Big Bang Dogma

"The Meta Model predicts that ever larger structures in the universe and ever smaller entities in the quantum world will continue to be discovered for as long as we look for them." - TVF

This is the "nitty gritty" here. I pick this bone with everybody. The strong implication here is that you hold the position that there are an infinite number of basic principles at work in existence. Hence, we might continue to discover great, new, and important ideas (equally as important as say, gravity) ... ad infinitum. In turn this would imply an opinion that "logic" has no hierarchical structure ... no basic principles which subsume 99% of the data which could ever be gathered by us ... in principle.

My view is that ... though some of those basic principles are not yet known ... when they are discovered and digested (certainly within the next 200 years pending the onset of another dark age) ... that will pretty much bring science to an end. There will always be things to discover but they will be increasingly minor details.

Personally, I would like to think that man could go on and on discovering new "Star Wars" type exciting things ... but the universe just doesn't seem like that to me. It's no match for the mind of man and will be disposed of as an adversary in short order (long from the perspective of one human life but very short compared to human history).

Thereafter man will have little to do but art, sports, math (a bottomless pit), a little science, and lots and lots of sex if his lifespan can be prolonged indefinitely. Thus, we become "land porpoises". And when we tire of that ... perhaps check out the rest of the galaxy ... whatever ... ;o)

What do you see as the future of man? Philosophically speaking ...
I just can't imagine "World War Two Hundred and Twenty Seven Thousand Five Hundred and Eighty One" ... The war to end all wars ...

There is an end to things ... and ... a beginning.
We're in the middle.

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What I pointed out is that gravity does the opposite. Left alone, gravity increases the order of clouds of gas and dust by forming them into stars and planets. Doing work against gravity (as in a supernova explosion) is needed to restore disorder.
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I must say I disagree with the definition of order presented here. Logically followed it would say that a diskette with all of its ones on the first few sectors; and all of the zeros on the remaining few sectors is more *ordered* than one that has Microsoft Word written correctly on it. Surely not even the most diehard opponent of Microsoft could say that??

I had thought that ordered in this case meant having the ability to do useful work... thus the transfer between randomly orbiting gas and an solid planet involves no increase or decrease of entroypy... but the radiating away and spreading of gravitic energy (as I mention in another post) is an increase.

> [ebtx]: The strong implication here is that you hold the position that there are an infinite number of basic principles at work in existence.

I would quibble with the word "principles". There are only a few principles of physics, and they apply equally well to all scales. In that sense, the universe is essentially the same at all scales, big or small, differing only in "details". But basics such as everything having wave or particle character are the same.

> [ebtx]: Hence, we might continue to discover great, new, and important ideas (equally as important as say, gravity) ... ad infinitum.

Indeed, there are surely an infinite number of media, and therefore of forces of nature, over an infinite range of scale. We will never stop discovering more "details".

> [ebtx]: In turn this would imply an opinion that "logic" has no hierarchical structure ... no basic principles which subsume 99% of the data which could ever be gathered by us ... in principle.

Your meaning here is not clear to me. But given the distinctions I just made, I think I disagree.

> [ebtx]: My view is that ... though some of those basic principles are not yet known ... when they are discovered and digested (certainly within the next 200 years pending the onset of another dark age) ... that will pretty much bring science to an end. There will always be things to discover but they will be increasingly minor details.

People have indeed thought that through the ages. Until now, they have always been mistaken about how close we are to discovering it all. The Meta Model argues from first principles that the details do not get "increasingly minor", but are essentially the same at all scales. Hence, our journey of discovery has no bounds in space, time, or scale.

> [ebtx]: What do you see as the future of man? Philosophically speaking ... I just can't imagine "World War Two Hundred and Twenty Seven Thousand Five Hundred and Eighty One" ... The war to end all wars ...

In the Meta Model, the universe is already infinitely old. It follows that life in the universe is as evolved as it will ever be, even though we have seen only an insignificant portion of it here on this one planet. But eventually, as stars go supernova and entire galaxies disintegrate, species either cease to exist or are severely set back by the need to migrate elsewhere.

In the future of humanity, I see a mirror of its possible past. The recent discovery of possible artifacts on Mars of a humanoid character suggests that our species evolved on another planet (now exploded), and transferred here 3.2 million years ago. This transfer involved an enormous setback to the technological level of that society, and survival became the major goal for thousands of generations until calmer times allowed the re-emergence of technology.

> [ebtx]: There is an end to things ... and ... a beginning. We're in the middle.

I agree. Isn't it amazing how we arrive at the same place traveling along such completely different paths?


> [ohlman]: I must say I disagree with the definition of order presented here. Logically followed it would say that a diskette with all of its ones on the first few sectors; and all of the zeros on the remaining few sectors is more *ordered* than one that has Microsoft Word written correctly on it.

I am unfamiliar with any qualification about "usefulness" in the definition of entropy, and don't see how to quantify that anyway. It takes equal work to create every diskette, regardless of contents. So why should there be any difference in entropy among them?

> [ohlman]: I had thought that ordered in this case meant having the ability to do useful work... thus the transfer between randomly orbiting gas and a solid planet involves no increase or decrease of entropy... but the radiating away and spreading of gravitic energy (as I mention in another post) is an increase.

Random gas versus a solid planet meets our most intuitive understanding of "disordered" versus "ordered". Gravitation operates to increase order with respect to the medium of gravitons, and to decrease order with respect to the medium carrying light (e.g., in the heat absorbed by planets). But as equilibrium is reached, that excess heat is radiated away, restoring disorder to the graviton medium and order to the light-carrying medium. Everything remains in balance -- a requirement if the universe is infinitely old. -|Tom|-

> [ohlman]: I must say I disagree with the definition of order presented here. Logically followed it would say that a diskette with all of its ones on the first few sectors; and all of the zeros on the remaining few sectors is more *ordered* than one that has Microsoft Word written correctly on it.
I am unfamiliar with any qualification about "usefulness" in the definition of entropy, and don't see how to quantify that anyway. It takes equal work to create every diskette, regardless of contents. So why should there be any difference in entropy among them?

Two comments: Altho I may have formulated it strangely (I certainly didn’t intend to) this is standard in any second law definition. As the first law states that energy is neither created nor destroyed in a closed system, the second law states that the “energy available to do work” is always decreasing. (Energy available to do work = useful energy. If my son is “not available to do work” then he is “useless”.)
I was using entropy in its “information theory” classification. Thus a disk that is randomly formatted is high entropy, and the disk with MS-Word on it is low entropy. A disk that was formatted as all ones, or all zeros, or a certain number of ones followed by a certain number of zeros, etc. would be higher entropy than one with Word on it.
Nature, on the other hand, prefers the low entropy disk. Left to itself it will randomly change the bits on the disk ... decreasing the uselessness of Word. Left long enough nature will turn all the bits into zeros by destroying the disk.
> [ohlman]: I had thought that ordered in this case meant having the ability to do useful work... thus the transfer between randomly orbiting gas and a solid planet involves no increase or decrease of entropy... but the radiating away and spreading of gravitic energy (as I mention in another post) is an increase.
Random gas versus a solid planet meets our most intuitive understanding of "disordered" versus "ordered". Gravitation operates to increase order with respect to the medium of gravitons, and to decrease order with respect to the medium carrying light (e.g., in the heat absorbed by planets). But as equilibrium is reached, that excess heat is radiated away, restoring disorder to the graviton medium and order to the light-carrying medium. Everything remains in balance -- a requirement if the universe is infinitely old. -|Tom|-

Random vs Non-Random does indeed meet our most basic definition of order vs disorder. However as all of the information involved in the state of a solid mass is already there in the state of random gas... this involves no increase in entropy.
If one were to go into a classroom and see a bunch of chairs randomly scattered around the room... that is high entropy. If I take them and put them all in little circles, or rows, etc. than that is low entropy (because none of the information needed to organize the chairs was present before). If, however, the building were to collapse on one side and all of the chairs were to slide down into one corner... that would represent an increase in entropy... since they would have shifted into a state that was predictable based upon information already in the chair (ie their reaction to gravity).
Thus a swirling ball of gas that coalesces naturally to form a solid lump of rock does not represent any increase in order. But if Scotty drives the Enterprise through that same ball of case and makes a charctature of Spocks ears... now that represents lower entropy!
You seem to be saying that in this closed system (the universe) entropy overall neither increases nor decreases. Thus denying the second law. I think. This may be a requirement for the postulate of an infinitely old universe... but it does seem to clash with the Second Law.

> [ohlman]: I was using entropy in its “information theory” classification. Thus a disk that is randomly formatted is high entropy, and the disk with MS-Word on it is low entropy. A disk that was formatted as all ones, or all zeros, or a certain number of ones followed by a certain number of zeros, etc. would be higher entropy than one with Word on it.

This may have some value in information theory, but it appears to me unrelated to the meaning of entropy in physics.

> [ohlman]: You seem to be saying that in this closed system (the universe) entropy overall neither increases nor decreases. Thus denying the second law. I think. This may be a requirement for the postulate of an infinitely old universe... but it does seem to clash with the Second Law.

I did not mean to be vague about this point. The Meta Model agrees that the 2nd law is correct mainly for the forces and media it was designed to represent. It goes on to say that it is incorrect for gravitation and other possible media that are anti-entropic. So MM revises the 2nd law, hopefully to make it more universal.

I grant this is not a subtle difference. My encyclopedia makes this point: "The second law poses an additional condition on thermodynamic processes. It is not enough to conserve energy and thus obey the first law. A machine that would deliver work while violating the second law is called a “perpetual-motion machine of the second kind,” since, for example, energy could then be continually drawn from a cold environment to do work in a hot environment at no cost. The second law of thermodynamics is sometimes given as a statement that precludes perpetual-motion machines of the second kind."

In following the logical consequences of the Meta Model, I published an example in the new book, "Pushing Gravity", M.R. Edwards, ed. (Apeiron Press, Montreal, 2002) of just such a "perpetual motion" device. It is shown in Figure 10, p. 116, and is based on a proposal by Lord Kelvin, who was perhaps the first to note that net energy might be extractable from gravitational fields. The essence of the idea is simple. If we develop super-dense matter as I described earlier in one of these threads, we can use it like a sail to propel things in the graviton wind always blowing downward at Earth's surface. -|Tom|-

The 2nd law of thermodynamics is about heat. Heat is what results when energy interacts with matter. Heat is not energy and entropy only works with the interaction of mass and energy. A photon of energy has no heat and only when mass absorbs photons does heat enter. The rules developed to utilize this interaction of energy and matter called heat are of little use in cosmology so why get bogged down in what entrophy does or does not accomplish? I don't get it.







































































entropy is a process that is predictable and unchanging