X-Message-Number: 20852
From: 
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 10:18:15 EST
Subject: entropy

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Simon mentioned entropy as evidence of the malice of the universe. All work 
and no play makes Jack a dull boy, so while the "heat death" of the universe 
is not one of our more pressing problems, no harm in a little fooling around.

Actually, entropy is a concept poorly understood by most people. If the 
Second Law is a genuine law at all, it is apparently an "emergent" one, not 
derivable from "basic" laws governing the behavior of matter at the 
submicroscopic level. 

People tend to swallow the Second Law uncritically because it is so obviously 
correct, in the short run, in so many cases. Hard to unscramble the eggs etc. 
Nevertheless, under reasonable assumptions, it was proven long ago that a 
closed system must eventually return arbitrarily close to any previous 
configuration. This means that, averaged over very long time periods, entropy 
must decrease as much as it increases. Ergo, no heat death, no inexorable 
deterioration.

You don't even need any math to prove to yourself that it is impossible to 
reach AND MAINTAIN a state of maximum disorder. If a system could reach a 
state of maximum disorder--the "most probable" distribution of 
components--then the next change MUST be toward greater order or lower 
entropy. (After that, a large decrease in entropy in a short time would still 
be unlikely under usual assumptions, but that isn't the issue.)

R.E.

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