John, Experimental results at several high-energy colliders suggest that at some point in the big bang the universe was a quark-gluon plasma, which despite it's high energy, is a BEC where all the particles share the same wave function- so they say. It seems to me that if all particles in the universe share the same wave function, that must be a state of very low entropy. I invite discussion on whether my thinking is correct. Richard
On Sun, Nov 30, 2014 at 11:00 AM, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Nov 29, 2014 at 4:29 PM, George <gl...@quantics.net> wrote: > > <http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/1-4020-3016-9>> As I have >> explained in previous posts, it is my opinion that Loschmidt was wrong in >> thinking that a Maxwellian gas column could power a perpetual motion >> machine of the Second kind which would decrease in entropy in an isolated >> system. >> > > Yes, Loschmidt was wrong about that. > > > Loschmidt was wrong with respect to the direction of time. In summary: >> entropy can decrease but time always flows forward. >> > > Loschmidt said the link between the second law and time can explain why > entropy will be higher tomorrow than today, but it can't explain why it was > lower yesterday than today. And Loschmidt was quite right about that, you > have to take initial conditions into consideration to explain that. In > retrospect this shouldn't have been surprising, even in a Newtonian world > the laws of physics alone are NEVER enough to figure out what a physical > system will do tomorrow or did yesterday, you also have to know exactly > what state the system was in for at least one moment in time before > yesterday. Only then can you use the laws of physics to figure out how the > system will evolve. > > > His argument was that if the laws of physics are perfectly reversible, >> then entropy is just as likely to increase as to decrease. >> > > No, it would be far worse than 50/50. His argument was that even if the > laws of physics were perfectly reversible entropy would still almost > certainly increase because there are astronomical to the astronomical power > more ways to be disorganized than organized, so the chances are > overwhelming that yesterday, the state that produced the state that things > are in today, was one of those EXTREMELY numerous states. But nobody really > thinks that entropy decreased between yesterday and today; the thing that > saves us from this paradox is initial conditions, the universe must have > started out in a very very low entropy state and has been winding down ever > since. > > 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
