Abstract
We live in a complex world, made more complex for us by the difficulty of distinguishing between our cultural expectations for how things work and the physical systems we interact with. The environmental systems of nature and the economy are often hard to recognize and constantly change, having behaviors independent of what people think about them. So our rules for systems we come to trust can become highly misleading without notice. That seems to have happened to us, evident in how people still project models of economic growth into the future, and already missing the turning point of timely response to erupting strains, fairly clearly around a century ago. That makes it valuable to know how the laws of physics provide some simple boundary conditions for responding to change in environmental systems, and knowing when you should.Learning to identify natural systems change and how to respond starts with learning to distinguish between physical systems, as one of our independent realities, and our worlds of information and belief as another. Once you can distinguish our information from its physical subjects you can compare the difference, and plan for change. Telling them apart can be a challenge, however, requiring attention to their distinctly different kinds of energy use, organization and natural limits. Environmental systems often change with their actively learning parts too, for another reason watching them change is more important than having theories of how they worked in the past.A useful way to find and track change in physical systems is found in how the conservation laws require energy flow and energy transfer processes to begin and end. They need a continuity that can be identified in recorded measures, made useful by raising key questions about irreversible changes precipitated by regular changes in scale. It builds a new bridge of methodology between theoretical and physical systems, introducing a new kind of empirical research