Posted on 08/30/2006 1:01:48 AM PDT by snarks_when_bored
Good one.
The very beginning of time found our universe in an extremely unnatural and highly organized low-entropy state.This set off my illogic alarm. What does he mean, "unnatural"? Isn't it nature itself that we're discussing? How many counterexamples can he offer? If he wants to say that the state of space in the distant past is different from the state of space now, that's fine, but calling it "unnatural" is a non-sequitur.
I think by 'unnatural' Carroll means highly improbable. If there are 10 quadrillion ways for something not to happen and only 1 way for something to happen, it's reasonable English to describe the 1 way as 'unnatural'. He certainly doesn't mean 'non-physical'.
I wish this guy would be more precise.
Check out the references in Post #6 above.
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Exactly. Our Universe is but one of perhaps a nearly infinite number, birthed and informed by the Metaverse.
Yea, but when He sinks the 8-ball; Games Over Dude!
I only like the article because they use the egg example.
This is a little bit off topic, but I read something like this and I think, "Here it comes again." So let me anticipate something.
Some years ago, I went around and around with some people about how low-entropy the early universe was and how could it have started so wound up. Their point, as you can imagine, is that it took an intelligence to design a low-entropy starting universe since low-entropy means "highly ordered."
The only way an unimaginably hot quark-gluon plasma is low-entropy is if it is super-small. It turns out that that's indeed the trick. Within the space available (almost zero), the universe is as high entropy as it can be, a gas so super-hot it doesn't even have baryons, just quarks and gluons.
So, yes, where "order" is set as the inverse of "entropy," then like those pool balls racked in the triangle, the low entropy of the early universe comes from confinement in a small space. (It's a singularity of some sort.) If for some reason that triangular rack is allowed to grow bigger every game, pretty soon the initial game conditions are looking pretty ragged.
But all that is using "order," "disorder," and "entropy" in narrow senses. There's a fallacy of equivocation in thinking this equates to "order" as in keeping your room neat. It most certainly does not.
Even as the total entropy of our universe rose with expansion, also with that expansion the plasma cooled. Baryons formed. Atoms formed. Gas and dust condensed under gravity to form stars and planets. Life arose. The universe is "more disordery" in a limited technical sense of the word. However, in the sense most of us think of it there is more order everywhere and anywhere in the arrangement of matter than existed in the quark-gluon plasma. We're just racked up in a really big, loose rack now.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm...omelets!
I still maintain that the only people who really understood the 2nd law lived in the 19th century.
Food is another thing altogether, though. ;)
Hmmm. I'm not sure your logic holds up; ironically, it might be the very direction of time that monkey-wrenches the works.
What I mean is, probability becomes meaningless when you look backward in time; it only has meaning when you look forward. Let's say I buy a raffle ticket, and I win. Before my winning ticket was drawn, my odds of winning were very-large to one, against...yet the odds of someone winning the lottery were one-to-one, or unity. Somebody will win.
So when I go to collect my raffle prize, the judge looks at me and says "The odds of you winning instead of all those other entrants are so small, it's highly improbable that you in particular would pull the winning ticket. You must have rigged the game somehow!"
No I didn't. Now that I've won the raffle, my odds of having drawn the winning ticket are one-to-one. It's already been done.
Time has as much directionality as the temperature readings on the thermometer on my porch. Today, BTW, is the fourth frost of the month, and this is a good one--all the leaves have visible frost this time. Temperatures are headed down, and the leaves will be headed for the lawn soon, but this may not be permanent.
The arrow of time is a myth. There is nothing, not even in the infamous thermodynamics that gives a preference to the direction of time.
Also, I am wondering lately why those who disapprove of the scientific tool of evolution even care. They have no need of the tool any more than they need an oil refinery in their yard.
I was just speaking of Carroll's use of the word 'unnatural'. The low-entropy beginning of our cosmos does appear to be very highly improbable...which is not to say it can't happen. Indeed, given a long enough time, just about anything will happen (there are no observers waiting around for most of the time so nobody's counting the hours!).
There is a school of thought that denies such things as the flow of time altogether. There is only now.
Considering that it's a veritable law of the universe that entropy increases over time, it appears to me that a low-entropy beginning of the cosmos is not only not improbable, but is in fact inescapable.
Thanks for that. I have always wanted to write a really good time travel story, but I haven't thought of a truly original idea. I should do a little more reasearch...
I wrote one and submitted it to a monthly newsletter, but it scared them so much they thought they better not publish it. Time is fascinating.
There are definitely some terminology problems here. Similar, really, to those who say: "Laws of nature? Aha! That means there's a law-giver!"
The increase of entropy since the BB is mostly a decrease of heat and compactness. (No doubt, our resident physicists will point out the many ways that's incorrect.) If being hot and condensed is so "ordered" that it implies a supreme intellect, well, the implication escapes me.
The arrow of time is a myth. There is nothing, not even in the infamous thermodynamics that gives a preference to the direction of time.
My understanding is that the directionality of time emerges from the statistics of enormous numbers of interacting particles. At the microscopic level, the laws of physics are reversible; at the macroscopic level, their reversibility is swamped by the correlations of interacting particles.
(BTW RW, I could use an Alaskan cold front about now!)
Sounds like the beginnings of intelligent design to me.
Order is a funny term. It can mean everything quiet and organized, or it can mean uniformity. Uniformity could be the condition in a totally random system as when entropy is maxed out or in a political system where everyone thinks the same.
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