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Letter: Free energy: Perhaps Le Chatelier got there first

Published 6 November 2024

From Pete Swindells, Wolverhampton, West Midlands, UK

It seems to me that the free-energy principle (FEP) is little more than a restatement of the principle put forth by chemist Henry Louis Le Chatelier: “If a system is subjected to stress, the system will respond in a manner that tends to mitigate the effect of the stress.” I can’t see that the fuzzy notions of the FEP offer anything beyond this (19 October, p 32).

Issue no. 3516 published 9 November 2024

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