real-world change or dynamics is seen to follow, or be motivated, by this law. So whereas the first law expresses that which remains the same, or is time-symmetric, in all real-world processes the second law expresses that which changes and motivates the change, the fundamental time-asymmetry, in all real-world process. Clausius coined the term "entropy" to refer to the dissipated potential and the second law, in its most general form, states that the world acts spontaneously to minimize potentials (or equivalently maximize entropy), and with this, active end-directedness or time-asymmetry was, for the first time, given a universal physical basis. The balance equation of the second law, expressed as S > 0, says that in all natural processes the entropy of the world always increases, and thus whereas with the first law there is no time, and the past, present, and future are indistinguishable, the second law, with its one-way flow, introduces the basis for telling the difference. -- Rod Swenson
Thank you oh so much for writing, cornelis!
BTW, fractals also remind me of this relationship between that which changes and that which does not, e.g. the Mandelbrot set. Another example, the shorter the ruler, the longer the coastline.