131–140 of 298 posts
"There’s some kind of gas or some thermal system out there that we can’t see directly" - The Ether is back on the menu boys
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjwQsKMh2v8
I like the river model which helps with the intuition.
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Mathematics is a human language. It being a formal language doesn’t change that. Further, it’s not objective: you’re choosing the basis which causes the complexity, but any particular structure can be made simple in some basis.
Mathematical notation is a human invention, but the structure that mathematics describes is objective. The choice of basis changes the absolute number of terms, but the relative magnitude of terms for a more or less disordered state is generally fixed outside of degenerate cases.
The complexity of terms is not fixed — that’s simply wrong mathematically. They’re dependent on our chosen basis. Your definition is circular, in that you’re implicitly defining “non-degenerate” as those which make your claim true.
You can’t make the whole class simplified at once, but for any state, there exists a basis in which it is simple.
As an experimental physicist, I refuse to get excited about a new theory until the proponent gets to an observable phenomenon that can fix the question.
This seems backwards. Entropy is a dispersive force — it favors distribution and disorder. But the universe clumps. Planets, stars, galaxies — all of them are low-entropy configurations. So how did scattered dust particles form the planet we’re standing on… through entropy? If gravity is just emergent from entropy, then it should be fighting against planet formation, not causing it. There’s a missing piece here — may…
It is gravity which disrupts this and causes clumping, and that _increases_ entropy.
I know it's confusing because normally one would think of a cloud of gas as more disordered than the star it might collapse into, but that is not so. For one the star would be much hotter, and the motions of every particle in the star much more chaotic.
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Entropy isn't a force. It doesn't "favor" anything. Its a property of statistics, information, and distributions. Also why does this have that particular ChatGPT social media post rhythm to it? Please, Lord, tell me we haven't reached the point where people are writing HN comments w/ AI.
You’re right. the cadence is written by ChatGPT. I’m pretty terrible at keeping my thoughts cohesive, so I often use it as a post processor. I’ll try not to do that. Because you had the decency to respond, I’ll spent some more time thinking about this and see if I can come up with a more well rounded response that incorporates more of the traditional language of physics. But to your point about entropy not being a “f…
Maybe use AI to help you understand TFA instead of writing gut reactions to the title.
I don't get it. To me, entropy is not a physical thing, but a measure of our imperfect knowledge about a system. We can only measure the bulk properties of matter, so we've made up a number to quantify how imperfect the bulk properties describe the true microscopic state of the system. But if we had the ability to zoom into the microscopic level, entropy would make no sense. So I don't see how gravity or any other fu…
Entropy is the opposite of potential
Biology thrives at the ebbs, flows, and eddies of entropy. Predation. Biochemical flux. There are arrows flowing every which way, and systems that keep it finely tuned.
This theory, based on my surface level reading and understanding, is that the aggregate particle-level entropy within sub light speed systems creates gravity.
Entropic gravity is a compelling framework. I think that most Physicists admit that it would be nice to believe that the yet unknown theory of everything is microscopic and quantum mechanical, and that the global and exquisitly weak force of gravity emerges from that theory as a sort of accounting error. But there are so many potential assumptions baked into these theories that it's hard to believe when they claim, "…
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Entropy isn't a force. It doesn't "favor" anything. Its a property of statistics, information, and distributions. Also why does this have that particular ChatGPT social media post rhythm to it? Please, Lord, tell me we haven't reached the point where people are writing HN comments w/ AI.
Because it has emdashes and ellipses that Chrome, Firefox, Mac, Linux, and Android text input controls do not natively produce. I don't know about iPhone. If you see these artifacts, it was authored in some other software (be it an editor or LLM) and pasted over.
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Warm objects actually do weigh more than their counterfactual cold versions haha. The stress energy tensor is the quantity to look at here.
I didn't know this, thanks for sharing. https://herebeanswers.com/things-weigh-heavier-or-lighter-wh...
why did you choose that one? serious question, because I'm trying to understand your process (and yes, maybe gently challenging it, but unsure if I should, bc you are clearly knowledgeable in specific ways about this)