Metaphor and degradation in China

One of the pleasures of attending a meeting that is intentionally international is the opportunity to have personal connections with scholars from all over the world.  I was surprised at the Energy Summit to hear from a scholar from mainland China who is trying to apply ideas from Lakoff and Johnson to entropy and Gibbs free energy.

http://esummit-msu.net/content/several-often-neglected-perspectives-energy-chemical-education

This paper is quite long and will need serious shortening and editing if it is to be included in the ES book. I have not had time to read it yet. Nevertheless, the paper represents some very careful and creative thinking about energy/entropy concepts.  Wei makes the argument that, contrary to common thinking, there is no tendency to minimize energy.  The Gibbs free energy should not be thought of as a competition between minimizing energy and maximizing entropy.  Instead minimizing Gibbs free energy is just a version of maximizing entropy in a constant pressure and temperature environment.  Gibbs free energy is simply a quantity which is measured in energy units and which decreases (for a system in a quasi constant pressure and temperature environment) whenever entropy increases (overall).  This framing would suggest that the Gibbs free energy may have a very close relationship with the idea of energy spreading in a quasi constant P, T environment.  I will have to think much more about this.