New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
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Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#2 As such, the second law appears to hold a chilling prophecy for humanity in the very long term.
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#3As such, the second law appears to hold a chilling prophecy for humanity in the very long term. The idea that our species is so uniquely capable of transcending extinction and surviving long enough for the fate of the universe to be relevant to it is optimistic to the point of absurdity. It fits the evidence better to suppose that we're particularly capable of self destruction.
Even if we don't self-destruct, we will likely have evolved into something else completely different by then. Or maybe a million years from now they will keep some humans (based on present-day DNA) in a museum exhibit somewhere. Or maybe that's us.
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#4I'm somewhat familiar with Barbour's work, which tries to reformulate gravity as a theory of 3-geometries instead of 4-geometries. Basically, you can do this by moving additional complexity into the lagrangian. Barbour's work is hard to get into because he has had various versions of this theory (Shape Dynamics) over the years and some of them are classical models, some are curved spacetime, some are more effective at being totally relational than others, etc.
Anyway, its true that something he calls the complexity increases forever in his more recent models, this is just an expression chosen to make the dynamics work out. Even Barbour says this is not necessarily related to the sort of complexity life has. And it depends on the universe being an open systems.
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#5As such, the second law appears to hold a chilling prophecy for humanity in the very long term. The idea that our species is so uniquely capable of transcending extinction and surviving long enough for the fate of the universe to be relevant to it is optimistic to the point of absurdity. It fits the evidence better to suppose that we're particularly capable of self destruction.
Even if we don't self-destruct, we will likely have evolved into something else completely different by then. Or maybe a million years from now they will keep some humans (based on present-day DNA) in a museum exhibit somewhere. Or maybe that's us.
I still maintain that we're not just a simulation, we're a screensaver on the computer of some extradimensional office worker who has been out of office for their version of a weekend.
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if we don't self-destruct, we will likely have evolved into something else completely different by then. Or maybe a million years from now they will keep some humans (based on present-day DNA) in a museum exhibit somewhere. Or maybe that's us.
I still maintain that we're not just a simulation, we're a screensaver on the computer of some extradimensional office worker who has been out of office for their version of a weekend.
You might like this: https://qntm.org/responsibilit
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#7If the laws of thermodynamics don’t apply does that mean we can build our perpetual motion machine?
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#8Slightly tangential, but does anyone know of a good layman's book on thermodynamics? I'm interested in the science and the history of it, but I'm not really trying to do a deep dive into the math -- I wasn't bad in stats or calc but that was decades ago now and I haven't really used them since...
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#9> ... all believe that the universe is not destined to grow more disorganized forever, but more complex and rich with information.
Maybe it's just a problem of being loose with terminology, but this seems to be contrasting entropy and information content, which is backwards?
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#10"Anything less than an infinite universe is a waste of space.
Anything less than an eternal universe is a waste of time."
~My Very Clever Dad. Miss you Dad.