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Entropy explained, with sheep (2016)

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Re: Entropy explained, with sheep (2016)

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This followup still predicts that cooling water cannot cause it to freeze. (And relatedly, it predicts that cold ice will take a long time to melt, but not that it won't melt. In fact, it won't melt.)

I don't see why either of those things follow, particulary the second. Cold ice, in an environment that doesn't supply energy to the ice, will not explore microstates at any notable pace, and thus will not melt. I don't think it makes any prediction about what will happen when cooling water, because the freezing reaction is related to the specific chemistry of water molecules. The only prediction is that any macrosta…

1. Things tend to turn to dust rather than stay together, because the number of states where things are "together" are small, and the number of states where things are dust are high.

2. Ice has a few arrangements, and water has many. So water is "dust ice".

3. H2O will naturally tend towards "dust" form over time, so ice will eventually become water.

Re: Entropy explained, with sheep (2016)

#82
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t have an answer to this question. I don’t want to discuss metaphysics here, but there is a very interesting discussion on that subject here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-6rWqJhDv7M

Let me rephrase maybe: Given the state of affairs I described above, I don’t understand what is the convincing argument that entropy does indeed increase in the long run. Any argument given should also work in the reverse direction, given the symmetry of time, shouldn’t it? (And thereby create a kind of reductio ad absurdum.) If not, why not?

One possible model of the universe is a low-entropy "bounce" in the middle (the big bang), with entropy increasing in both time directions away from it (and therefore observers on either side of it experiencing the big bang as being in the "past"). Then the only part that remains to be explained is why there's this single point of low entropy, and that's kind of a "why is there something rather than nothing?" question.

Re: Entropy explained, with sheep (2016)

#83
post #42

That still doesn’t answer the question how, if the laws of physics are time-symmetric, the universe as a whole can have a time-asymmetric evolution of entropy. I.e., if something forces entropy to increase in the long run, then that should hold in both directions of time. So what is it that causes entropy to only increase in the direction of the future, but not in the direction of the past, given that the laws pf phy…

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Re: Entropy explained, with sheep (2016)

#84

excuse my naivete, but do black holes help reduce entropy by capturing/engulfing things around them? Is that the cycle how universe keeps creating and recreating itself?

Nope, black holes have entropy proportional to the surface area of their event horizon. So the more stuff they engulf, the more their entropy increases, and thus they satisfy the 2nd law of thermodynamics just like everything else. It's a very interesting and active area of physics actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_thermodynamics

Has this been observed, or is it more: here's some math that makes entropy even possible because the alternatives sound unlikely? I'm betting on the weird, things like the universe being generative on a macro scale and entropic in local timespace, wherein dark matter is merely newly created matter not in another universe, but in this universe, maybe some unknown interactions between the unstoppable force of expansion and the immovable object of a black hole's gravity. I'm probably blathering, I'm not a physicist.

Re: Entropy explained, with sheep (2016)

#85
post #42

That still doesn’t answer the question how, if the laws of physics are time-symmetric, the universe as a whole can have a time-asymmetric evolution of entropy. I.e., if something forces entropy to increase in the long run, then that should hold in both directions of time. So what is it that causes entropy to only increase in the direction of the future, but not in the direction of the past, given that the laws pf phy…

This is an unsolved problem. If someone tells you they know the answer then they are probably mistaken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loschmidt%27s_paradox

The only convincing-seeming resolution I've heard is that our universe started in an exceptionally low-entropy state at the Big Bang.

Re: Entropy explained, with sheep (2016)

#86

So one thing I've never understood is how you can "count" microstates, or bits required to describe them, when the relevant physical parameters all seem to be real numbers. For instance, a gas of N atoms is described by 6N real numbers (3d position and velocity) regardless of how hot it is. The article talks about quanta of energy, but that seems like a simplification at best: a given interaction might be quantized,…

This is a very good question, which goes to the heart of statistical Physics. We use phase spaces for this (typically a 6N-dimensional vector space in which each microstate is represented by a point). The system has a probability of being in (or rather very close to) each microstate, which depends on several factors, like the conditions (isolated system, constant pressure, temperature, number of particles, etc). Coun…

So would it make sense to think of a microstate as a region of phase space, a point and those points "very close to" it? And "increasing number of microstates" just means a larger number of these regions have non-negligible probabilities? In continuous terms you would see this as the distribution flattening out. I might be having trouble visualising what we're integrating, since if it's a probability the integral over the whole phase space can only be 1, right?

Re: Entropy explained, with sheep (2016)

#87
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI-qAxKJoSU

In the video above you will witness a metal wire in a disorderly shape spontaneously form into an organized spring shape when entropy is increased (the wire is heated). There are no special effects or video rewinding trickery here, the phenomenon is very real.

It is as if you were looking at water spontaneously form into ice cubes but entropy is NOT reversing! It is moving forward.

The video is a really good example of entropy. It's good in the sense that if you understand why entropy is increasing when the metal is heated than you truly understand what entropy is... as the video gets rid of the notion of order and disorder all together.

That's right. There are many cases of increasing entropy where the system spontaneously progresses from a greater disorder to more organization.

Many people say that the when some system becomes more organized that means entropy is leaving the local system and increasing overall in the global system. This is not what's happening here. The wire is being heated. Atoms are becoming more organized and less disorderly by virtue of MORE entropy entering the system. If you understand this concept then you truly understand entropy. If not you still don't get it.

Re: Entropy explained, with sheep (2016)

#88
post #77

Great article. Can energy be explained in a similarly simple fashion? I'm pretty comfortable with probability theory so this entroppy explaination makes sense, but I still don't understand what energy is. Also, who determines what a 'macroscopic variable' is? Why do there only seem to be 3 for gassess (V, T, P?)

There is more macroscopic variables, for example the three components of the bulk flow velocity or the density of the gas.

But are those the only 6?

Re: Entropy explained, with sheep (2016)

#89
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t have an answer to this question. I don’t want to discuss metaphysics here, but there is a very interesting discussion on that subject here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-6rWqJhDv7M

Let me rephrase maybe: Given the state of affairs I described above, I don’t understand what is the convincing argument that entropy does indeed increase in the long run. Any argument given should also work in the reverse direction, given the symmetry of time, shouldn’t it? (And thereby create a kind of reductio ad absurdum.) If not, why not?

There are two significant repositories of high entropy in the known universe: empty space and black holes.

We can recast the Boltzmann measure of entropy by swapping small sub-volumes of a volume with one another and see if the containing volume changes significantly.

Swapping 1 cm^3 taken from the top of your brain with 1 cm^3 taken from the bottom of your brain will probably cause serious injury or death. Likewise, swapping 1 cm^3 of the valves on the left of your heart with 1 cm^3 of the muscles on the right of your heart will probably kill you. But swapping 1 cm^3 of blood taken from your left leg with 1 cm^3 of blood from your right arm will probably lead to no medical difference at all. So, qualitatively, the heart and brain have higher entropy than blood.

If you take 1 cm^3 of the stuffing of a cushion and swap it with 1 cm^3 of the stuffing elsewhere in the same cushion, you'd struggle to measure a difference by sitting on the cushion.

If you take 1 cm^3 of the air in a room and swap it with 1 cm^3 of the air elsewhere in the room, you'd struggle to notice a difference from outside the room.

And so forth.

We can play with larger volumes: if you are sitting on a cushion in a room, then swapping 1 cm^3 of your blood with 1 cm^3 of air will probably kill you. Swapping 1 cm^3 of a muscle in your leg with 1 cm^3 of the stuffing in the cushion will be unpleasant but not fatal.

In the room, most cm^3 is air rather than brain tissue. If we make the room bigger without adding more people or cushions, we get more air, so a bigger room+cushion+human has lower entropy than a smaller room+cushion+human. Expanding a room in this manner increases its total entropy. Our expanding universe works comparably.

A cm^3 of empty space is to all practical purposes completely substitutable with any other cm^3 of empty space. There's nothing in it. Real space outside galaxy clusters are practically empty, just some photons and neutrinos passing through.

When we consider the metric expansion of space we get two effects: there's more cm^3 of space, but not more photons and neutrinos. Those photons and neutrinos are also cooling, because the expansion is adiabatic.

The expansion of space is generating enormous entropy between clusters of galaxies, and that alone accounts for a large fraction of the increase in entropy in the universe.

Black holes hide what's in them. In a theoretical black hole (and the theory closely matches observation of things that are virtually certainly astrophysical black holes), the no-hair conjecture says that apart from position in and motion through spacetime, which we can remove by using a set of coordinates in which the (theoretical) black hole's mass M is always at the spatial origin, the only measurable values in electrovacuum are electric charge, angular momentum, and mass. What makes up M or contributes to the angular momentum or charge is unknown just by looking at a black hole at any given moment.

We can probe this a bit. Let's say our "snapshot" black hole's charge is completely neutral. Is that because only neutral charges have ever fallen into it? Or because a mix of opposite charges have fallen in over time, neutralizing small deviations in charge away from 0? We don't know. Same with angular momentum. We also don't know what things combined to give us the mass M.

In fact, consider a chargeless nonspinning spherically symmetrical black hole of mass M. We can raise M a small amount i by throwing in a thin collapsing shell of gas of mass ~ i. Or we can throw in two thin collapsing spherically-symmetrical shells of gas where each has mass ~ i/2. Or we can throw in three thin collapsing spherically-symmetrical shells of gas each of mass ~ i/3. And so on. A future observer would not know -- thanks to no hair -- the count of shells we threw in: it would only see a new black hole with one observable: M' where M' > M.

Because we can substitute the "insides" of a black hole arbitrarily as long as we preserve its observable quantities, a no-hair black hole can have absolutely enormous entropy. Additionally, a black hole with a larger mass has more entropy than a black hole with a smaller mass.

Astrophysical black holes probably only grow (and if they ever evaporate by the Hawking process then they mostly emit greybody radiation, which is extremely high entropy). Moreover, they grow by intercepting lower-entropy material, whether that's stars, molecular clouds, distant starshine, or the cosmic microwave background, all of which is of lower entropy.

Assuming the black holes that one finds in galaxy clusters tend to merge (which raises their entropy), and the metric expansion of space continues indefinitely, the far future of the universe is very large black holes surrounded by enormous amounts of space containing an increasingly sparse, increasingly cold gas of material that managed to avoid being stuck in galaxy clusters in the earlier universe which still had lower-entropy structures like stars and planets.

We can look backwards too: when we reverse the metric expansion of space, galaxy clusters are closer together, and the cosmic microwave background and the like gets denser and hotter. Stellar black holes become less numerous; central black holes in clusters and galaxies are smaller. Thanks to light being pretty slow (and also gravitational lensing) we can test this by probing "first light", "the dark ages", and other epochs that are accessible to conceivable observatories. It would be a super-interesting discovery to see more black holes in more distant (and thus older) galaxies than in closer ones, for instance, because it would directly implicate questions about the total entropy of the universe. Likewise, when we study the metric expansion of space there perhaps we could (shockingly) discover that remote "empty space" has much lower entropy than expected. These aren't very likely, though: it's safer to bet on the total entropy of the universe growing for a very very very long time thanks to the metric expansion of space outside galaxy clusters, and the gravitational collapse of matter inside galaxy clusters.

Re: Entropy explained, with sheep (2016)

#90

That's remarkably well done, but the underlying principle can be summarised as "regression towards the mean" which is not so difficult to understand. Now explain this: when the sheep are cooped up in one box you can extract energy from the system. This becomes apparent if you imagine the boundary between the boxes is a fan. As the sheep move from what is a high pressure on one side to 0 pressure on the other they wil…

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