Earlier quoted context omitted.
aren't people (and all living organisms) the quintessential example of a local decrease in entropy that results in greater overall entropy? we are highly ordered groupings of matter but we're really great at churning about the matter and energy around us and we eventually decompose too.
Yes absolutely! Life is actually a way to increase entropy as it harnesses chemical energy in systems that otherwise wouldn't be able to reach a lower energy state by themselves.
Argonne researchers posit way to locally circumvent Second Law of Thermodynamics
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Re: Argonne researchers posit way to locally circumvent Second Law of Thermodynamics
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes absolutely! Life is actually a way to increase entropy as it harnesses chemical energy in systems that otherwise wouldn't be able to reach a lower energy state by themselves.
Isn't it the other way around? Life decreases local entropy?
Re: Argonne researchers posit way to locally circumvent Second Law of Thermodynamics
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
The uncertainty principle is an absolute and inviolable consequence of pure mathematics; the second law of thermodynamics just makes predictions that are "very very overwhelmingly likely". The probability of the application of the uncertainty principle producing an incorrect prediction (internal to the theory) is zero, whereas the probability of the application of the second law producing an incorrect prediction (aga…
The statement of the uncertainty principle that I am aware of is that the product of standard deviations of conjugate variables (e.g., time and frequency; position and velocity) is bounded from below. This is a statement about the sample space. Note that standard deviation is expectation (over the ensemble) of the 2nd moment. I did not remember the exact statement when I posted earlier, but here it is: the statement…
Perhaps I have made the same mistake as you, and was thinking about the practical but non-generalized way the second law of thermodynamics is usually taught, which includes concepts like "the system will be in this state". The only part of your statement that is still probabilistic is "entropy will not decrease". That's not really true; it probably won't decrease.
>neither of which gives a prediction
"entropy will not decrease" is a prediction. It is possible (albeit overwhelmingly unlikely over large time scales) that this prediction is sometimes false.
Re: Argonne researchers posit way to locally circumvent Second Law of Thermodynamics
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
The statement of the uncertainty principle that I am aware of is that the product of standard deviations of conjugate variables (e.g., time and frequency; position and velocity) is bounded from below. This is a statement about the sample space. Note that standard deviation is expectation (over the ensemble) of the 2nd moment. I did not remember the exact statement when I posted earlier, but here it is: the statement…
No, the uncertainty principle is a statement about the behavior of non-commuting operators in a Hilbert space. It is not a probabilistic statement. It doesn't even have anything to do with probability until you apply it to a probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics, where vectors in the Hilbert space have something to do with probability. The understanding you are referring to is more or less correct, but is…
The markov/IT version of the 2nd law is a statement about macrostate entropy (taking the entire microstate ensemble for each macrostate), and in that sense it is not probabilistic. See the Cover&Thomas reference I gave earlier for the exact definition. It is indeed different than how it is usually taught in physics, in which the microstates are differentiated.
I guess we both need to be more careful about mathematical definitions in the future ...