Flow-Dependent Structures

Here's where it gets beautiful.

Dr. Bob loved to use everyday examples to explain Prigogine's far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

"We've all pulled the plug in our bathtub. What do you see? A whirlpool. That's a structure."

The Whirlpool

Think about that. You pull the plug, gravity acts on the water, and suddenly there's organization. A pattern. A structure that didn't exist before and won't exist after the water drains. The whirlpool is entirely dependent on flow.

Tornadoes work the same way. Hurricanes. Candle flames. They're all organized structures that exist only because energy is flowing through them.

"When you look at weather patterns, you're seeing structures dependent on flow."

The Impossibility That Isn't

From a static, random perspective, these structures are impossible. How could random molecules organize themselves into a perfect spiral? But from a flow perspective, they're not just possible—they're inevitable.

"As soon as you allow gravity to act on water, you see a whirlpool forming. Life is the same—flowing energy organizes matter."

You Are a Whirlpool

You are a whirlpool. A hurricane of biochemistry. A candle flame of consciousness. Stop the flow, and the structure disappears.

This isn't a metaphor. It's physics. Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize for proving that order can spontaneously emerge from chaos when energy flows through a system far from equilibrium.

You are that system. Energy flows through you—from the food you eat, the air you breathe, the sunlight on your skin—and that flow creates the organized structure called "you."

The Takeaway

Understanding this changes everything about how you approach health. You don't want to stop processes—you want to balance them. You don't want to freeze the system—you want to optimize the flow.

Your body already knows how to do this. It's been doing it since before you were born, orchestrating trillions of cells through quadrillions of chemical reactions, all coordinated by the endocannabinoid system.

You're not fighting entropy. You're surfing it.

Flow forward.