Posted on 12/28/2005 3:01:53 PM PST by johnnyb_61820
... the idea that the four fundamental forces of physics alone could rearrange the fundamental particles of nature into spaceships, nuclear power plants, and computers, connected to laser printers, CRTs, keyboards and the Internet, appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics in a spectacular way.
Anyone who has made such an argument is familiar with the standard reply: the Earth is an open system, it receives energy from the sun, and order can increase in an open system, as long as it is "compensated" somehow by a comparable or greater decrease outside the system. S. Angrist and L. Hepler, for example, in "Order and Chaos", write, "In a certain sense the development of civilization may appear contradictory to the second law.... Even though society can effect local reductions in entropy, the general and universal trend of entropy increase easily swamps the anomalous but important efforts of civilized man. Each localized, man-made or machine-made entropy decrease is accompanied by a greater increase in entropy of the surroundings, thereby maintaining the required increase in total entropy."
According to this reasoning, then, the second law does not prevent scrap metal from reorganizing itself into a computer in one room, as long as two computers in the next room are rusting into scrap metal -- and the door is open. In Appendix D of my new book, The Numerical Solution of Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations, second edition, I take a closer look at the equation for entropy change, which applies not only to thermal entropy but also to the entropy associated with anything else that diffuses, and show that it does not simply say that order cannot increase in a closed system. It also says that in an open system, order cannot increase faster than it is imported through the boundary. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
pong for later
God is a perfect Carnot cycle.
It's nice to know there are things you can count on like the Swallows Returning to Capistrano, and creationists completely misunderstanding the Second Law of Thermodynamics in a hilarious and embarassing way.
Only new twist to this one is that it's an actual professor in the Texas State University system, which doesn't really reflect well on Texas.
Agreed
When I leave things out in the sun, they tend to deteriorate, not evolve into something more complex.
BTTT
Take a look at a pic the amorphous blob of disorganized clouds that Hurricane Katrina formed from, and then look at Katrina at Cat 5 - organized Spiral Bands, symmetrical, with a perfectly round and clear eye. That was accomplished through solar energy, with no intelligent designer at all.
I don't know about that. Shake up an earth-sized box of Legos and watch what "evolves"?
But shine some sunlight in it. That'll do the trick!
Could you tell us with your reasoning why the portion of text shown here is wrong. Use the example used in the text and tell me why they are "hilarious" to you.
Legos aren't photoreactive. Many chemicals are.
I just read an article on the lack of science progress in the muslim world.
Teaching Darwinian evolution is against the law, in Saudi Arabia.
Remember folks: hydrogen is a colorless, odorless gas, which if given enough time, will turn into people like you and me. T
It gets tiring.
Yep, this professor is clearly one ignorant creationist hick. If only he had the wisdom and insight evident in this thread, he would realize how much of an uninformed rube he is.
Making assertions is pointless. Even Ayatollahs can do that.
How about explaining to us exactly why and/or how the second law was misunderstood, and what does it really say?
Yes, a nice piece of work. And, no, he doesn't misunderstand the second law of thermodynamics. This article nicely raises most of the basic problems with the theory of evolution. What it comes down to, finally, is statistical anaylysis. The probability of things evolving into the incredible degree of complexity we see on earth around us are more than astronomical. And, as he points out, although you can have a statistical anomaly at one small point, an eddy in the general heat (and carbon) decay of the universe, there's nothing observably "coming in the door" from outer space by meteorites, radiation, and a few random particles and gases.
Apparently it doesn't bode well for you either.
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