May 18, 2006

You Down With Entropy?
Everett

First of all, Annatar, thanks for the compliment. I did have to do some research (Google is a wonderful thing) for my last piece to make sure I had some of my numbers correct, but I would rather look stuff up and be right than pull things out of my head and be wrong. Either way, I'm glad you find what I write to be useful and insightful.

Farlas, I wasn't questioning where you heard about the sun shrinking. It's only (well, not only) logical that the sun would lose mass as it burns. I was questioning where you heard that the sun occupied the volume of our entire solar system. Perhaps I should have been clearer on that. Mea culpa.

I've heard that story about the missing day before. Having seen no evidence against it, I'm inclined to believe it. I suppose it's possible the scientists' calculations were simply wrong, but I can't imagine that they wouldn't have double-checked their calculations before looking for some external explanation.

While we're on solar incidents, what do you make of the sun dancing in the sky at Fatima?

http://www.crystalinks.com/fatima.html

If an animal, or any organism, were to evolve in such a way that it was no longer functional, the animal would die out.

You also ask about the second law of thermodynamics: In a closed system, entropy always increases. Leaving aside the question of whether our universe was a closed system at the time of the big bang (or is now, for that matter), it does not follow from the second law of thermodynamics that the universe should be more chaotic now than when it first formed. Contrary to what you (and I) learned in chemistry class, entropy is not a measure of disorder. It is actually a measure of the energy unavailable to do work. Simply put, energy given off in a reaction diffuses from areas where it is concentrated (the area of the reaction, in this case), to areas where it is less concentrated. Eventually, the energy in a system will become evenly dispersed across a closed system and chemical activity will cease. Thus, the universe would have failed to take shape if the energy in the universe were evenly distributed throughout as a result of the big bang. We know this is not the case because the Earth is being constantly bathed from all sides in the residual microwave radiation from the big bang. Information obtained by the Cosmic Background Explorer in 1992 showed a map of the universe as it was 300,00 years after the big bang and found that matter (which can be converted to and from energy, hence e=mc^2) was not evenly distributed throughout the universe. Thus energy was not distributed evenly throughout the universe, and the second law of thermodynamics poses no hurdle to the development of the universe as posited by the Big Bang Theory.