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 ...
We'd all sound like Donald Duck??
E=Mc2
M=E/c2
I think Siegfried's buddy Roy will tell you that the garden of Eden treatment doesn't work so well with Tigers. He'll be treating them like highly evolved predators from now on.
Y2k was an expensive problem for corporations. I worked for a company that manages most of the country's mortgages. They had a team of about 50 guys working on it in 1994.
Hence the big nothing when the date rolled.
I think it's easy to argue that spontaneous generation was already on it's way out by the time the Second Law was explicitly formulated.
"Pardon me Roy,
Was that the cat that chewed your new shoes?"
(With apologies to the Chatanooga Choo-choo)
http://www.mamarocks.com/Chattanooga_Choo_Choo_MM_GM.mid
With a number like this; how can you ask a question like this??? ;^)
More than implied, he stated. It was just easy to miss the word 'alone'.
Hope your lunch was enjoyable.
Yup - now I've goofed off for 7 hours!
You & me both, kiddo. I thank you for helping me pass the time here today!
I give. What are you talking about?
I have GOT to SOMETHING done around the house before the wife gets home!
See you guys later....
Nevermind (g). I get it!
Talking snakes, dirt-eating snakes, unicorns, mysterious trees of "Life" and "The Knowledge of Good and Evil," giants, dragons, leviathans, satyrs, ruminant rabbits, bird-bats, four-legged insects, melting snails, storehouses for snow and hail, and let's not forget:
". . . for out of the serpent's root shall come forth a cockatrice, and his fruit shall be a fiery flying serpent" [Isaiah 14:29] and
". . . the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled, and spotted." [Genesis 30:39]
The supernaturalist may be a source for spiritual wisdom, but I wouldn't take too far the notion that he wields a particularly "sane" view of nature.
AFAIK continental drift can be measured over a period of years. Are you saying it cannot?
As for the existence of electrons, neutrons, protons, neutrinos, etc., we can formulate experiements to test theories about the existence of all of those. The experiments can be repeated, falsified, etc. Are you saying this is not the case?
As I said, you've limited yourself to your imagination. The rest went right over your head. My assertion was not idle speculation, it is a cornerstone theorem in mathematics.
Or imagine a universe where no stars exist. Only dust, barely above the absolute freezing point.
Where did the dust come from if there are no stars? Incidentally, all you've asserted here is conditions that alter computation rates and probability distributions, but does not eliminate them. You said "impossible", not "improbable". Try again.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.