On 1/7/2014 8:14 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 2:36 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
> he assumed this time asymmetry was fundamental, not a mere statistical
effect
related to the low entropy of the initial conditions of the experiment.
A mere statistical effect?? I would argue that the second law of thermodynamics is much
more fundamental than the first. The first law, the idea that matter and energy can not
be created or destroyed is not a logical necessity it's merely a empirical observation,
up to now we've just never seen that law violated and we use induction to conclude that
we never will. Induction is a very good rule of thumb but it you wait long enough it can
sometimes lead you astray. I don't expect it to happen but I can at least conceive of
the idea that someday we will find a circumstance where the first law is untrue.
But the second law is not like that, conceiving of a world where entropy
doesn't increase
That should be "decreases". Since QM without collapse is unitary it entails that entropy,
at the microscopic level, never changes. Eddington knew that entropy was relative
coarse-graining.
with time is like imagining what the world would be like if 2+2=5.
But that applies to the world in general and the experimenter. A particular system with a
small number of degrees of freedom (like a pair photons) need not exhibit an increase in
entropy. And besides as you pointed out Bell didn't really assume anything about physics
in deriving his inequality except that you get definite results.
The second law is not based on observation but on pure logic and the fact that there are
just more ways to be disorganized than organized.
But if there are only two degrees of freedom, two polarizations for the entangled
particles, the statistics don't tell you much.
Brent
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