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The problem with your argument is that on a large scale thermodynamics moves energy from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration. Voids are low concentrations of energy whereas stars have high concentrations of energy around them. This means that the energy produced by stars, and thus galaxies and galaxy clusters will eventually move into the Voids. The gravitational energy will of course continue to pull stars into an ever tighter matter as the weak and strong nuclear forces decay, so the probability of the universe ever being completely homogenous at the quantum level is zero.
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obermd wrote: The problem with your argument is that on a large scale thermodynamics moves energy from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration.
Thermodynamics tends to move things from higher energy states to lower energy states. Concentration (of stuff), although a factor, is not the only consideration - and may not even be one.
The Gibbs Free Energy, which is basically the traffic controller for thermodynamic (which way does something go) includes both thermal and entropy components. They can pull together or in opposing directions for a given event. Expand your view to the surroundings and the entropy has increased and that is a dispersive phenomenon.
Gravity is magic! but, I'd conjecture that energy is emitted when two object coalesce do to gravitational forces. Isn't there something to that effect when an object crosses the event horizon of a black hole? Also, don't black holes emit Hawkings radiation (per an earlier post) and they eventually wither away into total dispersion as energy?
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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The formation of planets and rise of intelligent life seems to me to be a violation of entropy.
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Any thing can happen in a truly chaotic path - local order is, in fact, required for a truly chaotic system.*
Hence - planets, life, &etc.
* at least along the way to wherever it's headed.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Sorry, the universe could approach total chaos as a limit. Areas of orgnization could evaporate. Or the expansion of space-time could grow exponentially, causing the universe to pop like a soap bubble, also causing the universe to approach chaos as a limit.
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It seems that life is anti-entropy. Whether it's an amoeba or a zebra, its always straining like hell against entropy to organize the physical world to perpetuate itself. It seems that if life figures out how to sweep across the universe faster than entropy, life could theoretically get the upper hand. If entropy winning is an ever expanding universe, getting lonelier and lonelier, what is life winning? Puppies, kittens & everyone singing Kum ba yah? Alas, it seems that either to the exclusion of the other is universal demise. With a universal balance between entropy and life, there could exist simultaneously pockets of chaos and clusters of kittens. Maybe equilibrium between them should be our hope?
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OK, not at the Universe level, but all the matter speeding from galaxies away from them eventually coalesce to the gravity of nearby influences creating new BIG BANGs. Einstein's greatest personal discovery was that matter and energy cannot be either created or destroyed.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Cthulu discovered that the whole universe was his...
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Local order for the sake of global entropy isn't anything new. Stars for example, are a more ordered system than thin gas stretched out throughout space, but stars actively increase the entropy by burning gas (as heat energy has the highest entropy of them all). Even life works the same way, locally, a living cell is more ordered than some primordial soup but by converting energy, life helps greatly increasing entropy. And as experience has shown, the more complex life gets, the more entropy gets generated (industrialization has increased the entropy output like nothing else before it).
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Again (and not intending to sound rude!) - I know what entropy is and how it "works" - it is, in fact, what gives a direction to time if you consider it. And studied enough thermodynamics to be pretty damn familiar with it, even quantitatively, as it the -T△S component in the Gibbs free energy. None of that, along with your observations are the point.
Restated: if the universe reaches a point where all content is in a total state of entropy, that state, itself, has lost a component of randomness as there is no variation in the state. Thus, for entropy to continue (a poor choice of words) some component(s) must always maintain a difference from a state of total entropy. My hypothesis, then, is that it could be a spontaneous change of state to any component, reducing it from a state of total entropy as it strives toward universal entropy (a logical contradiction?) which is, in a sense, a local rewind.
Taken a step further - which assumes some correctness in my hypothesis, one mechanism for this could be a local reverse in the direction of time . . . at least from the point of view of an outside observer. Ironically, the decrease in entropy, being potentially spontaneous, is still following its local time flow in a positive direction.
Let yourself then dream: we could be oscillating, irregularly, in a time stream without direction from an outside observation (outside of time, that is!) and things keep happening, unhappening, and the like. Inside this stream, however, we'd never notice.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Quantum mechanics dictate that SOMETHING will happen one way or another, on miniscule scales. Even if the universe devolves into a rather monotonous full-entropy-soup, local changes will always exist. That's however rather ordinary physics, scifi stuff like spontaneous reversal of time not included.
The reality of CPT symmetry is still not conclusively decided by experiment, but all signs point to it standing.
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Member 9167057 wrote: CPT symmetry
Had to look up what that is - but, at least according to the Wikipedia, whatever it is has been found to:Quote: Efforts during the late 1950s revealed the violation of P-symmetry by phenomena that involve the weak force, and there were well-known violations of C-symmetry as well. For a short time, the CP-symmetry was believed to be preserved by all physical phenomena, but that was later found to be false too, which implied, by CPT invariance, violations of T-symmetry as well.
But you note the idea of aQuote: monotonous full-entropy-soup,
And my thinking was such a state cannot exist in that it would violate the concept of entropy, itself. At the point where full entropy would be possible, something, somewhere, must be spoiling full entropy - which, expressing with the weakness of language - full entropy can only exist you don't have it. (but is getting rather close)
I'll except part of the quantum mechanical rational in that full entropy need only be marred somewhere, statistically, at all times.
Schroedinger's cat may (or may not) have had reconcilliation.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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How does that violate the concept of entropy?
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Member 9167057 wrote: How does that violate the concept of entropy? |
To what do you refer when you use "that"? But, before you explain the mysterious 'that', try to keep in mind, this is a musing - not a presentation before the Nobel Committee.
Achievement of total chaos is simultaneously unachievable.
Perhaps our reality, our entire universe, is the last pocket of non-fully-chaotic materials and energy in the totality of existence - but only lately. The big bang? Perhaps the a possible manifestation of the spontaneous creation of our universe to thwart total chaos in order to maintain it.
The universe rewinds on any scale
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Well, what "that" were you referring to when you said "And my thinking was such a state cannot exist in that it would violate the concept of entropy"? That's the same "that" I am talking about.
Anyway, while there's an interesting philosophical question of what maximum entropy is, in it's physical form, there's no actual hard facts pointing to maximum entropy spontaneously giving birth to a universe, order.
Our universe being but a pocket in a metaverse is an interesting thought, but it's more of a mathemathical play. If you care, there's an even more interesting theory of our universe being a low-energy pocket of a-forever-expanding-high-vacuum-energy-inflating-metaverse. As far as the math goes, it makes somewhat more sense than assuming the universe being a pocket in a maximum-entryopy-metaverse, but it's still about as real as tachyons (which also work out mathemathically, but have pretty much 0 resemblence to reality).
To wind back quite a lot, it's interesting to regard maximum entropy as being identical to maximum order. How comes? Order got to do with symmetry. You can have, let's say, translational symmetry, rotational symmetry, mirroring symmetry. The more rotational axes or translational vectors you have, the more order generally is there. But a state of maximum entropy has all the symmetries there are, the set of translational vectors is infinite, same as rotational axes and angles.
That's not very substantial though. For starters, talking about entropy in terms of order or chaos doesn't really hold. In physics, entropy goes woth the number of microscopic scales corresponding to the same macroscopic state, or rather to the same macroscopic energy.
Back to the big bang, the universe being an island in a vast world of maximum entropy is but a theory. A nice one, sure, but the universe may just as well be, well the universe. As in "all there is". Not that long ago, an anomaly in the CMB was theorized to be another bubble universe (all in the context of the M-theory, here synonymous with string theory, which by itself is under scrutiny as it seems to be impossible to combine with our reality) but that's all rather unproven, more in the realm of "Well, sure, this may be the case, but let's go with Occam's Razor first".
In other words, a universe in a state of maximum entropy spontaneously giving birth to a pocket universe isn't exactly impossible according to modern physics, but so is technically time travel (which just requires some exotic stuff with negative mass). In other words, not exactly the most likely of explanations.
What is definitely possible, are quantum fluctiations. Those are not only possible, but unavoidable. They however are rather locally confined, both in space and time. Tip: There's an interesting theory going on right now, the holographic principle. It's about using QCD on a 3D surface of a 4D spacetime (i.e. our universe) which by the merit of entropy (read: Thermodynamics) creates space-time curvature (read: General relativity). From what I get, this is still in it's infancy but it's a somewhat likely candidate for the theory of everything. Since it combines general relativity and quantum field theory (the 2 right but conflicting, yet both proven experimentally to exhaustion) using thermodynamics as a glue, that may be something.
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Me to myself:
Don't worry you are going to get the job done, code will run in first attempt, will do the article today  chill girl chill...
Meanwhile my brain:
"Baby, tell me one more beautiful lie" 
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While you're lying to yourself here's a little something for you!
Jonny Lang - Lie To Me - YouTube[^]
I may not be that good looking, or athletic, or funny, or talented, or smart
I forgot where I was going with this but I do know I love bacon!
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Quote: Me to myself:
or
Black Sabbath - Am I Going Insane [Radio] - YouTube[^] 
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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I see, you are not only a "glass half full" but a glass completely full person?
Or maybe just delusional.
Nothing ever works the first time.
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Well, I just believe "garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are Fairies at the bottom of it".
There is no problem so big that it cannot be solved with a little self-delusion. 
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I would happily side with your wife. Though you can call the fairies to make your garden beautiful.
38 years is a long time I must say  . How did you manage to survive?
Agree. I don't have as much experience as you have but I already feel the need for things to slow down a bit or else I might get fully delusional as well. 
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It takes three things to keep up:
1. Running like hell to "keep up"
2. Pig-headed stubbornness
3. Good Luck (Lots of it)
The last 2 items on the list have allowed me to stay married for 45 years as well.
Who Dat! Who Dat! Who Dat say they gonna beat them Saints!
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