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In all of physical law, there’s arguably no principle more sacrosanct than the second law of thermodynamics — the notion that entropy, a measure of disorder, will always stay the same or increase. “If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations,” wrote the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington in his 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World. “If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found...

How to think about entropy and time by Sean Carroll, CalTech prof of physics.

What’s the price of an accurate clock? Entropy, a new study has revealed. Entropy — or disorder — is created every time a clock ticks. Now scientists working with a tiny clock have proven a simple relationship: The more accurate a clock runs, the more entropy it generates. "If you want your clock to be more accurate, you’ve got to pay for it,” study co-author Natalia Ares, a physicist at the University of Oxford, told Live Science. “Every time we measure time, we are increasing the universe’s entropy." As we go forward in time, the second law of thermodynamics states...

The thorny thought experiment has been turned into a real experiment — one that physicists use to probe the physics of information ============================================================= It took physicists 115 years to tame Maxwell’s Demon. The universe bets on disorder. Imagine, for example, dropping a thimbleful of red dye into a swimming pool. All of those dye molecules are going to slowly spread throughout the water. Physicists quantify this tendency to spread by counting the number of possible ways the dye molecules can be arranged. There’s one possible state where the molecules are crowded into the thimble. There’s another where, say, the molecules...

......................................And that led to a remarkable twist in the story. Because the radiation is highly entangled with the black hole it came from, the quantum computer, too, becomes highly entangled with the hole. Within the simulation, the entanglement translates into a geometric link between the simulated black hole and the original. Put simply, the two are connected by a wormhole. “There’s the physical black hole and then there’s the simulated one in the quantum computer, and there can be a replica wormhole connecting those,” said Douglas Stanford, a theoretical physicist at Stanford and a member of the West Coast team....

As time races by, most of us barely notice the change that wear and tear inflicts on the objects around us. But everything from much loved teddy bears to the seats we sit on is marked by time every single minute of the day, as these fascinating images from around the world, collected by Bored Panda, reveal. In them, train station seats have the ghostly imprints of the many people who have sat there immortalised on the wall behind, while a bicycle is now an inextricable part of a tree trunk after the boy who left it chained there never...

Earlier this week, Drew M wrote another chapter in his long running “Let It Burn” saga, Can The GOP Be Reformed? Some Say No, Others Are Wrong. It's a good essay, I encourage anyone who missed it to take a moment to read it, because I'm about to take issue with it. The issue I have with Drew's thread has nothing to do with it's content. I happen to think that his observations are spot on, and I agree with them. The GOP isn't a conservative party. It isn't going to ever be as conservative as he, and I, and I suspect...

2 Futures Can Explain Time's Mysterious Past New theories suggest the big bang was not the beginning, and that we may live in the past of a parallel universe December 8, 2014 |By Lee Billings In the evolution of cosmic structure, is entropy or gravity the more dominant force? The answer to this question has deep implications for the universe's future, as well as its past. Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 TeamPhysicists have a problem with time.   Whether through Newton’s gravitation, Maxwell’s...

A New Physics Theory of Life Katherine Taylor for Quanta MagazineJeremy England, a 31-year-old physicist at MIT, thinks he has found the underlying physics driving the origin and evolution of life. By: Natalie WolchoverJanuary 22, 2014 Comments (151) print Why does life exist?Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as...

Genetic Entropy Points to a Young Creation by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. * Many creationists believe that the bulk of scientific evidence for a recent creation comes from the fields of geology, physics, and astronomy and that biology and genetics have little to contribute. However, data that confirm a young creation are rapidly emerging from genetic studies performed by both creationist and secular scientists. One of the most important finds in recent years came from modeling the accumulation of mutations (genetic code errors) in the human genome over time using computer simulations. Researchers found that this buildup of mutations can only...

A modification to one of the most fundamental laws of physics may provide a link to the rise of intelligence, cooperation - even upright walking. The idea of entropy describes the way in which the Universe heads inexorably toward a higher state of disorder. A mathematical model in Physical Review Letters proposes that systems maximise entropy in the present and the future. Simple simulations based on the idea reproduce a variety of real-world cases that reflect intelligent behaviour. The idea of entropy is fundamentally an intuitive one - that the Universe tends in general to a more disordered state. But...

When fresh water rivers flow into the sea the concentration difference leads to a change in entropy. US researchers have developed a battery that generates power from that entropy difference.Yi Cui's team at Stanford University, California, extract energy with 74 per cent efficiency using manganese dioxide nanorods and silver electrodes1. 'What we have really demonstrated that this idea can work,' says Cui.Cui's team estimate that if the technology was used on all world's rivers this renewable energy technology would hypothetically generate 2 TW, or approximately 13 per cent of current global consumption.Entropy based power generation has been done before but is most reliably done today...

<p>The universe was in chaos after the Big Bang kick-started the cosmos, a new study suggests.</p> <p>While one might expect the explosion that began the universe to wreak some havoc, scientists mean something very specific when they refer to chaos. In a chaotic system, small changes can cause large-scale effects. A commonly cited example is the "butterfly effect" — the idea that a butterfly beating its wing in Brazil can bring about a tornado in Texas.</p>

Perfect liquids suggest theory’s math mirrors something real Shadows live in a simple world. They glide effortlessly across any sort of surface, oblivious to the higher dimension of space in which 3-D bodies move, collide and sometimes block the paths of rays of light. Shadows have no idea how important that third dimension is, and how objects in it endow those very shadows with their quasi-physical existence. Indeed, the laws of shadow physics all depend on the third dimension’s presence. And just as the clueless inhabitants of the shadow world require an extra dimension to explain how they exist and...

The Last Embers of the Fire by Anthony Esolen 11/24/08 We Catholics are commonly urged to "engage the culture"; not to flee for monasteries of our own making, but to work within the institutions of mass media, mass education, mass marketing, and mass entertainment to advance the banners of Christ, our King. I do not wish to criticize those who toil at that thankless task. Nor will I suggest that their work will be futile; no true service of the Lord can be without fruit. But I do believe we have mistaken the signs of the times. We seek to...

Many years ago our new nation, under God, was conceived and formed to embody and nuture liberty, equality and freedom from tyranny and religious oppression. Several years later, our nation established specific rules and laws which would help govern us down through the ages. One could make the argument that America, at the time of the Constitution, was a newly ordered system. An imperfect system? Perhaps. But at least one filled with hope and optimism for a better life. 230 years later we have moved from a newly created ordered social and political state to one of societal disorder, seemingly...

Mark Warner announced this morning that he's not running for president. As Prince Metternich asked when informed that the Russian ambassador had suddenly dropped dead, "What can have been his motive?" I suppose it was a calculation that he was just not going to overtake Hillary Rodham Clinton. And that the time, money, and effort required over the next 27 months or so were just not worth it. Warner has a fortune, made after he won a cellphone lottery, but not, I think, a big enough fortune to finance a presidential campaign. A year ago I thought the Democratic field...

News Discussions?

Pat Buchanan describes it in terms of the fall of the West. "Rome conquered the barbarians, then the barbarians conquered Rome." Pat often dons his twenty league boots, these days, but it is he, not the West, who has seen his best days. Rome, whose senate from time to time officially declared this or that caesar a god, will never select Buchanan for the pantheon. Paris is a tourist destination, these days, nothing more. Eastern liberal college students traditionally spend some time there, casting about for culture and trying out their skill with the lingua franca. Painters pay homage visits...