Timescape model, arguably less magical than ΛCDM, also makes heat death seem less certain. The ultimate conjecture of all. Humans surely love closure.
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)
#12If the laws of thermodynamics don’t apply does that mean we can build our perpetual motion machine?
Just as soon as you figure out what dark energy is and how to extract work from it. Easy, right?
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#13Slightly 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...
Honestly, this is the type of stuff ChatGPT is really good at. Explaining overviews of a field, avoiding math if you want, focusing on concepts and explaining different schools of thought.
As long as you're sticking to the well-established stuff, it tends to be quite factually accurate. I think it's really underrated as a resource for good high-level overviews of fields where those overviews otherwise don't exist at all, are overly technical, or the existing overviews have a lot of author bias.
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#14>>>>> Consciousness, creativity, love — all of these things are destined to disappear as the universe becomes increasingly disordered and dissolves into entropy.
Those are evolved traits, and it seems more likely that evolution will replace them with some other traits within a time frame that will be like the blink of an eye compared to the projected decay of the universe.
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#15IANAP, but what I'm seeing here is a lot of very optimistic speculation about how life might survive, with no plausible mechanism. We have no idea what dark energy is, and it may well be impossible to extract energy from. Some of the quotes in the article suggest that life must physically go find additional energy sources, especially if dark energy doesn't work out. Interstellar travel is already prohibitively difficult, and getting to the next galaxy seems simply infeasible. Humanity's descendants are basically limited to the Milky Ways resources. Left to itself, the universe will eventually run out of hydrogen that can be economically fused. It will go dark eventually. The black hole power plants will eventually run out.
Wake me up when dark energy is more than a statistical anomaly, or we have a practical theory for a warp drive.
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#16>>>>> Consciousness, creativity, love — all of these things are destined to disappear as the universe becomes increasingly disordered and dissolves into entropy. Those are evolved traits, and it seems more likely that evolution will replace them with some other traits within a time frame that will be like the blink of an eye compared to the projected decay of the universe.
They evolved for pretty strong reasons that have been around a lot longer than a blink of an eye. Namely, collaboration and creativity are extremely good survival strategies.
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#17Sprinkling pop physicists like Paul Davies in between name dropping prominent historical physicists doesn’t make for a convincing article
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#18> ... 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?
Entropy also has units of measure: Joules per Kelvin.
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Loved it! Thanks!
Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)
#20Slightly 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...
Honestly, this is the type of stuff ChatGPT is really good at. Explaining overviews of a field, avoiding math if you want, focusing on concepts and explaining different schools of thought. As long as you're sticking to the well-established stuff, it tends to be quite factually accurate. I think it's really underrated as a resource for good high-level overviews of fields where those overviews otherwise don't exist at…
Ugh, I couldn’t disagree more. Sure, LLMs can generate some really nice introductory summaries of topics. But, so far at least, they can’t even hold a candle to brilliantly written books and long form articles. Consider the classic book Cosmos. There is more insight into the universe in any few pages of that book than could be gathered by reading even a thousand ChatGPT results.