Yep I thought that, that the 2nd law falls out of an expanding universe (or the other way around)
That's if the 2nd law is inviolable but from the meagre understanding I have it butts heads with a bunch of other inviolable laws.
And AFAIK there's no reason why it should have priority.
I read some Penrose stuff and to make the 2nd law work with the big bang it means that the primal atom has to have exceptionally lowest entropy possible. I'm not sure how that works, wouldn't the entropy be really high? I don't really understand how a universe that evolves over time to have increasingly lumpy and ordered structure is one where entropy is always increasing either
To be fair I've only just started reading about this, know fuck all and I'm probably missing something
Is the entropy of the universe at the instant of the big-bang zero because you know where everything is and what it's doing i.e. it's all just there and it's not doing anything - very, very tidy.
venusian wrote:Is the entropy of the universe at the instant of the big-bang zero because you know where everything is and what it's doing i.e. it's all just there and it's not doing anything - very, very tidy.
I suppose having no dimension could mean the entropy is really low
I tend to take a somewhat simple view of what entropy is.
Entropy is you can mix water from two containers, but you cant unmix it once it's mixed.
For example, with temperatures, if you start with equal masses at 30 and 70 degrees celcius, then mixing gets you twice that mass at about 50 degrees. What you actually had before mixing was one population of molecules with a mean kinetic energy of (whatever it takes to be 30 degrees) and another with the kinetic energy relevant to 70 degrees, but they had standard deviations, dunno what, but something, maybe worth 5 degrees, maybe ten, but something, probably not very broad. When you mix them, it's not just the case that the average moves to about a kinetic energy of 50 degrees, it's that from the moment of mixing, the standard deviation would be shrinking down to about the value it had for the prior separate masses.
So the reason you can't get the thirty and seventy degree molecules out again is that they aren't there any more, most of the molecules are at a kinetic energy of about fifty degrees. We call that entropy, but it's not really anything complicated until you make it mathematical.
Unrelated: has LIGO been active, they had two results, then nothing, has the experiment been shut down for some reason lately ?
"My way is the way of not fighting":- the book of Enter the Dragon.
zip accident wrote:Entropy is you can mix water from two containers, but you cant unmix it once it's mixed.
Not sure about this analogy. If you can distinguish the contents of the containers in any way, you can unmix it.
If you want a quick entropy analogy, surely a better one would be "You can mix a tub of red sand and a tub of blue sand easily, but it's really really hard to separate out the purple sand into red and blue".
zip accident wrote:Entropy is you can mix water from two containers, but you cant unmix it once it's mixed.
Not sure about this analogy. If you can distinguish the contents of the containers in any way, you can unmix it.
If you want a quick entropy analogy, surely a better one would be "You can mix a tub of red sand and a tub of blue sand easily, but it's really really hard to separate out the purple sand into red and blue".
First off, "cant" should have been "can't", I didn't spot it until edit time was over.
Yeah, some mixes can theoretically be unmixed, but it takes a lot more work/energy than mixing, it always prevents perpetual motion or anything like it.
The case of temperatures I am pretty sure is as I described though, the velocities change to approximate the new mean.
"My way is the way of not fighting":- the book of Enter the Dragon.
Gravity waves contain infomation. There is presumably an infinitesimal gravity wave produced every time a particle falls into a black hole. Where is the paradox? The information should be echoing around the universe, continually attenuating, but never disappearing.
Thought of this earlier, presumably someone got there first, but I don't remember hearing/reading about it.
"My way is the way of not fighting":- the book of Enter the Dragon.
I read this a while ago, and it's been bugging me ever since:
The optical light curve shows that OJ 287 has a periodic variation of 11–12 years with a narrow double peak at maximum brightness.[6] This kind of variation suggests that it is a binary supermassive black hole of two black holes of similar size.[7] The double-burst variability is thought to result from the smaller black hole punching through the accretion disc of the larger black hole every 12 years.[3] Until the 2015 discovery of the binary nature of PG 1302-102, this was the best binary black hole candidate known, since 2008.[3]
The smaller supermassive black hole with a mass of "only" 100 million M☉ orbits the larger one with an observed 11- to 12-year orbital period. The maximum brightness is obtained when the minor component moves through the accretion disk of the supermassive component at perinigricon.
To me, most of it makes sense, until they talk about light coming out when the smaller SMBH passes through the accretion disk of the larger. What causes the activity it seems to me, is the accretion cloud of the smaller one passing through the accretion disk of the larger.
"My way is the way of not fighting":- the book of Enter the Dragon.
I accidentally stumbled upon this scientifically illiterate monstrosity, as I fell down the rabbit hole of the Internet for a few hours:
CERN is creating the Mandela Effect with black holes for Satan, according to two design hipsters on stools.
(I also love the "but CERN never polled the international community about whether they should build their particle accelerator!" - because, umm, when it was America at the fore-front of building massive particle accelerators, I don't remember them consulting anybody else either.)
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
Wow. "People will be saying, you guys aren't scientists, but to understand science, you need a broader mind." And there's me thinking that to understand science, you primarily need to have some actual understanding of science.
