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 ...
The process by which a tropical wave organizes into a hurricane is fairly well understood, has been observed repeatedly, and is reproducible in computer simulations that merely set the initial conditions and allow interaction based on the laws of physics, without any sort of framework or plan.
It's not necessary to invoke a "designer" to explain the formation of a hurricane, any more than it's needed to explain lightning or myriad other physical processes.
I can't prove or disprove there was an intelligent designer because that question falls out of science. It's only that one isn't necessary to explain that particular physical process.
If people simply threw up their hands and gave up and said "Gee, God musta done it" regarding either the formation or tracks of tropical systems we wouldn't have the complex computer models that we have now that do a generally good and ever-improving job of forecasting them.
Yes, I did quite a bit of math before I went on to other things, and I understand statistics reasonably well.
But you are talking about millions of orders of magnitude here, if not billions.
It is sometimes said that, given enough time, a room full of monkeys could create all the works of Shakespeare. Wrong. As this author points out:
"Lest anyone imagine a lot can be accomplished by single random mutations, note that if a billion animals each typed one random character per second throughout the Earth's 4.5 billion year history, there is virtually no chance any one of them would duplicate a given 20-character string.)"
In other words, a billion animals over the entire history of earth would be hard put to recreate a single line of Shakespeare.
All it takes is a handful of SK combinators and a very simple machine to run them on to bootstrap an operating system.
Your field may be computer science, but you apparently did not take many graduate courses in algorithmic or computational information theory or you would see where your intuition has failed you.
As it was in Taliban Afghanistan.
Fortunately, York, PA is not going down the slope to that swamp.
People who believe this should take a course in basic chemistry. The shape of any crystal is pre-determined by the bonding angle created by electron sharing in the molecule. dissolving the molecules in water is simply a case of a greater force (the polar water molecule) overcoming a lesser force (the molecular bond of the solute) for the period of time it takes for the substance causing the greater force to evaporate.
Those crystals will form in the same way every time unless an impurity causes some random error. In other words, the order is in the molecule - forever.
I am glad you extracted Patrick from diapers and not vice versa. There must be some soccer hooliganism somewhere which has resulted in an outbreak of teeth smashing thereby delaying the Tooth Ferry. That usually ties up the works for several days especially when Arsenal is involved in the English Premier League.
F
I have a bachelor's degree in chemistry and a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering (both with GPAs greater than 3.5). I lectured a Physical Chemistry lab my senior year. I can't even remember how many thermo classes that I took to obtain both degrees.
Can you explain clearly, with examples, exactly how this author does not understand the Second Law of Thermodynamics? I would especially like to hear about the "hilarious and embarassing" parts.
But you stated there was none implying you had provided proof or the like, which I said was a non-sequitar.
You stand corrected by your own admission.
What exactly do you mean by that! Can you give an example?
I didn't realize it was Futbol season in Britain. I guess that explains it. James will just have to gum his leftovers for a while.
Alas! "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of (Rome)." (with apologies to Mr. Shakespeare).
F
Thank you for the very clear and concise explanation.
Strawman. Dispense with the probability-from-the-assumption-of-an-unbiased-distribution argument already. It is not applicable. Furthermore, you clearly do not have much of an idea of how just how severely strong biases in the phase space cut into the "improbability" that you are asserting for some arbitrary molecular construct. All of which is trivially verifiable with elementary analytical chemistry.
It takes on a more complex structure in NaCl crystal form after the water evaporates.
The water after evaporating, though, is in a less complex form than it was in solution.
Do you know anything about limit theorems in probability and statistics? How can you say that?
yes, those dumb creationists - many of whom are your physicians, pharmacists, professors (we'll some, but they are in hiding), physicists, biochemists - yeah, I guess when they point out the big elephant in the room, the absolute truth of conflict between the laws of thermodynamics and evolution, all the evolutionists cultists can say, is well - make up a big lie , using scientific jargon that means absolutely nothing (that's called an illusion) or call names. They sure sound like alot of democrats I know!
That was clever!
See you around - my kids want the computer!
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