On Fri, Nov 07, 2014 at 10:53:28PM -0500, John Clark wrote: > On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 3:56 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I'd say that expansion of the universe is almost necessary, not > > contingent. > > > > I'd say that by about 1850 when people started to have a understanding of > what Entropy was physicists had all they needed to have known that the > universe must have started out in a very very low entropy state, that is to > say they could have predicted the Big Bang in the early to mid 19th > century; and they wouldn't have needed to go near a telescope to do so. But > unfortunately they didn't, it's one of the great failures of nerve or > imagination in the history of science. >
Boltzmann indeed predicted a low entropy state sometime in the past. His idea was that it was a massive thermal fluctuation, and that the universe has existed for an eternity, and for most of that eternity was at maximum entropy. It was kind of one of the first anthropic arguments. I don't think the big bang per se is such an obvious outcome from the second law. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
