Correspondence : Sir Alan Cottrell

From Sir Alan Cottrell   Jesus College, Cambridge

12 August 1974

Dear Miss Pick,

   Thank you so much for your letter (8 August). It was very kind of you to lend me a copy of your pilot study. Since this is your last spare copy, I thought I had better read it and return it quickly, so that I am sending it back here.

I thought your idea of the analogy between the natural processes of the Earth and the operations of a business enterprise very attractive, and was struck by how this works out in detail. It was not immediately obvious to me what new methods this would suggest for dealing with our problems of conservation of resources, economic progress, environmental improvement, etc. However, perhaps all this will become clear in your final report.

It seemed to me you had taken the analogy between the Earth and a business enterprise perhaps about as far as it will go in purely qualitative terms and I wondered whether it might be possible to pick out one aspect of it and try to make it more rigorous and exact. In particular, I thought you might want to draw the analogy between energy and money much more precisely, perhaps even to the extent of finding and relating common concepts in thermodynamics and economics. It would be necessary, for example, to find clear economic analogues for free energy and bound energy, since the Earth sends back into space just as much energy as it receives from the sun, through of course at a much lower level of quality. It may be someone has already explored this particular analogy, although I am not aware of it. I do not know of any scientist who has gone in this particular direction, though it may be someone has approached it from the economics side.

Yours sincerely,

Alan Cottrell, Master

jmp/26 Oct 2016