On Saturday, September 14, 2019 at 7:12:34 AM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote: > > If the early universe, say before the emergence of the CMBR, consisted of > a random collection of electrons and photons, wouldn't this correspond to a > *high*, not low entropy? Wouldn't it be analogous to gas with many > possible states? Yet cosmologists seem hard pressed to explain an initial > or early state assuming the entropy is low. AG >
When I was an undergraduate I took a course in Classical Thermodynamics and recall being satisfied that entropy was well-defined. I never took a course in Classical Statistical Mechanics, but I've seen Boltzmann's equation for S and wonder how N, the number of possible states is defined. If we have a gas enclosed in a container, we can divide it into occupation cells of fixed volume to calcuate S. But why can't we double the number of cells by reducing their volume by half? How then is S well defined in the case of Classical Statistical Mechanics? TIA, AG -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/35a78e16-25fd-4bd7-91df-888c01b62d63%40googlegroups.com.
