Opposites: Open and closed

Are they really so opposite?

As Niels Bohr used to say, the opposite of an ordinary truth is a falsehood, but the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth. I offer this opposite pair:

1) All systems are open.
2) All systems are closed.

A closed system is a set of physical things which can be regarded as isolated from the rest of the universe. An open system, in contrast, is affected by things outside itself, even if those things are not directly observed. So these statements are certainly opposite. How are they both true?

What defines 'the system'?

Experiments try to isolate variables, but we can never achieve perfect isolation. Vacuum chambers are made of steel walls, and over time a few stray gas atoms always percolate in and out of tiny cracks or pores in the steel surface. No laboratory building is perfectly insulated from vibrations. High energy cosmic rays can pierce any barrier; and so on. It may be possible to achieve isolation that is excellent for all practical purposes, but all physical systems are open, strictly speaking. 

If we really want to speak strictly, however, then the very concept of a ‘system’ is inherently an approximation. There is really only one system: the universe. The universe as a whole is closed by definition, so all systems are closed. Of course, it is no less impossible in practice to describe the whole universe than it is to seal off a portion of the universe in perfect isolation from the rest. It is often possible, however, to describe a very large closed system.

And indeed this is precisely what we normally do, to identify the distinctive physical features of an open system: we analyze a large closed system, and then discard all the information that does not refer directly to the small sub-system that represents our ‘open system’.

So any system is open, if we want it to be: it is only a matter of how low we set our threshold for ignoring slight influences from external factors. Conversely, however, any system is closed, if we want it to be: it is only a matter of how large we are willing to make our system, to bring relevant external factors within its frame. The distinction between open and closed systems is an important one, but it is not a distinction between two different ways things can really be. It is a distinction between two different ways of thinking about things. Both ways can be good ways of thinking. Both truths are profound.

An engine would still run inside a large box.

It seems to me that too many physicists today have lost sight of the second truth, however. The most profound mystery that physics still faces is the origin of irreversibility. We don't understand why we can't remember tomorrow. And whatever is going on in quantum measurement, it seems to be an empirical fact that all quantum measurement devices rely crucially on thermodynamically irreversible processes to achieve their extreme amplification. No-one can find a clear explanation of irreversibility within closed-system Hamiltonian mechanics, but few people want to accept that our mighty science is still stumped by such a basic question after a century of breakneck progress, so most people like to think that the open system generalization must be the simple solution.

Open systems can't be the basic explanation of irreversibility, because all systems are also closed. Whether or not a system is open is not a physical fact, but an arbitrary choice of perspective in deciding what to include within the system. So the openness of physical systems cannot make a fundamental difference to anything; anything that can be explained as an open system must also be explicable as a larger closed system. A steam engine would still run, at least for a good long time, inside a big impermeable box.