Okay, it states that disorder in the universe must always be increasing. This is something I frequently run into when I debate a Christian, and I usually end up having to explain that the energy from the Sun allows complexity to increase on Earth.
But here’s a question that I cannot answer…today’s universe is certainly more orderly than the chaotic conditions of the early universe, shortly after the Big Bang. How did order increase? Doesn’t that violate the 2nd law?
In the early universe, the whole of the matter-energy in the universe was concentrated in a very small area.
Something I’ve never understood is why “spread out” is synonymous with “disorder.” Instead of a cloud of primordial gas, we now have systems of billions upon billions of spherical objects that revolve and rotate with each other in unison. Is that not considered order?
Don’t make too much of “order” and “disorder” as these aren’t really physical concepts.
The point of the Second Law is that things tend to go to the more likely state.
Imagine a jar containing a gas. All the gas being in the jar is a highly unlikely state (physically), so when you open the jar the gas escapes going to physically much more likely states.
Or, to look at things in reverse, if you have a gas filling a room and a jar, how likely is it that the gas will spontaneously find itself entirely within the jar? That is to say that the presence of all the gas in the jar is very unlikely (and also “ordered” so ordered basically is a variation on the notion “unlikely”, and any “unlikely” state is an “ordered” one).
In some sense the universe is rather like a gas escaping a jar.
Okay, it states that disorder in the universe must always be increasing. This is something I frequently run into when I debate a Christian, and I usually end up having to explain that the energy from the Sun allows complexity to increase on Earth.
But here’s a question that I cannot answer…today’s universe is certainly more orderly than the chaotic conditions of the early universe, shortly after the Big Bang. How did order increase? Doesn’t that violate the 2nd law?
No.
One cannot get any more ordered than being everything being squeezed into a singularity.
The amount of free energy in the universe has decreased. Right in line with thermodynamics.
Also right in line with statistical thermodynamics. The universe has gone from a less probable state to a more probable state namely one with minimal free energy.
The very high energy of the Big Bang singularity has dissipated into what you see now. What used to be a single compactum is now scattered in pieces. Sounds like disorder to me.
If you really have to find a religious gloss to all this, consult the K’balah. When the Ein Sof (the Infinite One) created the physical cosmos He smashed ten vessels into pieces (or so it is told). That is the Medieval Jewish version of the Big Bang. The Infinite One also created a hole in His midst to make room for the physical cosmos. This is cognate to the notion that space-time is expanding. So the Infinite One sacrificed some of his compactness and wholeness to make room for the cosmos and us (so the story goes). Plato had a similar notion. Maybe the Greeks were not such dunces, after all.
Frankly, I prefer the secular version of the Big Bang.
In some sense the universe is rather like a gas escaping a jar.
An excellent analogy. As the gas dissipates it is less and less capable of doing work. Hence its free energy decreases. This analogy is also very much in line with the K’balistic notion of the smashing of the vessels. G-D broke ten vessels (so the story goes) in order to make the physical world. When G-D called the world into being he said let there be Light, and Light there was. We still bask in its afterglow, the Cosmic Background Radiation. You might call this the Jewish version of the Big Bang.
Compare the quiet static version of the cosmos put forth by Plato and Aristotle with the rather noisy and cataclysmic version put forth by the Jewish mystics. The Greek version says the physical world is a smudgy copy of the Ideal Real World. The Jewish version is that the real world is wreckage floating in the void, which is more in line with modern physics. Both versions imply that the cosmos goes to a less and less perfect state as time passes which is in line with thermodynamics.
I am more partial to the modern physics version, since it can be quantified and tested.