In MWI it is rather difficult to reverse time and unsplit the universe. It's not Hermitian Richard
On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 1:40 PM, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 12:06 AM, Russell Standish <[email protected]> > wrote: > > >> 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. > > > Yes but Boltzmann thought that you could ignore boundary conditions and > the second law of thermodynamics alone was enough to logically deduce that > in the distant past the universe must have been in a very low entropy > state, but in 1876 Loschmidt pointed out that Boltzman was wrong about > that, he said you can't deduce a irreversible process, like the increase of > entropy, from classical dynamics alone because if you just reverse the > velocity of the particles in high entropy state B it will evolve back into > the low entropy state A that produced it. And knowing that there are > VASTLY more high entropy states than low entropy states and asked what > state produced the stat we're in now you'd have to answer that it was > almost certainly one of those enormously numerous high entropy states > UNLESS you made a further assumption, the past hypothesis, the idea that > the universe must have started out in a very very low entropy state. > > John K Clark > > > > > -- > 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. > -- 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.
