As 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.
If you look at who supports this theory, it's all ego-driven software engineers who believe they can solve physics from first principles, ignoring hundreds of years of evidence that these laws do apply.
I'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.
Slightly 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...
The usual handwaving for entropy v. information/complexity is to observe that our universe goes from simple low entropy state (Big Bang) to a simple maximum entropy state (Heat Death).
Both have low information. The complexity rises and falls, peaking somewhere in the middle, as energy from the gravitational field is turned into structure.
Penrose likes zero initial Weyl curvature because it provides low entropy, but also conformal flatness, thus enabling his CCC theories.
Another consequence is that the Big Bang is not a reversed black hole (white hole). Black holes have high Weyl curvature. The Big Bang is the lowest entropy configuration, but a Black Hole is the maximum entropy configuration (just mass, spin and charges).
>>>>> 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.
IANAP, 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.
Practically stars are mostly burned out in another 50 billion years and radioisotopes that produce a heat gradient will also be mostly decayed by then. Eventually good tidal energy situations like
will end as well since this kind of situation changes the orbits. So energy for life and usable thermal gradients will disappear even if entropy will continue to increase for a long time -- for instance, black holes will be slowly inspiralling and crashing into each other resulting in huge entropy increases on paper.
It's amusing to see such grandiose predictions about the fate of the entire cosmos when our science doesn't hold water even at the galactic scale, I mean its dark matter band aid. If the accuracy is only 10% at the galactic scale, it must be less than 1% at the scale of galaxy clusters, and beyond that it's no better than tea leaves reading.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 31.5 ms ] threadHighly recommend reading this book for how these sci-fi theories are being used to promote eugenics, climate destruction, and pseudoscience: https://www.amazon.com/More-Everything-Forever-Overlords-Hum...
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.
Maybe it's just a problem of being loose with terminology, but this seems to be contrasting entropy and information content, which is backwards?
Both have low information. The complexity rises and falls, peaking somewhere in the middle, as energy from the gravitational field is turned into structure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weyl_curvature_hypothesis
Penrose likes zero initial Weyl curvature because it provides low entropy, but also conformal flatness, thus enabling his CCC theories.
Another consequence is that the Big Bang is not a reversed black hole (white hole). Black holes have high Weyl curvature. The Big Bang is the lowest entropy configuration, but a Black Hole is the maximum entropy configuration (just mass, spin and charges).
Anything less than an eternal universe is a waste of time."
~My Very Clever Dad. Miss you Dad.
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.
Wake me up when dark energy is more than a statistical anomaly, or we have a practical theory for a warp drive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_heating_of_Io
will end as well since this kind of situation changes the orbits. So energy for life and usable thermal gradients will disappear even if entropy will continue to increase for a long time -- for instance, black holes will be slowly inspiralling and crashing into each other resulting in huge entropy increases on paper.
I never heard something like that. Gravity follows the first and second laws of thermodynamics.