Universe Has 100x More Entropy Than We Thought

eldavojohn writes "Previous estimates are now thought to skimp on the entropy of the observable universe. The researchers contend that super-massive black holes are the largest contributor of entropy. Since they contribute two orders of magnitude more than previously thought, the total of all the observable universe is correspondingly higher. The paper highlights (in gruesome detail) new issues that arise with these new calculations — like estimating us a little bit closer to heat death (moving entropy totals from 10^102 to 10^104 out of a maximum of 10^122)."

Comments

Excellent!

[Dyinobal]

I can finally move forward with the plans for my Entropy Cannon.

Re:Excellent!

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Construction of the cannon ain't helping the situation any!

Re:Excellent!

[Afforess]

It self-destructs, correct?

Re:Excellent!

[FlyingSquidStudios]

No, it merely reaches a state of equilibrium, so it never fires.

Re:Excellent!

[symbolset]

I saw that movie.

Re:Excellent!

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

10^104 entropy ought to be enough for everybody.

Re:Excellent!

[Tablizer]

I can finally move forward with the plans for my Entropy Cannon.

Well, we can use something that mass-installs Windows. Where do I order one?

     

Re:Excellent!

[Chris Burke]

Duck Dodgers: Ah-ha! Now I've got the bead on you with MY disintegrating pistol! And brother, when it disintegrates, it disintegrates!
Duck Dodgers: Heh, what do you know... It disintegrated.

Re:Excellent!

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh. Mine's done.

Re:Excellent!

[Fluffeh]

I can finally move forward with the plans for my Entropy Cannon.

Hmmm, I just can't build up excitement about that I am sorry. Every time I try to get excited, it just wanes off and I am simply content again.

Re:Excellent!

[fbjon]

Don't all cannons do that, even the ones that fire?

Re:Excellent!

[Anonymous Coward]

the total of all the observable universe entropy is
2.0506224207728602e+122

Heat Death

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a link for anyone curious about the Heat Death of the Universe concept

Re:Heat Death

[MozeeToby]

It's interesting to note that even with the new estimate being 100X greater than the old, the new data is still only a billionth of a billionth of the maximum value. What, if anything, does that mean for the past and future of the universe? Reminds me of the Stephen Baxter book Manifold: Time, where the age of stars and galaxies is thought of in the same way we think of the instant right after the big bang.

Re:Heat Death

[SlashdotOgre]

Coincidentally, the Ask Slashdot regarding SciFi works for students lead me to Isaac Asimov's cool short story "The Last Question" (http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html which has an interesting perspective on this...

Re:Heat Death

[DarkMage0707077]

So we had the Big Freeze and the Big Crunch...now we have "the Big Burn"?

Now all we need is one that's Wind related and all the Natural elements will be represented.

Re:Heat Death

[gnick]

Heat Death is the "Big Freeze", although I suppose you could view it as the universe burning out. Personally, I'm not too worried. IMO, anyone concerned that any life will be around to worry about the universe fizzling out is way too optimistic.

It's not that it's not interesting and "The Last Question" (linked above) is a neat fatalistic take on surviving to that point, but face it. We'll all be screwed long before it's an issue - All the way down to the hardiest little bacteria.

Re:Heat Death

[commodore64_love]

>>>What, if anything, does that mean for the past and future of the universe?

There was a Doctor Who TNG episode about this. The universe at the point of heat death was a sad and depressing place to be... very very dark To paraphrase Marvin the Depressed Robot - Might as well slit my wrist now, since it will all end in tears anyhow.

Now the world has gone to bed
Darkness won't engulf my head
I can see by infra-red
How I hate the night

Re:Heat Death

[commodore64_love]

You don't understand the meaning of heat death. It isn't a "burn" but a very, very low energy state of about 0.5 degrees above absolute freezing. It's the point where all energy has been consumed, even gravity, such that all stars/planets have broken-apart, and all that remains is scattered atoms just randomly vibrating..... like a watch slowly winding down until it stops.

Did I cheer you up?

Re:Heat Death

[Anonymous Coward]

If the universe started out in a state of order then created at least four collapsing proto universes before this barionic matter universe. Then what we have is a flux state for all that we know. The end of everything barionic might cause confusion among scholars. If the universe is a zero sum game then you get out exactly what you put into it. The disorder of the universe is what gave rise to our evolution from primates to philosophers. Without entropy the gases and dust would have remained a super dense singularity. Some disorder is a good thing. The universe is exponentially getting bigger. Just ask a tachyon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon
Talking to them is the hardest part. Just like talking to women.

Re:Heat Death

[gardyloo]

You're right about it not being a burn. However, one can have a _tremendous_ amount of energy around for a heat death. It's the entropy which matters, though, as for the energy to _do_ anything, there has to be an energy density difference from place-to-place, and time-to-time. No gradient, no energy flow. It's the equivalent of a glowing hot ceramics furnace: it's amazingly energetic, but the fact that it's uniformly energetic means that you can't tell what bit is furnace wall, and what bit is pottery.

Re:Heat Death

[JohnRoss1968]

OK im confused Doctor Who TNG.. Isn't TNG The Next Generation .. as in Star Trek The Next Generation ??
Also I don't believe its supposed to be Marvin the Depressed Robot.. I believe its supposed to be Marvin The Paranoid Android.

Re:Heat Death

[Quothz]

It's interesting to note that even with the new estimate being 100X greater than the old, the new data is still only a billionth of a billionth of the maximum value.

Well, sure, but if you're raising that issue (and assuming maximum entropy is possible and leads to a heat death), it's worth noting that most of the time left will be spent in near-heat death, in which not much can go on but the last bits of decay. Regardless of which version of the heat death you favor (if any), only during a tiny fraction of the lifespan of the universe will there be much happening.

Also bear in mind that it isn't clear whether the increased entropy in black holes "counts". TFA barely touches on the notion that the finding may not mean we're closer to heat death, but only that the maximum entropy of the universe is higher than thought as well.

Re:Heat Death

[Volante3192]

Think GP is trying to be clever and refer to the revival of Doctor Who currently playing as opposed to the episodes with the first eight doctors.

Re:Heat Death

[mweather]

Cold Death is the big freeze. The results are similar, bot they're not the same thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Freeze

Re:Heat Death

[commodore64_love]

>>>Isn't TNG The Next Generation .. as in Star Trek The Next Generation ??

No. TNG can also refer to other shows that are sequels to the original, like Battlestar Galactica TNG, Quantum Leap TNG, 90210 TNG, Melrose TNG - at least that's the shorthand used on rec.arts.tv

If you have an alternate way of referring to the original Doctor Who and the new Doctor Who show, I'm open to suggestions.

Re:Heat Death

[amRadioHed]

They both describe the exact same thing. I think that section in the Heat Death article saying it is slightly different from the Big Freeze is wrong.

The "Timeframe for Heat Death" section even links right to the Big Freeze article as the main article on the topic.

Re:Heat Death

[Conditioner]

How about just calling it "the new" or "the newer Doctor Who show", or the new Battlestar Galactica? What happens if the come out with a newer Quantum Leap, will you call it Quantum Leap TNNG ? Maybe you could use GI and GII for Generation one and Generation Two of a show.

Re:Heat Death

[Omestes]

If you have an alternate way of referring to the original Doctor Who and the new Doctor Who show, I'm open to suggestions.

Doctor Two?

Re:Heat Death

[tom17]

the original Doctor Who and the new Doctor Who

Re:Heat Death

[Bigjeff5]

They are related but not the same, they are describing different facets of the same issue. "Heat Death" refers to the ultimate state of entropy - that all the energy in the universe had moved from a high concentration to a low concentration, which results in a perfect equilibrium.

"Cold Death" happens long before heat death, it referse to the point when the expansion of the universe spreads the stars so far apart that new stars can not be re-formed from the gasses of dead stars/systems. Once all stars have consumed all their fuel and no new stars can be formed, life in the universe is no longer possible. That is the cold death of the universe.

Basically, heat death will happen hundreds of billions of years after cold death happens - the Universe will have reached a completely uniform 0 degrees kelvin and it will be completely dead.

Re:Heat Death

[Alamais]

And IMO, anyone who thinks that, in all the endless universe, there is not one form of life that will find a way to survive to the chilly end, nor is there any possibility of life forming in the deep future, is way too pessimistic.

It's an interesting question because of philosophical questions it raises.

What is survival? What if we (and by 'we' I mean living creatures in the broadest-possible scope) manage to create a perfect machine? Something from pure fields and laws we can't even imagine now. The ideal engine, with no loss for a given calculation. If we store a mind in such a machine, has that mind survived? With no energy input or output, there can be no net change. Is a mind, which may be conscious and unfathomably complex, but which is nevertheless perfectly static, truly alive?

What is life? If we reject the static mind and say that there must be some energy gain and loss in order to truly qualify as a surviving life form, then what are the options? We consume the universe, yes, and then? Can we move on to others? Is there meaning in such survival?

Someone above mentioned Baxter's Manifold: Time, and that had an interesting take on the whole thing. The end idea being that the best outcome is one in which maximum diversity is achieved. That is, that a given universe's best 'final outcome' is that which creates more universes. In a way this is an answer to "The Last Question". Rather than reversing entropy in a given universe, we create new universes that, in effect, decrease entropy for the set of all universes. The more universes we have, the more possibilities are expressed. Of course Baxter adds in the possibility that a 'parent' universe can impart some facets of itself to its 'children', which leads me to wonder about 'natural selection' among universes. If the 'best' universe is one that reproduces the most, then isn't the end result a multiverse full of universes that only exist for a fractional second before exploding into newer universes? Whee!

Of course, 'fraction of a second' may be meaningless if 'time' is an concept that differs from universe to universe, so perhaps it doesn't matter to multiversal evolution. Hell, maybe a universe could be its own parent.

...Oh look, I've gone cross-eyed.

Wibble.

Re:Heat Death

[Anonymous Coward]

Argh, I've seen this story posted here like bijilion times, everyone has read it already or is too young too be able to read with understanding anyway.

Re:Heat Death

[Anonymous Coward]

reference shows by year created

"Doctor Who (2005)"
from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436992/

"Original run Classic series:
23 November 1963
6 December 1989
Television film:
12 May 1996
Current series:
26 March 2005present"
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who

Re:Heat Death

[Anonymous Coward]

Completely void of motion with no hope of re-animation == Dead
Therefore at the point of heat death, if not before, everything will be dead.

Good luck spawning new universes, but methinks you have been reading too many comic books.

Re:Heat Death

[arminw]

...What is life?...

Jesus Christ, God come to earth, defined it this way:

John 17:3 And this is life eternal, that they might know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.

The apostle Peter writes this about the end of the universe:

2Pe 3:7 But the present heavens and the earth being kept in store by the same Word, are being kept for fire until the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.

2Pe 3:10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a roaring noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat. And the earth and the works in it will be burned up.

Here is another description of the end of the universe, this time by the apostle Joh:

Rev 20:11 I saw a large, white throne and the one who was sitting on it. The earth and the sky fled from his presence, but no place was found for them.
Rev 20:12 I saw the dead, both important and unimportant people, standing in front of the throne. Books were opened, including the Book of Life. The dead were judged on the basis of what they had done, as recorded in the books.
Rev 20:13 The sea gave up its dead. Death and hell gave up their dead. People were judged based on what they had done.

Re:Heat Death

[ustolemyname]

So? I read it, but couldn't remember what it was called, and appreciate the link. To me, GP would have been appropriately modded "informative".

Re:Heat Death

[gmhowell]

Fully understanding this concept led me to drink heavily in college and drop chemistry as a major. Seriously.

Re:Heat Death

[GaryPatterson]

The BBC call it "Doctor Who 2008" (etc). That seems pretty straightforward, and gives a bit more information with only one more ASCII character.

Re:Heat Death

[Alamais]

Wow, an AC with no imagination and a religious nut. Not exactly the conversation I had hoped for.

Re:Heat Death

[bronney]

Not to be a smart ass and shit, but the "mind" you describe, sounds like a "book", or a symphony. We already have "minds" that survives. If there's no input or output, nobody can hear the tree falls. And hence whether it is objectively alive (or conscious) isn't meaningful.

The problem I see is, when the sun explodes, when all suns explodes, your book won't be there. Not going in the multiverse thing at all here.

Re:Heat Death

[Uber Banker]

Sometimes I visit Slashdot and see a bloody good comment. This is one of those times.

Re:Heat Death

[uninformedLuddite]

We are living in the instant after the big bang

Re:Heat Death

[RichiH]

Let me hijack this thread to ask in which order I should start reading Baxter. Should I just go through his Xeelee Sequence chronologically or is there, same as with e.g. Heinlein/Asimov, a progression of philosophical ideas/in-story relevations which suggest a different order?

Re:Heat Death

[ShieldW0lf]

The "Heat Death" concept, the concept that the universe is infinite, and infinitely expanding... these just don't make sense. Gravity and Entropy both imply that the universe will not infinitely expand, but will contract back to the singularity and then expand outward again. Other theoreticians have called it "The Big Crunch"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Crunch

If you think of time as another spatial dimension, matter and energy as being two forms of the same thing and the universe as a 4 dimensional "object" with a shape and a surface, you can envision the universe as a kind of soap bubble that has a surface tension, and the topology of that object implies gravitational forces and entropy. The "singularity" or "black hole" is the lowest common denominator state of the mass/energy of the universe.

Dark matter is also implied by such a model. I suspect dark matter to be other universes, other iterations of the singularity expanding and collapsing, similar to this one and attached to this one.

We are limited by our conception of time... we are stuck in the view that we are 3 dimensional objects that, over time, are transforming and translating within space. But time is an illusion. You, in your previous configuration, are not annihilated and replaced by this new configuration. You continue to exist at the moment of your birth and of your death just as you exist at this moment. This life of yours does not end in the sense that it is gone, but only in the sense that you are "over there". Your birth and death are a part of your surface, just like your skin is.

"God" aka "The Universe" really does not play dice. Causality exists, therefore, the future and the past abide. If the future was not connected to the past, then causality would not exist, and learning of any sort would not be possible. This isn't a new idea... this is what "Faith" was always telling you to recognize... that the universe has a shape, that causality exists, and that learning is possible. Calling the shape of the universe it's "Personality" is just a matter of terminology.

If you find this sort of thing confusing to think about, reading "Flatland" is a good way to jog the mind. Flatland and A Wrinkle in Time were the books I used to introduce these concepts to my daughter so I could explain how I look at the world to her... you can grab a copy of Flatland at Project Gutenberg.

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/97

Anything written by Rudy Rucker is good too. His book The Sex Sphere did more to make me interested in theoretical physics than any teacher I ever had.

Re:Heat Death

[RichiH]

Hundreds of billions of years is definitely too short a time for complete 0. Just think of the background radiation.

And if you define our universe as "the stretch of space (and dimensions?) which is directly or indirectly affected by the direct or indirect effects of the Big Bang", absolute zero can not exist as there will always be some particles racing towards infinity (or another universe, or, or, or) which have enough heat energy. Again, think background radiation.

Re:Heat Death

[ShieldW0lf]

They are related but not the same, they are describing different facets of the same issue. "Heat Death" refers to the ultimate state of entropy - that all the energy in the universe had moved from a high concentration to a low concentration, which results in a perfect equilibrium.

"Cold Death" happens long before heat death, it referse to the point when the expansion of the universe spreads the stars so far apart that new stars can not be re-formed from the gasses of dead stars/systems. Once all stars have consumed all their fuel and no new stars can be formed, life in the universe is no longer possible. That is the cold death of the universe.

Basically, heat death will happen hundreds of billions of years after cold death happens - the Universe will have reached a completely uniform 0 degrees kelvin and it will be completely dead.

If time is relative, and there are no stars, how long is a hundred billion years? Is it a long time, or a short time?

Re:Heat Death

[commodore64_love]

Which requires me memorizing what year each episode aired. It's easier to just say "In the season three episode of Doctor Who TNG, we see the daleks....."

Re:Heat Death

[commodore64_love]

Your viewpoint is interesting, but has no more basis in observation than the greek myths. Scientists have looked at the Big Crunch, and found that the galaxies are moving too fast. They will never pull back together.

Re:Heat Death

[commodore64_love]

That's correct. The universe will never be absolute zero, but it will have attained a point where there's no energy except a very low-level heat about 1/2 degree above absolute. Like an engine that is slowly-but-surely cooling off. Hence the name "heat death". The universe will be a still-warm but essentially dead corpse.

Re:Heat Death

[mdwh2]

So is next year's going to be Season Five of "TNG", or Season One of something you have to think of yet another name for? (Next year will be new lead writer, new actors, even new logos - pretty much another reboot, albeit it with less of a wait.)

Re:Heat Death

[commodore64_love]

>>>However, one can have a _tremendous_ amount of energy around for a heat death.

I said it was a low energy STATE, not that the overall quantity was low. 1/2 a degree Kelvin is extremely low.

Re:Heat Death

[commodore64_love]

So according to Isaac Asimov's "Last Question" story, god is a computer built by the previous iteration of the universe. That explains a lot.

Re:Heat Death

[Phoenixlol]

I think most people generally refer to the number Doctor they're on. Tennant is the 10th, I believe.

Re:Heat Death

[Anonymous Coward]

I think, got it:
"Cold Death" is the Big Freeze
and "Heat Death" is The Freeze.

Re:Heat Death

[Anonymous Coward]

If the universe started out in a state of order then created at least four collapsing proto universes...

...then God is cornered as a queer.

Re:Heat Death

[Hellpop]

Well, at least until they find out they were off by 100X magnitude on some other measurement. That's the great thing about science, it's always changing based on new evidence and observations. The trick is to not get pigeon-holed into believing that any certain "current" opinion is absolute. The more we learn, the less, it seems, we knew.

Re:Heat Death

[Hellpop]

I also need to point out that most definitions of Entropy refer to closed systems. We do not know yet whether the universe is a closed system or an open one. That would make a huge difference.

Re:Heat Death

[Anonymous Coward]

jesus is so gay

Re:Heat Death

[BlkRb0t]

Interesting read, Asimov is a genius.

Re:Heat Death

[Anonymous Coward]

Using TNG doesn't really make sense as TNG expands to The Next Generation, which at the present would be the as yet unmade episodes with Matt Smith as the Doctor. Perhaps you want to refer to it as "the current generation".

Re:Heat Death

[Your Anus]

The universe is a closed system by definition.

Re:Heat Death

[Hellpop]

By definition. Whose definition? What is it in fact? Does anyone have a definitive answer for that? If you subscribe to the "Many Worlds" view or believe that strings originate from outside our universe, or one of any number of other theories, you could believe that it may not be a closed system. Last I checked, no one had definitively cracked the answers to all the mysteries of the universe, so I'd say we don't know for sure.

MC Hawking on Entropy

[tylersoze]

http://www.mchawking.com/includes/lyrics/entropy_lyrics.php

Re:MC Hawking on Entropy

[vivin]

The researchers contend that super-massive black holes are the largest contributor of entropy.

I have also heard that "glaciers melting in the dead of night" contribute to entropy quite a bit.

Re:MC Hawking on Entropy

[R2.0]

Anyone besides me hear Deep Purple when they read "super-massive black hole"?

You down with entropy?

[megamerican]

Entropy, how can I explain it? I'll take it frame by frame it,
to have you all jumping, shouting saying it.
Let's just say that it's a measure of disorder,
in a system that is closed, like with a border.
It's sorta, like a, well a measurement of randomness,
proposed in 1850 by a German, but wait I digress.
"What the fuck is entropy?", I here the people still exclaiming,
it seems I gotta start the explaining.

You ever drop an egg and on the floor you see it break?
You go and get a mop so you can clean up your mistake.
But did you ever stop to ponder why we know it's true,
if you drop a broken egg you will not get an egg that's new.

That's entropy or E-N-T-R-O to the P to the Y,
the reason why the sun will one day all burn out and die.
Order from disorder is a scientific rarity,
allow me to explain it with a little bit more clarity.
Did I say rarity? I meant impossibility,
at least in a closed system there will always be more entropy.
That's entropy and I hope that you're all down with it,
if you are here's your membership.

Chorus
You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me! (x3)
Who's down with entropy?
Every last homey!

Verse 2
Defining entropy as disorder's not complete,
'cause disorder as a definition doesn't cover heat.
So my first definition I would now like to withdraw,
and offer one that fits thermodynamics second law.
First we need to understand that entropy is energy,
energy that can't be used to state it more specifically.
In a closed system entropy always goes up,
that's the second law, now you know what's up.

You can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave the game,
'cause entropy will take it all 'though it seems a shame.
The second law, as we now know, is quite clear to state,
that entropy must increase and not dissipate.

Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
That, in a nutshell, is what entropy's about,
you're now down with a discount.

Chorus

Trash Talk
Hit it!
Doomsday, kick it in!

-MC Hawking

Re:You down with entropy?

[Robotbeat]

Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!

I believe firmly in evolution and the Big Bang and all that, but in order for the universe to have been created at some point, it's first generally necessary to prove that it has a finite age. The Second Law basically proves that quite nicely. So the Second Law isn't all that useless to the arsenal of Creationists.

Re:You down with entropy?

[ari_j]

I prefer MC Escher.

Re:You down with entropy?

[mcgrew]

Wow, Vogons posting on slashdot!

Re:You down with entropy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer MC pee pants.

Re:You down with entropy?

[osu-neko]

I believe firmly in evolution and the Big Bang and all that, but in order for the universe to have been created at some point, it's first generally necessary to prove that it has a finite age. The Second Law basically proves that quite nicely. So the Second Law isn't all that useless to the arsenal of Creationists.

Except, of course, it doesn't. The "heat death" of the universe does not prove the universe has a finite age, in fact quite the opposite, it would imply the universe will continue indefinitely. It's just that, for the vast majority of that infinite time, it will be in a very uninteresting state. It tells us what the "end state" of the universe will be, but reaching the end state of the universe is not the end of the universe, the universe goes on forever in its final state.

Re:You down with entropy?

[lgw]

If the current age of the universe is finite, then it must have come into being - been created - at some point. There's no real answer to how that might have happened within the real of science. Oh, you can say there's some multiverse which creates universes such as ours, but that just shifts the question: how was the multiverse created?

My personal creation belief is that our universe is itself a supermassive black hole in some much larger universe, and in that universe the riddle of creation has some obvious answer. Perhaps God strides around shaking hands and giving photo-ops. Perhaps you can see the moment of creation with a sufficiently powerful telescope. Perhaps that unvierse does not have afinite current age.

Re:You down with entropy?

[Robotbeat]

I meant that the CURRENT age of the universe is finite. And any point in the future, the age will be finite (although it will be arbitrarily old the more arbitrarily further in the future you pick).

You misunderstood my comment.

One of the main ideas (before the Big Bang theory was proposed) used to be that the universe had always existed. So, in that context, the second law (and the Big Bang theory) sides with the creationists, who propose that the universe currently has a finite age.

If you really want to change a creationist's mind, you must first convince them that modern, mainstream science is sometimes on their side, and then they stop fighting and you have an ally for science, instead of a foe. Science is agnostic (because it deals with the natural, not with any kind of potential "supernatural"), yet atheists make enemies of science when they pit science against religion (which is more important than rational thought to very many people--they will defend it at all costs).

If atheists really care about advancing science in the public's view, they will stop picking fights with everyone's grandmother and start just advocating science (and letting science stand for itself).

Re:You down with entropy?

[greengearbox]

The "heat death" of the universe does not prove the universe has a finite age, in fact quite the opposite, it would imply the universe will continue indefinitely.

you avoided his point, which was not that the universe will end but that it began.

"the age of X" generally means not "how long until X dies or ceases to exist", but "how long since X was born or came into existence".

The apparent directionality of entropy over time might imply (in a general, imprecise way) that entropy had a minimum value at some point, that this point was the "beginning of the universe", and (so it's said) that a beginning with no antecedent implies some sort of creative force, i.e. god.

Re:You down with entropy?

[maxwell demon]

If the current age of the universe is finite, then it must have come into being - been created - at some point.

No. Even with a finite age, there's absolutely no need for a beginning. Just like the positive reals have no first element (for each positive real, there's a smaller positive real; note that 0 is not a positive real), there need not be an earliest point in time.

Re:You down with entropy?

[maxwell demon]

No, it was Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England, who posted.

Re:You down with entropy?

[Robotbeat]

No. Even with a finite age, there's absolutely no need for a beginning. Just like the positive reals have no first element (for each positive real, there's a smaller positive real; note that 0 is not a positive real), there need not be an earliest point in time.

Your argument is equivalent to Zeno's Paradox.

Re:You down with entropy?

[Knara]

It's hard to convince a Creationist that science is on their side, they don't even realize the irony inherent in the fact that their ability to communicate with each other is, by and large, facilitated by systems created via science.

Re:You down with entropy?

[cromar]

Dude can't rap.

Re:You down with entropy?

[Arthur Grumbine]

Do you realize who you're arguing with? I think he knows what he's talking about when it comes matters like this...

Re:You down with entropy?

[Robotbeat]

As long as we are being literal, why should I trust the word of a demon? ;)

But anyways, who's to say the Universe uses our pedantic definition of "zero"? Perhaps the beginning of the Universe can be best described with an extension of the real number line where "zero" can be positive?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signed_zero

Re:You down with entropy?

[lgw]

Hint: singularities in your model are points where your model fails. Open ranges make great sense in mathematics, but perhaps not so much in reality - especially in areas where reality is quantized. Sure, you can walk the model back in time towards 0 and let the energy density appproach infinity as t approachs 0, but that only proves that at some point very close to t=0, the model fails.

Most of the speculation about very early moments of the universe are extrapolations far beyond the bounds of data. Entertaining, but not science. Really, "inflation" is a bunch of "reality doesn't fit our model so let's adjust reality" BS, like every other cosmological constant, and everything in the timeline at or before "inflation" is just model masturbation at this point.

Re:You down with entropy?

[Artifakt]

But so many Atheists don't really care about science any more than the Creationists do. Yes, I'm about to draw a -1 Troll, but here's the facts.
Back in the 1940s - 50s, when the Big Bang/Steady State controversy was at its peak, a sizeable number of organised Atheists came down squarely on the side of the Steady State. Scientists and Philosophers, people with the international reputation of Sir Bertrand Russell (for just one example), all insisted that science would prove the Steady State. They made public statements that the Steady State proved there was no need for any God, and that the Big Bang wasn't science, it was religion trying to sneak God in by the back door.
      At least a dozen people who were as significant to the Atheist movement of their time as Richard Dawkins is today or Carl Sagan was before his death, picked one side in a scientific debate over the other for philosophical reasons, and turned out to be wrong. Even twenty years after the Big Bang won out in most circles, almost none of them could bring themselves to admit it had.* Many of them acted with obvious bad character, for example making promises that if it turned out the universe did have a definite time of origin, they would resign from being local chairman of an Atheist society and embrace religion, and then denying they ever said such things once the Big bang won in general scientific circles (and several of these made the statements on radio or in their own books, so the record is actually pretty easy to check).

*Fred Hoyle comes to mind as a partial exception. He actually coined the phrase "Big Bang" as an insult to the 'other side's' position, and has tended to support odd theories that might do away with the Big Bang standard model ever since, but at least he has admitted that he had created a straw man attack with the name.

Re:You down with entropy?

[Nursie]

Atheist movement? ROFL.

FAIL.

Re:You down with entropy?

[arminw]

....to prove that it has a finite age....

If you BELIEVE in the Big Bang, you must logically also believe that the universe has a finite age. Nobody knows what was before the Big Bang. Matter-energy, space-time all came into being together. I BELIEVE that the eternal God Jehovah created the universe out of nothing. He formulated the laws under which it would evolve. Even though the details are very sketchy, there is one refrain in the creation account in the Bible. It says repeatedly that God said "it was very good".

In my estimation, a universe with entropy, that is where things get old, die and wear out is definitely not "very good". The Bible does not go into detail, but does tell us that evil entered into God's very good universe and has messed it up. That's why, in the Bible, God promises to create a new heaven and new earth, a new eternal universe, wherein there will be no more evil.

God has a very simple, universally applicable test to determine who will join him in this new perfect creation. It is found in the most quoted verse of the Bible: John 3:16.

Re:You down with entropy?

[arminw]

...Science is agnostic (because it deals with the natural, not with any kind of potential "supernatural"),....

Indeed, is there any mathematical equation or law of physics that operates differently if God is honored as creator, rather than some other mechanisms that leave God out of the picture? All scientific facts and data are neutral. It is only people's interpretation of the data, that may or may not give God the credit and honor.

Faith goes where science cannot go, because unlike science, faith is not limited to the natural, but indeed CAN go to the supernatural. In the end, faith is more important in all of our lives, then we give it credit for. I'm not talking about blind faith, but reasoned faith. Jehovah God invites us to reason:

Isa 1:18 Come now, and let us reason together, says Jehovah; though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be like wool.

There is very little in life, if anything, that we know for certain. It's reasonable to believe, that you,ll wake up tomorrow morning to another day, but it's by no means certain. It's reasonable to believe, that the airplane you're about to get into, will take you to your destination. Sometimes airplanes crash killing everybody aboard. It's reasonable to believe, hope, that other drivers will be sober, keeping on their side of the road, but we all know, that some get drunk and cause deadly crashes. It is reasonable for me to believe in God, whom I have repeatedly seen working in my and my family's life.

Re:You down with entropy?

[geekoid]

except it is not finite. it get to amximun entropy, but it continues to exist, forever.

It's noce that you create your own belief in the face of all actual evidence, but it's a bit of a mastabatory practice, don't you think?

Re:You down with entropy?

[BumbaCLot]

Never heard of local chairmen of Atheist societies, but if it is so easy to check, why not give us one example?

Re:You down with entropy?

[maxwell demon]

Hint: There's a difference between a logical argument and an argument about physical reality. I did the former. That is, I didn't say anything about whether the universe had a beginning, I only said something about whether we can conclude that it had a beginning from it having a finite age. Namely we can't.

About physical reality, it's to expect that GR will fail before approaching the singularity. But that's clear not from the fact that there's a singularity (after all, one could imagine ways to avoid the singularity without modifying GR; probably some well-crafted assumptions about dark energy would suffice), but from the simple fact that GR and QM simply do not fit together well, but would both become relevant in the very early universe. And it's extremely unlikely that this would be resolved by a modification of just QM (although I'd not be surprised if QM had to be modified as well as GR).

Re:You down with entropy?

[Anonymous Coward]

QM and GR fit together very well (i.e., they do not conflict at all) in the limit of low individual particle energies and in the limit of low space-time curvature.

The usual way to gain cooperation among the two is to choose an inertial frame of reference that corresponds with small space-time curvature and minimal individual particle inertial energies. This is usually possible except near (or within) extremely dense massive objects like black holes or the early universe. Near (or in) such objects conflicts between GR and QM arise, and limits to the applicability of both theories appear, workarounds for which expose further conflicts.

A set of conflicts arises in the limit of high individual particle energies when standard model particles are given enough mass-energy that the effects of gravitation on the interactions between standard model particles cannot be ignored (as they usually are in QED and other non-relativized treatments of QM). Relativized theories, such as QFT, extend the limit substantially and are effective approximately to the point where excitations in the graviton field interfere constructively with excitations in the other (standard model) fields (and necessarily vice-versa) leading to non-renormalizable results. This is the GUT limit.

Another set of conflicts arises in the limit of space-time curvature such that time dilation occurs in the scale of particle wavelengths. This is the curvature limit at which GR counterterms diverge to infinity and one can therefore not construct a locally flat slice of space-time sufficiently large to make a reliable equation of state for the system under study.

A really simple example of why this is a problem is the equivalence of wavelength, frequency, momentum and mass-energy in a highly energetic particle: if we choose geometrized units (c == s == G == hbar == 1) and treat s (second) as the metric along all four axes, then curvature is measured in s^-2, or in other words space-time curvature is measured in terms of the change of speed of an internally stable oscillator from the perspective of an observer, with clocks ticking slower as curvature increases. The problem is that curvature can become high enough that this time-dilation should affect the frequency of a wave/particle dual across the distance of its own internal frequency. This is a partially solvable problem in GR in that in geometrized units, the wave/particle duality is explicit and "not a problem", but it causes a difficulty for QM because at these high curvatures you cannot recover the particle interpretation of the wave/particle dual -- additionally the wavefunction becomes quite complex.

Ignoring the "reality" of the standard model and the discrete particle-like nature of mass-energy (from QM, which is well-supported by lab experiment and astrophysical observation), much smaller denser systems defy the expansion of the system from effectively infinite space-time curvature to low curvature. One of the goals of GR was always to be able to map reasonably large "slices" of Minkowski space-time from the real space-time geometry, but the homeomorphism becomes inaccessible when the space-time curvature becomes extremely large due to self-gravitation, and this is where the problematic singularities tend to appear.

It may be that GR not only works geometrically in extremely large but not infinite space-time curvature, but is physically valid, in which case a hard limit to QM's applicability exists. Alternatively, it may be that the disappearance of the particle nature of matter is not physical in the limit of individual particle energies we can reach experimentally, in which case GR is broken even in merely very highly curved space-time. Alternatively it may be that both are superseded in the limit of high individual particle energies and high space-time curvature by some new theory of gravitation that clearly works in those limits.

Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[lbalbalba]

And I was under the impression that all that black holes were good for, was for sucking stuff in that never can get out ? Oh well, guess I should have payed more attention in class as a kid...

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[A beautiful mind]

Information doesn't come out. But information != entropy. Black holes are the ultimate rand() it seems.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[Shakrai]

Information doesn't come out

But V'Ger does....

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[lbalbalba]

Information doesn't come out. But information != entropy. Black holes are the ultimate rand() it seems.

Still think it's weird (call me a dummy, you will, anyway :) How can it generate entropy when nothing can escape it ? Or is it ultimately random about *what* it sucks in ?

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[sakdoctor]

urand()
Blackholes don't block.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[Tanuki64]

Actually like the parent I am a bit confused, too. I roughly associate entropy with disorder. So I'd expect that black holes destroy entropy. They suck stuff in and destroy it totally or at least homogenize it totally -> less disorder. Like you have a very messy room. When you take out everything and throw it in a garbage bin, the room is empty and clean -> less entropy. Question is, where is the flaw in this view?

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[evilbessie]

That _was_ the theory, Hawking messed that up with Hawking Radiation though, sorry.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[Colonel Korn]

Everything that comes into a black hole comes back out eventually via Hawking Radiation. It goes in as a star or a chicken or a pistachio and comes out as random energy, which is a pretty clear increase in entropy.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[kalirion]

Could this Hawking Radiation be harnessed? That is, can it be considered as free energy as opposed to entropy?

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[lbalbalba]

Everything that comes into a black hole comes back out eventually via Hawking Radiation.

Ah, so my initial pre-conception that *nothing* can come out of a black hole is outdated or simply dead wrong: 'Hawking Radiation' comes out of a black hole, being the source of the entropy. Thank you very much for clearing that up for me, I would mod you up if I had mod points left.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[Lemmy Caution]

"Order" and "disorder" are human perceptions, not states of matter and energy. Sometimes we perceive more order when there are clear differences in energy states, sometimes we perceive less

To you, which is more ordered: a bowl of cherries next to a glass of water, or a completely smooth blend of all of them? The latter is more entropic. In the case of the room, replace the garbage bin with an incinerator, and the "empty" room (plus the stuff that used to be in it) is now in a more entropic state. The fact that you personally find it tidier isn't relevant. Assuming that you might have actually needed some of the stuff that we just burned, too, you might find it a rather poor solution to the problem of a messy room.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The room is all there is. So you take garbage, put it in a bag and it just sits there, radiating a stank you just can't get out of your clothes or hair.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[zehaeva]

it would be more apt to say that a black hole sucking stuff in is more akin to taking everything in a very messy room and giving it all to the "Will it Blend?" guy, having him whip up a "messy room" shake and compacting that into a very tiny ball.

while your room is indeed clean, everything that was in your room is now in a small ball of disorganized matter where as it used to form nice neat polymer chains and crystalline structures and other such organized molecular structures. now its all just a large amount of goo which is defiantly less organized than a bed room set, sheets, clothes, your favorite plushies and whatever other junk there was there.

~zeh

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[amliebsch]

The flaw is that entropy is not exactly synonymous with disorder. Sometimes it is, if a disordered state has a lower energy potential than a higher ordered states. But in many cases, such as falling to the bottom of a gravity well, the "ordered" - actually just more compact - state is the lower energy state. Entropy is just the degree to which a system has moved from a higher energy potential to a lower energy potential. If we had more potential energy after falling into a gravity well than before it, then we'd need rockets to blast ourselves from space back to Earth, rather than the other way around.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[Tanuki64]

It goes in as a star or a chicken or a pistachio and comes out as random energy, which is a pretty clear increase in entropy.

Maybe it is an increase in entropy. But it is not a clear increase. The matter is homogenized. Isn't this a loss of entropy? Suppose you have a bag which is filled with a mixture of salt and sugar -> high entropy. Now you turn magically the sugar and the salt into a diamond. One type of matter, highly ordered -> less entropy. Isn't this the same a black hole does? You give in all kind of matter, you get out one type of radiation. I am sure this view is not correct, but where is the flaw?

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[lbalbalba]

That _was_ the theory, Hawking messed that up with Hawking Radiation though, sorry.

Thanks for pointing that out, like one of the other posters. Apparently, my pre-conception of black holes was outdated or simply dead wrong.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[Thornburg]

Actually like the parent I am a bit confused, too. I roughly associate entropy with disorder. So I'd expect that black holes destroy entropy. They suck stuff in and destroy it totally or at least homogenize it totally -> less disorder. Like you have a very messy room. When you take out everything and throw it in a garbage bin, the room is empty and clean -> less entropy.

Question is, where is the flaw in this view?

IANAP(hysicist), but here's my thought:

The problem with this view is twofold, one is that of using "is a similar concept to" as if it were a mathematical "=". Entropy is similar to disorder and one type of disorder might be a messy room. This does not mean that a messy room has a higher entropy than a clean room.

The second is thinking that homogeny is the opposite of entropy, when, in fact, it is the ultimate form of entropy. If every single atom in the universe were the same (and stable, such as a Noble gas), then it would be very difficult to make anything happen. No useful energy is available. OTOH, if you have lots of different kinds of atoms, you can mix some of them together to make new things or generate different forms of energy (such as heat, light, or kinetic energy).

To get back to the messy room analogy--if everything in your room were thrown into a giant blender, and made into a sea of sand, it would have reached maximum entropy. However, in the messy room, there might be just as much potential energy as the clean room, possibly even more. Therefore is difficult to distinguish which has greater entropy.

And, finally, to get back to black holes: Assuming that Hawking Radiation really exists and functions as speculated, black holes take useful energy (light & matter) and turn it into less useful energy (hawking radiation), thus increasing entropy.

As I said, IANAP, so if someone wants to correct me, feel free, but please explain why, so that I can learn something.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[vlm]

Three very separate questions

Could this Hawking Radiation be harnessed?

Sure, although there are some minor engineering challenges.

That is, can it be considered as free energy

Not "free energy" because you're converting mass into energy.

as opposed to entropy?

On an entire system wide basis, entropy times temperature equals energy, so "as opposed to" is a weird phrase to use. Lots of energy emitted, at a low enough temperature, means the entropy must be high.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[ArcCoyote]

It goes in as a star or a chicken or a pistachio and comes out as random energy

I want something that does the opposite. When I push a button. Without the billions of years it normally takes.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[John Hasler]

Black holes have mass too, but that doesn't mean that mass comes out of them. It is a characteristic of the hole not something the hole emits.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I might agree that in your analogy you are indeed creating a highly ordered end product. Unfortunately, the end product of Hawking Radiation is the exact opposite. You input highly structured, dissimilar material objects, and the result is uniformly dispersed, homogenized radiation. The differences are dissipated away. A universe of electrons, protons, and photons can result, when distributed in such a way that energy is pumped into a region, in emergent patterns in said region. Things like us, for instance. When everything is dissipated to uniform radiation, there is neither a gradient to drive, nor anything to be driven thereby. I'd want to say there is then nothing but background radiation, but I'm lost in terms of what background means without a foreground. At the limit, I'm not sure "time" itself would have meaning, though I assume that all through the approach it would just be losing, and never quite totally lose, meaning.

Also note: you had to put energy into your system to "magicly" convert the carbon into a diamond structure. Likewise, when I consume lunch, I'm feeding to maintain my equilibrium. Without that orderly, structured input of usable energy, I'd dissipate and disperse. If we had an external source of energy, we could perhaps likewise impose order on the Hawking Radiation and convert it into useful structures such as electrons and protons. Without such an external source, though, whatever that means, the future is (eventually) bleak.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Try this. You have a well organized study. Books are organized on shelves. Pencils and pens and blank paper are laid out on a desk. But no one is doing maid service, and over time wind blows in and disperses the neat stack of paper. An earthquake knocks over the books. If you come in and "haul out the garbage", it might look cleaner, but now ask, "how much work do i have to do to get back to the organized study mode?", which has become *much* harder since the volumes of Britannica are now missing.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[Anonymous Coward]

It goes in as a star or a chicken or a pistachio and comes out as random energy

I want something that does the opposite. When I push a button. Without the billions of years it normally takes.

star

Nebulous gas clouds

chicken

other chickens

pistachio

plants

next...

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[T.E.D.]

Everything that does anything also contributes to entropy. That's one of the more depressing facets of the Laws of Thermodynamics.

I had a(n awesome) physics professor who used to paraphrase the Laws of Thermodynamics as:

1. You can't win.
2. You can't break even.
3. You can't quit playing the game.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I think I sense a chicken/egg sort of paradox here. "Entropy is just the degree to which a system has moved from a higher to a lover potential." So you have defined entropy in terms of energy changes. Likewise, can't potential energy itself be defined (that is, the structured state from which said potential arises) in terms of entropy? Does a potential actualizing lead to entropy, or does the initial state (divided) and final state (difference "dispersed") merely describe an entropic process, with potentials being a manner of describing order yet to be dissipated? I dare suggest energy isn't more fundamental than entropy.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[Toonol]

Don't different black holes emit energy at different peak wavelengths, depending on their mass? If so, wouldn't that maintain temperature differentials, hence reduce entropy?

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[Dan Ost]

Actually, the Hawking radiation doesn't come from inside the black hole.

When a particle/anti-particle pair tunnels into existence at the edge of a black hole, for some reason, the anti-particle tunnels into existence inside the black hole and is immediately annihilated by an already existing particle in the black hole (thus reducing the mass of the black hole by one particle's worth). The particle that tunneled into existence outside the black hole spins off and is referred to as "Hawking Radiation".

The wikipedia article is excellent.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[maxwell demon]

Indeed, there may even be a way how information may leave a black hole. At least the author of this preprint claims so.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[ppc_digger]

Blackholes don't block.

Actually, they do if you get close enough.

That's one deadlock you're not getting out of!

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[maxwell demon]

Unless you are the Cosmic AC. :-)

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[DriedClexler]

Everything that comes into a black hole comes back out eventually via Hawking Radiation. It goes in as a star or a chicken or a pistachio and comes out as random energy, which is a pretty clear increase in entropy.

Exactly. Another way to think about it is this: the speed of light is the maximum speed information can travel. Since the escape velocity of a black hole is greater than the speed of light, information cannot escape either.

Because information cannot escape, it means you cannot infer what went into a black hole by looking at what comes out. (Note: information being "destroyed" in a black hole doesn't prevent you from e.g. keeping a record of what you tossed into a black hole. Once it goes inside, it won't somehow destroy your records, as I used to believe was the implication.)

So the Hawking radiation must be completely uncorrelated with what went into the black hole, except that the rate of radiation emission must depend on the temperature of the black hole (which would increase from turning objects into heat). This in turn means that to give the least information possible, Hawking radiation must be the lowest quality (highest entropy) form of energy in the universe.

And, if that doesn't make sense, just keep in mind that destruction of information is thermodynamically irreversible, so a black hole must increase entropy that way.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[LitelySalted]

I think an interesting question is "do black holes only increase entropy?"

Taken from Wikipedia on the definition of Hawking Radiation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation) , "...rotating black holes should create and emit particles.â This implies that a black hole must have an angular momentum associated with it in order to emit Hawking Radiation and thus a higher entropic state.

Now, let us take a classic example, a celestial body interacting with a black hole. For the purposes of argument, let us theoretically allow the planet to be at maximum entropy. That is, there is no useful energy in the system to allow for interaction. We will take the black hole to have a high amount of entropy, perhaps because it has not interacted with any matter in a good while.

By the conservation of angular momentum (since we discussed the black hole has to have angular momentum to emit Hawking Radiation), the matter from the celestial body will not simply be devoured by the black hole, but accumulated on what is known as an accretion disk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accretion_disk). Summarily, the accretion disk is transference of matter from one celestial body to a stronger gravitational brother (i.e. the black hole) whereby matter is siphoned from the less dense object to the denser object. The matter on the accretion disk is accelerated and becomes superheated through friction; in the process, X-rays and other forms of radiation are emitted.

Basically, we have gone from two high entropic states (inert planet and a black hole with little interaction) to a lower entropic state, because the energy in the planet was changed from a useless, uniform state, to a volatile state.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[Bigjeff5]

Except that black holes woudln't turn it in to a diamond, it would do the opposite. It would take your bag of sugar/salt and atomize it while burning it, leaving you with nothing but waste heat. That is a definite increase in entropy - if you think about it for a second you'll realize that all matter has a higher potential for entropy than all radiation, because it has more structure that can be broken down. Black holes are very good at breaking down structures.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[elashish14]

This isn't quite true. Entropy (S) is defined as k*ln(omega) where omega is the number of possible configurations of a given macrostate (ie. fixed pressure, chemical potential, etc.). However, the Gibb's free energy of a system (G) which typically defines whether a system will spontaneously relax to a given macrostate is given by H - TS. That said, a system will relax to that macrostate if the change in free energy (dG = dH - SdT) is negative.

Raising S by transforming to some given macrostate does not necessarily mean a lower G. You see this all the time in many solid-state mixtures. Mixing two elements will cause an increase in entropy, but also may increase in internally stored energy (endothermic mixing) so dH is positive as well as SdT. The result is that you get complex phase diagrams like this atoms dissociate into different phases withing the system lowering entropy but even further lowering enthalpy to reach a minimum G. Of course, when you raise temperature, S dominates so eventually we reach a monophase liquid system.

So to fix what you said, an increase in entropy is always an increase in 'disorder' (more possible microstates in a given macrostate) but this does not always guarantee that the system will spontaneously fall to that state.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[dissy]

"Order" and "disorder" are human perceptions, not states of matter and energy. snip
To you, which is more ordered: a bowl of cherries next to a glass of water, or a completely smooth blend of all of them?

Well, the cherries probably have a tiny bit of Iron in them, which is as ordered/stable as matter gets while still being matter.

As for the rest, both are disordered, with one being disordered and slightly disgusting to think about ;P

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[Artifakt]

Good explanation overall, but for the record, it seems highly unlikely that either a chicken or a pistachio has ever been consumed by a black hole, although it seems much more probable that some distant analogues of those two things somewhere have.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[Artifakt]

You'd better hurry to get a patent on the push button chicken.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[spokedoke]

Systems 'generate' entropy because that is the way entropy was defined at the time of invention. The point of the second law is that entropy has to move in the same single direction, and positive-increasing was picked to be that direction. Black holes might be one of the times that it may have been more intuitive to define entropy as negative-decreasing. Sorry that I didn't bother to write a wikipedia page so that I could have a citation, but Dehoff's Thermodynamics in Materials Science talks breifly about reasons that entropy should have been defined as being consumed instead of generated.

Relative to black holes, to my understanding the arrangement of matter at a singularity should have no physical meaning, which is probably your point. However, black holes have significant mass, and have corresponding processes that occur in and around them (i.e. gravity). These processes proceed in a specific direction, just like we are swirling in the giant toilet bowl towards the black hole at the center of our galaxy. As this occurs, entropy is increasing due to the affect of that black hole on all of us.

Whatever processes occur inside the black hole may have a significant contribution compared to the act of sucking up a whole galaxy, but I have no idea what is going on inside a black hole. It is quite possible that the universe after heat death will look very uninteresting, when all the galaxies and interacting black holes have swallowed up each other and entropy is maximized. Maybe there will just be one black hole sitting in nothing?

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[clarkcox3]

In the room cleaning example, you may have reduced the entropy in your room by ordering it, but you have still increased the overall entropy of the Universe. While cleaning the room, your body turned (ordered) food into (unordered) heat at a rate faster than if you had not been doing anything. The garbage can is less ordered. etc. Anything you do to make one thing more orderly will reduce the local entropy of that thing, but will increase the total entropy of the Universe. In the case of a black hole, you take something ordered (i.e. whatever fell into the black hole had *some* structure; it was matter made of atoms, or it was light made of photons vibrating at specific frequencies, etc.), and you remove that order from the Universe. eventually, that matter and energy renters the universe as random heat (i.e. Hawking radiation). So black holes essentially destroy information and order, which is the very definition of increasing entropy.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[glitch23]

Oh well, guess I should have payed more attention in class as a kid...

Ya think?

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[CTachyon]

Exactly. Another way to think about it is this: the speed of light is the maximum speed information can travel. Since the escape velocity of a black hole is greater than the speed of light, information cannot escape either.

Because information cannot escape, it means you cannot infer what went into a black hole by looking at what comes out. (Note: information being "destroyed" in a black hole doesn't prevent you from e.g. keeping a record of what you tossed into a black hole. Once it goes inside, it won't somehow destroy your records, as I used to believe was the implication.)

Interestingly, this is wrong, and Stephen Hawking lost a bet over it.

The Second Law is actually very tightly coupled to Shannon-style Information Entropy: if you knew enough information (as a fait accompli) about the current state of a system at equilibrium, you could successfully build a Maxwell's Demon that used that information to separate the system into hot and cold reservoirs, allowing you to cancel out the entropy of the system with your information's "negentropy" (as it's called). Learning the information in the first place causes your information entropy (i.e. correlation with the system, negentropy) to increase, which by physical necessity also causes your thermodynamic entropy to increase in tandem. This is why a Maxwell's Demon doesn't work: the entropy undone in using the information is always less than (or, in a perfect system, equal to) the entropy done while learning it. (If blind faith provided non-tautological and accurate information about the universe with better-than-random chance, then you could build a Maxwell's Demon that broke the Second Law -- and since the Second Law is inviolable, it must be the case that blind faith tells you nothing... except possibly tautologies if your brain uses reversible computing. If you think hard enough about it, it also disproves substance dualism.)

In the specific case of information entropy and black holes, it turns out that the information never crosses the event horizon, and thus never has to break the speed of light limits when leaving it. As modern physics and Stephen Hawking have both discovered, all the entropy of a black hole's formative mass/energy is encoded in two dimensions as ripples in the event horizon of the black hole. Black holes have also been discovered to be maximum-entropy objects in modern physics, containing the largest amount of entropy physically possible for the volume of space enclosed by the event horizon. (This has interesting implications on the nature of reality -- look up the anti-de Sitter/CFT correspondence for all sorts of 2D/3D weirdness, like the universe being equivalent to a 2D hologram.) When a quantum of Hawking Radiation emerges from the event horizon, it carries off precisely the amount of entropy equal to the entropy carried by the change in the surface area of the event horizon when expelling the quantum, thus maintaining the invariant that the black hole is a maximum-entropy object. Because "information entropy" is another way of saying "too random to predict ahead of time" -- that's what information is, by Shannon's definition of it -- the radiation looks quite random indeed. But that doesn't mean it's uncorrelated with the history of the black hole.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[evilbessie]

You were applying logic to something quantum in nature as Hawking Radiation requires particle/anti-particle pairs (I think this was Dirac who suggested these were being created all the time in space but am too lazy this morning to look it up) to be created and one half falling into the black hole and the other escaping. It's madness, madness I tell you.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[Anonymous Coward]

When a particle/anti-particle pair tunnels into existence at the edge of a black hole, for some reason, the anti-particle tunnels into existence inside the black hole and is immediately annihilated by an already existing particle in the black hole (thus reducing the mass of the black hole by one particle's worth).

Uh, but doesn't this annihilation produce a quantum of energy which can't escape the black hole and thus contributes to its total mass? Besides, at any given moment, roughly same amount of particles and antiparticles from random virtual pairs cross the "edge of black hole" and thus in total we should have equilibrium between the black hole and its immediate surroundings.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[DriedClexler]

I don't know what the Maxwell's Demon refutation has to do with what I posted. I agree with all of that, and am familiar with it. In fact, I've helped to promote that very link you gave about Engines of Cognition.

But anyway, I agree that perhaps I went too far in saying that no information escapes. Rather, the minimum possible information escapes. You can infer the total mass-energy that went into a black hole based on what comes out, but that's it. A black hole still removes all constraints on the degrees of freedom of a system that keep it from having the entropy that a black hole would. The degrees of freedom are constrained when e.g. the object has shape, a specific pattern of motion, remains a solid rather than a liquid, etc. We recognize such constraints as information.

So you would be able to know the energy of the shoe or chicken that went into the black hole, but any information differentiating that shoe from any other object with the same energy is gone.

And there's still no universal scientific consensus that Hawking won the bet.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[madcow_bg]

Actually, the Hawking radiation doesn't come from inside the black hole.

When a particle/anti-particle pair tunnels into existence at the edge of a black hole, for some reason, the anti-particle tunnels into existence inside the black hole and is immediately annihilated by an already existing particle in the black hole (thus reducing the mass of the black hole by one particle's worth). The particle that tunneled into existence outside the black hole spins off and is referred to as "Hawking Radiation".

The wikipedia article is excellent.

Yet you failed to grasp the actual idea.

It is a VIRTUAL particle/antiparticle pair that gets created out of nothing for a very short time. The pair annihilates in normal circumstances, releasing no energy since none was given in the first place. Strange concept really, but works mathematically.

However near the black hole one of the pair can escape and the other may not. Then the falling virtual particle annihilates with a real one, and the escaping one just escapes. By escaping it carries some of the energy of the black hole away.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[geekoid]

When it coems out it MAINTAINS the information of the particle.

Which is the cool bit.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[geekoid]

""Order" and "disorder" are human perceptions, not states of matter and energy."

no, that's not true.
We can determoine the order, but order exists.

the universe isn't a random thing, it is very ordered.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[CTachyon]

I don't know what the Maxwell's Demon refutation has to do with what I posted. I agree with all of that, and am familiar with it. In fact, I've helped to promote that very link you gave about Engines of Cognition.

My apologies, but have you followed through on the consequences? Information entropy and thermodynamic entropy are the same thing -- rather, the latter is a special case of the former -- and if black holes could permanently destroy information, then one could build a Maxwell's Demon by using a black hole to destroy the thermodynamic entropy gained in learning the particle velocities. Because Maxwell's Demon is impossible, black holes must preserve information. QED.

But anyway, I agree that perhaps I went too far in saying that no information escapes. Rather, the minimum possible information escapes. You can infer the total mass-energy that went into a black hole based on what comes out, but that's it. A black hole still removes all constraints on the degrees of freedom of a system that keep it from having the entropy that a black hole would. The degrees of freedom are constrained when e.g. the object has shape, a specific pattern of motion, remains a solid rather than a liquid, etc. We recognize such constraints as information.

Again, you're missing my point. All the information entropy is preserved, and every bit of it is present in the resulting Hawking Radiation: for each bit of information entropy that you observed falling into the black hole, there is one bit of information entropy trapped in the event horizon that you can predict better than chance. The information has been smeared and jumbled with all the other bits, but it is still in there, and it still correlates with the circumstances that led to the black hole's formation.

A human confusion is the idea that "information" has anything to do with "meaning". One bit of information allows you to correctly predict the answer to one yes/no question with equal odds. Nothing more. It requires more information to describe hot water than it does to describe cold water, but that doesn't mean the hot water is more meaningful. Bulk properties like shape, state of matter, etc. are very tiny bits of information, vastly outnumbered by the bits of information that exist closer to the atomic level. That means, if you smear and jumble the bits together, it's hard to find the ones that a human is interested in. That doesn't mean the bits ceased to exist -- any of them.

And, yes, the dust is still settling on this interpretation of black holes, but it's increasingly the dominant position among physicists. This is why I mentioned Stephen Hawking: as the original proponent of the "black holes destroy information" hypothesis, the fact that he was convinced otherwise by the evidence and recanted his old hypothesis in 2004 is extremely indicative of the mood of the field. There are still some unresolved questions, yes, but it's not obvious how to proceed: first we need to discover a coherent description of what "entropy" means (either thermodynamic or informational) in a Quantum Mechanical context, because classical entropy doesn't have a sane interpretation in QM.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[DriedClexler]

With all due respect, I still think the mistake is on your end, in that you seem to equate entropy, information, and informational entropy.

Entropy refers to the logarithm of the number of possible states a system could be in, based on what you can observe about it. (And of course to fully generalize it, you actually sum over the probability times log of the inverse of probability, which is Shannon entropy, to account for states not being equiprobable.)

Information, however, is the opposite of entropy: the more you know about a system (i.e. the more information you have about it), the less entropy it has (because you've reduced the number of states it could possibly be in -- that's the point Less Wrong makes about how knowing more about particles makes them colder.)

The Maxwell's Demon refutation shows that *entropy* cannot be destroyed (summed over all the universe), including informational entropy. But *information* can be destroyed -- by its conversion into entropy, or increase in the number of possible states it can be in. (In the example, after using the knowledge the demon had, the mutual *information* between the demon and the system is indeed destroyed.) What physicists warn cannot happen is destruction of entropy: collapsing mutliple states into one state, which would violate Liouville's Theorem.

Because entropy represents the number of states something can be in (from an observer's perspective), it represents the maximum information that could potentially be stored in it, assuming you could somehow retrieve it (by identifying *which* of those states it's in). But this still does not mean information can't be destroyed. If a solid object has a shape, then many of its degrees of freedom are constrained, and so it has lower entropy than if it were a gas. Once converted to a gas, that information about its shape is gone -- the object no longer contains information about its shape, and it can't be recovered except by e.g. using other media to store the shape.

When a black hole converts the shoe into Hawking radiation, it removes all degrees of freedom that make the shoe have the form of a shoe rather than some formless gaseous blog. And from that random Hawking radiation, you can't extract the shape back out. So this statement is just confused:

All the information entropy is preserved, and every bit of it is present in the resulting Hawking Radiation

Entropy *increases*, while information is not preserved. All that you can predict is that it had m*c^2 worth of energy added to it, but you cannot know anything else about the shoe -- it has been converted to a state of maximal entropy, no longer having its DoFs constrained -- information -- that contained the information of it being a shoe.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[CTachyon]

With all due respect, I still think the mistake is on your end, in that you seem to equate entropy, information, and informational entropy.

Entropy refers to the logarithm of the number of possible states a system could be in, based on what you can observe about it. (And of course to fully generalize it, you actually sum over the probability times log of the inverse of probability, which is Shannon entropy, to account for states not being equiprobable.)

Correct.

Information, however, is the opposite of entropy: the more you know about a system (i.e. the more information you have about it), the less entropy it has (because you've reduced the number of states it could possibly be in -- that's the point Less Wrong makes about how knowing more about particles makes them colder.)

Correct, with the caveat that you're only hinting at the underlying idea. Entropy is measured relative to a frame of reference (a closed system), just as position and velocity are measured relative to a frame of reference (an inertial/non-accelerating frame in Newtonian physics and SR).

The Maxwell's Demon refutation shows that *entropy* cannot be destroyed (summed over all the universe), including informational entropy. But *information* can be destroyed -- by its conversion into entropy, or increase in the number of possible states it can be in. (In the example, after using the knowledge the demon had, the mutual *information* between the demon and the system is indeed destroyed.) What physicists warn cannot happen is destruction of entropy: collapsing mutliple states into one state, which would violate Liouville's Theorem.

Wrong emphasis: *mutual* information, not mutual *information*. "Mutual information" is a special case of the broader category of "information". Some instances of *mutual* information even belong to the restricted and rarefied subcategory of *meaningful* mutual information, i.e. mutual information that human mental algorithms are capable of making direct use of. But, again, this has nothing to do with the Shannon definition of information, which makes no claims as to whether or not the information is meaningful [1].

Why am I emphasizing the word "mutual" in all of this? Because the mutual information is a property of the closed system itself, not of either component! If two components of a closed system are correlated, it doesn't mean the equality of entropy and information is broken, it just means that they cannot be fully examined in isolation from each other.

If you were to examine each component in isolation, as if each one existed inside a closed system that excluded the other, you would dutifully arrive at an entropy figure for each one. If you then incorrectly summed the apparent entropy of these two components, as if the fictitious isolation actually existed, the sum would double-count that portion of the entropy which is correlated between the two parts. The entropy figures you calculated were only apparent entropy, not true entropy. Instead, you have to subtract out the degree to which their entropies are correlated — that is, their "negentropy" or "mutual information" — to arrive at the correct figure for the closed system as a whole. But the negentropy does not physically exist: it is a mathematical artifact of your attempt to consider each component in isolation, just as Newtonian centrifugal force is an artifact of a non-inertial reference frame. The negentropy "exists" only because it cancels out your first mathematical artifact: when you tried to consider the parts independently of their correlation, you invented "apparent entropy" figures that had nothing to do with the "true entropy" figure (relative to the larger system in which the two components are correlated).

It's enlightening to think about entropy as being the physical representation of "history". If an irreversible action happens, entropy is the historical record that we exist in

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[DriedClexler]

Okay, I agree with what you just said, so let me now take it back to your claim that even after the shoe is thrown into the black hole, you as an observer gain some predictive power over the Hawking radiation.

First of all, you are correct that the mutual information is an artifact of considering the systems together rather than in isolation, and that it must be subtracted to find the total entropy of the universe.

Furthermore, if you are able to transcend the perspective of an observer in the universe, you would see both entropy and information being conserved as a consequence of Liouville's Theorem, due to the conservation of phase space. However, as the LW link you gave explained, if you want to draw a *smooth boundary* over the squiggly phase space volume, you will necessarily characterize many more states as being possible than really are, giving the appearance of an increase in entropy, which is how any in-universe observer experiences it.

Applying this back to the question of the black hole: you are correct that there is a sense in which the information in the shoe is preserved, but only from the perspective of a timeless being outside the universe. From the perspective of beings in the universe, it has destroyed all mutual information that such observers would have with the shoe, *except* for knowledge that it was "something" with a certain level of mass-energy. This destruction of mutual information means an increase the universe's entropy (again, from the perspective of anyone within the universe).

The Hawking radiation would therefore not tell you anything about the object thrown in that would tell you it was a shoe, rather than something else with the same mass energy. So yes, you get some predictive power from that, but you would not get any predictive power that you would have from knowing anything about its shape, etc.

Are we in agreement on this?

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[CTachyon]

I think we're basically on the same page now.

Essentially, *if* we knew the laws of physics in sufficient detail to build an accurate simulation — i.e. had a working quantum gravity theory — *and* we could probe all the entropy of the black hole to insert into the simulation — an feat that makes quantum gravity look like high school algebra — *then* we could build the simulation and run it backward (yay time-reversible physics) to figure out how the black hole was created, including the fact that one of the formative objects was indeed a shoe. Likewise, if we were to study *all* the outflowing Hawking radiation, we could model the emission of the radiation, and from that a model of the black hole that emitted it, and from that a model of the objects that formed it, shoe included.

This is of course a "spherical cow" thought experiment because of the immense amounts of entropy involved in a star-sized black hole: just the RAM in the simulating computer would necessarily occupy a volume greater than star-sized. But for a sufficiently small and short-lived black hole — for instance, one formed by colliding a proton and antiproton with the correct kinetic energy — the numbers suddenly become much more reasonable. It's conceivable that we could perform the experiment on a microscopic black hole and arbitrarily approach that limit of understanding in our models, even if we could never truly reach it.

(At this point, the idea reminds me a bit of X-ray crystallography: in crystallography, the image generated is a fuzzy, imperfect view of the spatial Fourier transform of a physical crystalline structure, with sharp lines indicating the distance between repeating units in the lattice (i.e. the spatial frequency). I imagine that interpreting the Hawking radiation from a microscopic lab-created black hole would be a roughly similar experience — with the exception that humans can, with practice, glean meaning from a spatial Fourier transform just by looking at it, whereas I doubt a similar thing would be possible with a pictoral representation of entropy in Hawking radiation.)

That said, even if we never did achieve such an experiment with microscopic black holes, the entropy continues to be information even when we're not looking at it, or even when we have no ability to derive meaning from it — which was my original point in my first reply. Though I've definitely found this to be a useful and thought-provoking discussion.

Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ?

[DriedClexler]

I've definitely found this to be a useful and thought-provoking discussion.

Same here. Thanks for the replies. :-)

Any astrophysics geeks out there

[Anonymous Coward]

What would happen if we found the smallest black hole and started propelling celestial bodies, i.e. planets, into it. Could we dump planets into the black hole indefinitely? Will the black hole just continue to gain mass and radius?

TIA

Re:Any astrophysics geeks out there

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait till the LHC runs at full power. I am guessing around Dec 2012.

Re:Any astrophysics geeks out there

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I guess that the smaller the black hole, the more problems you would have when trying to squeeze a planet into it.

Re:Any astrophysics geeks out there

[Anonymous Coward]

By those criteria you must consider ALL questions insulting. Try not to be so sensitive.

Re:Any astrophysics geeks out there

[ArcCoyote]

being haughty to AC is like shouting at a tree because a squirrel annoyed you.

Re:Any astrophysics geeks out there

[bhagwad]

I don't see anything wrong with the intent of the question. Maybe he read it and found it too complex. Maybe he didn't understand it at all. Maybe he didn't read it and thought Slashdotters could give the best answer - in any case, no one's forcing you to answer his question.

Fourth Law

[T.E.D.]

I propose a Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: There's more entropy than you think there is.

Re:Fourth Law

[salahx]

Fourth Law of Thermdynamics: There's always more entropy then you think there is, even when you take into account the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics.

I still wouldn't worry about the heat death of the universe, though, unlike those in the aforementioned link.

Re:Fourth Law

[LotsOfPhil]

There already are four laws of thermodynamics.

Re:Fourth Law

[anorlunda]

Good one T.E.D. I'll remember that one and use it some day.

Re:Fourth Law

[Aphoxema]

Fourth Law of Thermdynamics: There's always more entropy then you think there is, even when you take into account the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics.

I still wouldn't worry about the heat death of the universe, though, unlike those in the aforementioned link.

You forgot to recursively account for the fourth law, you fool! The death of the universe will now be exponentially sooner every moment that passes!

Re:Fourth Law

[PakProtector]

There already are four laws of thermodynamics.

Just because there are four of something does not necessitate that one of them is the fourth.

There are four laws of Thermodynamics. One of them is the 0th.

Re:Fourth Law

[Anonymous Coward]

They start at zero though.

Re:Fourth Law

[navyjeff]

The Fourth Law of Thermodynamics exists and states:

If the heat is on someone else, it's not on you.

It's useful for staying out of trouble.

Re:Fourth Law

[Anonymous Coward]

Entropy? In MY universe?

It's more likely than you think...

Re:Fourth Law

[T.E.D.]

I always found the last phrase of Hofstadter's law to be an unnesecary crutch for the logically impaired. Plus it removes most of its punch. I didn't feel like making the same mistake myself.

Having spent better part of the last decade engaged in a sysephian struggle to clean a house inhabited by three children and two working adults, you might notice that I've given this issue a lot of thought already.

Re:Fourth Law

[T.E.D.]

Actually, proposing Fourth Laws is sort of a minor industry. There are tons of them out there. This one is just mine.

My problem with the one you list is that it presupposses that the Laws are all about heat. (Thermodynamics, right?) However, to me they have always been all about entropy. So for my money, any real Fourth Law would have to say something new about entropy.

Re:Fourth Law

[Bigjeff5]

Having spent better part of the last decade engaged in a sysephian struggle to clean a house inhabited by three children and two working adults...

If you think that's impressive, I recently organized my house without throwing much of anything away. It doesn't sound that impressive at first, but it's about like a super-massive black hole suddenly spitting out a solar system all orderly and primed for life.

Re:Fourth Law

[T.E.D.]

Not throwing anything away just wouldn't be cleaning. When I get serious about it (twice a year or so) I typically throw away two entire lawn bags full of trash, broken toy pieces, and fast food "prizes" just from the living room and dining room alone.

Re:Fourth Law

[Workaphobia]

Great. Now I have to remember how to construct a fix point suspended environment to do physics. *Looks around* Anyone seen the Y-combinator?

Re:Fourth Law

[jpate]

If you can think of it, there is entropy of it

Re:Fourth Law

[ConceptJunkie]

Having spent better part of the last decade engaged in a sysephian struggle to clean a house inhabited by three children and two working adults, you might notice that I've given this issue a lot of thought already.

Us, too. Although we have four kids. We're losing to entropy. How about you?

gosh

[phantomfive]

Things are just falling apart all over!

Re:gosh

[Aphoxema]

Things are just falling apart all over!

On the contrary; things are falling together.

Re:gosh

[AnotherUsername]

Things are just falling apart all over!

On the contrary; things are falling together.

Oooohh!!!! Burn!!!

Re:gosh

[Plugh]

"Free Countries"... ha! That's a good one.

As if a *country* could make you *free*

discovery

[unjedai]

Universe Has 100x More Entropy Than We Thought

Scientists must have discovered my daughters room.

Re:discovery

[royallthefourth]

Universe Has 100x More Entropy Than We Thought

Scientists must have discovered my daughters room.

No, but the football team sure has!

Re:discovery

[macraig]

Was it attacked by a blender?

Re:discovery

[Archangel Michael]

She's eight, you insensitive clod!

Re:discovery

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Football plays and players clearly show that simple bodies can form spontaneous order. This result was found to be in direct opposition to the prevailing dogma of the second law of teenodynamics; That the disorder of a teenagers life, property, and living space will always increase over time. This breakthrough is thought to have bearing on the great problem of "Teenage dysfunction death" which asks why when teenagers continuously degenerate over the course of their teen years, so they eventually mature into productive and stable adults.

Scientists urge caution in relation to these findings. "Current teenage theory leaves many questions unanswered", said Professor Alex Tweed of the national institute for Juvenile Entropy studies, "However, one result does not explain all the data on its own. For example, we know that there are quite a few adults who never become stable or mature. For example, many can be found making tasteless jokes about peoples' daughters on web forums, and other can be found modding up those same comments. This field will require more research before a definitive understanding of human maturity is achieved."

Re:discovery

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, then we should rephrase that to: Roman Polanski certainly has!

Re:discovery

[royallthefourth]

All I was trying to say is that she's a terrible quarterback


because she's constantly getting sacked

Re:discovery

[Knara]

It could be the Pee-Wee football team.

Re:discovery

[Anonymous Coward]

Never stopped me before.

Re:discovery

[Anonymous Coward]

I am going to write personally to the NSF to stop all further funding for such "researches".

Re:discovery

[mcrbids]

Amazing!

You managed to pull a steaming, raw, pile from your backside, serve it up with buzzword compliance, and make it all the way to +5 insightful.

My hats off to you, sir. Excellent trolling. Excellent!

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why does nagios keep telling me the entropy on my server is out?

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

[abbynormal brain]

So, it looks like we are closer to the novel than previously thought? And rather than witnessing the "end of the univers" (with dinner and wine) we are observing the cleaning crew (black holes) picking up the ... er ... mess?

People of the universe, please attend carefully.

[GMFTatsujin]

The message that follows is of vital importance to you all...

MWAHAHAHAHAHA!

Second Law of Thermodynamics

[royallthefourth]

Since entropy is far more prevalent than we once thought, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is even more important than before.

This means, of course, that evolution is impossible qed

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[Anonymous Coward]

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is: You can't win. What has that to do with evolution?

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[Jesus_666]

Granted, Evolution isn't the nicest PIM software on the market but impossible? I think that's a bit harsh a verdict.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[mrsquid0]

No, "you can't win" is the first law of thermodynamics. The second law is: you can't break even. The third law is: you can't quit the game.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[Gotung]

You fail at understanding both the 2nd law and evolution.

The Earth is not an isolated system.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[Anonymous Coward]

The third law is: you can't quit the game.

I lost the game.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[drizek]

If there is 100x more entropy in the universe that means there is 100x more stuff in the universe that isn't God, making the existence of God 100x less likely.

we're doomed anyway

[prgrmr]

Because of Neutron decay we've only 10^49 years anyway.

Re:we're doomed anyway

[joelholdsworth]

Hey I drew that diagram! Small world.

Re:we're doomed anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't we just as easily make more Neutrons anyway, even at our pretty amateur level of quantum understanding?

Same goes for all the other particles.

Re:we're doomed anyway

[Cow Jones]

Because of Neutron decay we've only 10^49 years anyway.

I sense a fascinating new doomsday scenario, but unfortunately my particle physics are lacking. I can neither understand the diagram you linked to, nor mentally translate the Wikipedia article into anything suitably threatening.

I would be much obliged if you could explain (in a layman's terms) why we should all be afraid of neutron decay (never mind the 10^49 years, it sounds horrible already).

CJ

Re:we're doomed anyway

[prgrmr]

from here: http://www.benbest.com/science/standard.html "A free neutron (a neutron not in an atomic nucleus) has a mean lifetime of about 15 minutes, typically decaying into a proton, an electron and an electron antineutrino"

The 10^49 years accounts for the time it takes for all the stars in all the Universe to reach whichever final state they are destined for, based upon their size, and then go through neutron decay. I got this from an essay done in the 60's by physicist whose name I cannot recall right now, from the book "The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics"

OMG, We're all gonna die!!!

[the_rajah]

Oh, wait... that's going to happen anyway.

Re:OMG, We're all gonna die!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Truth is on the scale of time of the Universal you are not much different from dead now.

(Oh my God, this sarcasm is so Doug Adam! I killed me!)

What's the big deal?

[kalirion]

FTA: A black hole is the entropy champ because there are myriad ways for all the material that has fallen into it to be arranged microscopically while the black hole retains the same numerical values for its observable properties -- charge, mass and spin.

So a black hole's entropy = "we don't know by looking what's inside"? How exactly does that contribute to the heat death of the universe? If there was a million times more entropy in black holes, how would it effect existance outside of black holes? Is there a background process constantly checking the total amount of entropy, ready to reboot the universe when it reaches an arbitrary level?

Example: blood alcohol content.

Sure, a .5% BAC is lethal, but only if its in the blood that circulates through your body. Say you had a large organ you do not use with its own blood flow, and occasionally a tiny bit of blood from your main blood stream enters that organ and is never seen again. And now you find out that the blood inside the organ gets converted to 200 proof alcohol. This messes with your average BAC, but does it make you die any sooner? You will die of blood loss eventually, and no matter what the BAC inside the organ is, it will not speed things up!

Re:What's the big deal?

[kalirion]

Yeah, should've used "affect" instead of "effect" (preempting grammar nazis).

Sure there are other grammar errors tho.

Re:What's the big deal?

[xednieht]

Can you rephrase the example with pot? The 200 proof .5% BAC stuff confuses the hell out of me.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Aladrin]

Should have used a car analogy.

It doesn't matter how much dirt is in the gas in the can in the back of the car if the gas in the car's tank is pure. Siphoning the car's gas into the gas can isn't going to make the car die, either.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

But that dirt in the back of the car has weight, just as the black hole.

in the car analogy it gets less total distance because of the extra weight, Same with the universe, If more matter is locked up in black holes, Obviously there is less matter outside of the black holes. Therefore sooner heat death.

Re:What's the big deal?

[mea37]

I'm afraid the BAC analogy really isn't appilcable. You're describing an impurity which builds up to a critical level to "kill" the host, and pointing out that if you could sequester the impurity the sequestered quantity wouldn't matter. Entropy is not an impurity that is slowly building up to eventually cause the universe to break; it's nothing like that at all.

I find it conceptually confusing to think about entropy as a finite/positive quantity. The way it's defined mathematically, of course, it is ... but at a physical level there's just something backwards about it.

Entropy describes the degree to which energy in a system isn't usable. If you consider as a closed system a bit of ice in a glass of hot water: the heat in the water is "useful" in this system. It will melt the ice, and then equalize the temperature of the water from the melted ice to that of the rest of the water. (That may not seem "useful"; I suppose the point is other processes could capture and use the energy for other ends.)

But, as the ice melts and the water temperature equalizes (or as any other process fuels itself by accelerating this process), you don't run out of energy (which is constant) - but you do run out of "usability" of energy. When your system contains only water at a fixed temperature, there is no way to make heat flow, and all of teh energy in the system is useless. (Again, this assumesa closed system.)

So the point with black holes is, they aren't sequestering entropy to keep it from harming the universe in some way (like your BAC example); if anything they sequester energy and keep it from interacting with the rest of the universe, rendering it useless. (Not sure how Hawking radiation fits in that analysis, though.)

Re:What's the big deal?

[kalirion]

So the point with black holes is, they aren't sequestering entropy to keep it from harming the universe in some way (like your BAC example); if anything they sequester energy and keep it from interacting with the rest of the universe, rendering it useless.

If that's all it is, than basically what this article is saying is that "black holes account for 100 times more of the total mass of our universe than we thought", instead of "a black hole of a given mass has 100 times more entropy than we thought"? I can buy that. But then what does this have to do with "having no idea how stuff is arranged inside black holes?"

Re:What's the big deal?

[mea37]

Perhaps the idea of "sequestering" energy is an over-simplification.

I think rather than "black holes account for 100x the mass we thought", they may actually mean "mass (energy) in black holes is 100x more useless than we thought".

In other words, the sequestering of energy in a black hole isn't absolute; to the extent that we can observe properties of the black hole that are a result of the energy it contains, we are interacting with said energy. E.g. we could in theory use a black hole's gravity as a power source, though we'd do so at the expense of throwing more mass into the black hole.

But to the extent that those observations are limited, so is the ability of the energy in the black hole to interact with the rest of the universe. A black hole could contain pockets of hot and cold matter at a very microscopic level (analogous to the ice cube in hot water I talked about before), but if we can't externally observe those hot and cold pockets then, from the point of view of the outside universe, they might as well not exist. The black hole could contain configurations of energy that would be "useful" in most contexts, but those are indistinguishable from configurations of energy that are not.

Re:What's the big deal?

[reverseengineer]

So a black hole's entropy = "we don't know by looking what's inside"? How exactly does that contribute to the heat death of the universe? If there was a million times more entropy in black holes, how would it effect existance outside of black holes? Is there a background process constantly checking the total amount of entropy, ready to reboot the universe when it reaches an arbitrary level?

All reasonable questions. From how I understand it, the idea that the universe has a maximum possible entropy (to which black holes contribute) depends on the correctness of the holographic universe theory. The holographic universe notion is all about how the universe we observe is really a projection from a two dimensional event horizon. Central to the holographic universe is the holographic bound, which states that the total entropy of the universe is constrained by the surface area of the universe event horizon. That means that the entropy of black holes must be figured into the total entropy of the universe. What the parent is really assuming is the same thing that Stephen Hawking originally assumed with the "black hole information paradox"- that when ensembles of particles fall into a black hole, they are carrying information about their total accesible microstates- their entropy- in with them, but all a black hole ever spits out is featureless Hawking radiation. If that information disappears, it implies that black holes can reduce the entropy of the rest of the universe.

The holographic principle answers that objection by proposing that Hawking radiation isn't really featureless- it is modified by the event horizon, which contains the information. Instead of being an entropy vacuum, a black hole is an object with maximal entropy per volume. That entropy very slowly bleeds out into the rest of the universe through Hawking radiation.

If the holographic universe idea is true, this means that the entire universe is headed for a point where it reaches the maximal entropy per volume. This would be the heat death of the universe, because it would be impossible to do useful work. Finding out that black holes have the lion's share of the entropy means that there is less possible work available in the rest of the universe, since the black hole share counts towards the total. Of course, the universe couldn't reach a true thermodynamic heat death until all the black holes had evaporated (the time estimates for this process tend to be rather large), but that would be small comfort for anyone around after all the stars burn out.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

(Not sure how Hawking radiation fits in that analysis, though.)

Short answer, as best as I can think it through - Hawking radiation is the useless high-entropy energy being released from the black hole. It's too long-wavelength to do anything useful with it. (Another way of thinking of it - a black hole's effective temperature, defined by the amount of Hawking radiation emitted by it, is so low that it doesn't have a significant temperature gradient with the rest of the universe, so you can't get work done by allowing heat to flow between them as, say, between the boiler and cooling tower of a power plant.)

Re:What's the big deal?

[kalirion]

But didn't we already know all that? What ways did they think the black hole's energy/mass could be utilized that are now ruled out? Seems all they're saying is "there is even less information we have about the insides of a black hole than we thought, and ignorance=entropy".

Re:What's the big deal?

[mea37]

I'm not sure, actually. Keep in mind a lot of things about black holes aren't known (or at least there isn't universal agreement about them).

We are but children...

[Anonymous Coward]

in a cosmic playground. We have barely wandered outside our local nursery, but maintain an ego the size of a galaxy. May the future discoveries put a proper perspective on all of mankind.

Dark Energy

[russotto]

With the "news" (circa 1998) that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing, it seems to me that worries about the heat death of the universe should be put on hold. There's something (currently labeled "dark energy") about cosmology that we simply lack sufficient understanding of.

Re:Dark Energy

[locallyunscene]

With the "news" (circa 1998) that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing, it seems to me that worries about the heat death of the universe should be put on hold. There's something (currently labeled "dark energy") about cosmology that we simply lack sufficient understanding of.

Yes, the president should select the "Astrophysics Center" and move the "heat death" slider to 0 and the "dark energy" slider to 100. We must find the chosen one to combat this "dark energy" threat!

Re:Dark Energy

[DarkMage0707077]

I thought that Dark Energy was supposedly unknowable by design?

Re:Dark Energy

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

nah. Karl Rove is very much knowable.

Re:Dark Energy

[Sponge Bath]

the president should select the "Astrophysics Center" and move the "heat death" slider to 0 and the "dark energy" slider to 100.

I've seen this in the Oval office, it's actually just an Etch-a-Sketch.

Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no scientist, but this doesn't seem to bode well for the theory of evolution.

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no scientist, but this doesn't bode well for molecules.

Re:Hmm...

[Fujisawa Sensei]

I'm no scientist, but this doesn't seem to bode well for the theory of evolution.

Perhaps you haven't noticed, but there's a big energy source pumping low entropy energy into the earth. Its called the sun.

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no scientist, but this doesn't seem to bode well for the theory of evolution.

Obvious troll is obvious.

Is this really a problem?

[rwa2]

The universe is still expanding in all directions at the speed of light, then the entropy per unit volume will still stay low enough to be habitable, right? Or is the problem that the rate of increase in volume will not keep pace, since it takes longer and longer for the universe to double in volume at a constant rate of expansion?

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

The expansion of the Universe actually works against us. There is only so much energy in the Universe (i.e. matter and energy). As the Universe expands, the energy is spread over greater distances, making it harder to extract as much energy from a certain amount of space as you used to be able to do. When the energy is spread to thin to support life, it's called the cold death of the Universe.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Irontail]

I don't think volume really factors into the heat death situation. As long as there's a finite and fixed amount of energy in the universe, a fixed amount of entropy is required to cause heat death. Now, I haven't read that much on heat death, so I could be quite wrong. I hope someone will correct me if so.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are thinking of Cold Death. Seems we are dying either way.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[mrdoogee]

COLD DEATH? No such thing.

No sir. "Cold" is a human construct. There is only heat, and absence of heat. That is why they call it "heat death" since the universe's heat (or to be more scientific, ENERGY) eventually reduces to 0, thereby causing the universe to "die."

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Max_W]

Where the universe is expanding? Into another universe? Into emptiness? Into nothing? Is there any rational explanation? Or is it unknown yet?

Re:Is this really a problem?

[FooAtWFU]

It doesn't matter how much space you have if there's nothing in it but the same old cosmic microwave background radiation in all directions.

Entropy isn't poison: it's just uselessness.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where the universe is expanding? Into another universe? Into emptiness? Into nothing? Is there any rational explanation? Or is it unknown yet?

It's expanding into dimensions beyond our own. Think about inflating a balloon - if the surface is a two dimensional environment, then blowing it up forces it through the third dimension. We're in the same boat.

I wonder what would happen if we bumped into another universe though. Could that explain quasars and other hyperenergetic phenomena?

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Knara]

Cold Death vs Heat Death

Re:Is this really a problem?

[rwa2]

Well, the classic thermo problem is that you have a box full of gas. Suddenly, you double the volume of the box - in the example you open a partition into another box next to it, and the gas expands to fill the new volume. You can harness that energy gradient to do some useful work. Afterwards, the gas is fully mixed between the initial and final volumes of the box, the entropy is maxed out, and you can't really get anything out of it anymore.

If the universe were constrained to a constant volume, we probably would be in heat death already, since everything would have mixed. But because the volume keeps expanding, the universe has maintained lots of lumps and clusters of high energy and low energy, and a lot of which is all clustered into stringy bits, so you can still take advantage of energy gradients to do things. As long as there is empty space next to filled, space, there's lower entropy.

You could argue that the purpose of life is to decrease local entropy per unit volume (at the expense of higher global entropy)... The insides of stars are pretty interesting, but only on a scale of several thousand miles. However, life forms will find an energy gradient - heat and radiation from the sun - and use that to organize molecules to make things pretty interesting on a scale of nanometers and micrometers.

All of this activity generates high-entropy waste heat, but as long as there's somewhere for all of this heat to go (radiated off into empty space) then we're locally safe from heat death, where we just turn to a uniform gas or plasma stew.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Chris Burke]

No sir. "Cold" is a human construct. There is only heat, and absence of heat. That is why they call it "heat death" since the universe's heat (or to be more scientific, ENERGY) eventually reduces to 0, thereby causing the universe to "die."

Aside from "cold death" being a real but different concept... In "heat death" the amount of energy in the universe will not be 0, it will be exactly the same amount as it is today because energy is conserved. It will just be unusable for any ongoing processes like life or stellar fusion.

And sure, "cold" is basically a human construct, but so are positive charge carriers in circuits. It's still useful to talk about. While the existence of absolute zero means (unlike in circuits) you can't universally replace "heat" with "cold", when talking about temperature gradients and heat flow you can, just flip the sign and now it's "cold flow". Pointless mental exercise, but hey, thanks to Benjamin Franklin all us EEs have had to get used to doing it. :P

Re:Is this really a problem?

[dissy]

There is only heat, and absence of heat. That is why they call it "heat death" since the universe's heat (or to be more scientific, ENERGY) eventually reduces to 0, thereby causing the universe to "die."

Practically yes, from the point of view of any given photon at that time.

But the universe will have the exact same amount of energy as right now. What will happen is the distance between any given two photons (or any other particle for that matter) will be further apart from each other, and moving even further apart from each other, faster than the speed of light.

This means after the moment of heat death, if two particles of energy are on a head on course with each other, moving at the speed of light, they will not be moving fast enough to ever get any closer to each other.
In fact, two particles traveling towards each other at the speed of light, will make them appear to be moving further and further away.

This is due to the universe expansion, which at some point (assuming heat death is actually what will happen of course) means the space between *ALL* particles will be greater than the distance they can travel towards any other at the speed of light.

Thus, from the point of view of a particle, be it energy or a component of matter (long since ripped apart and not able to get close enough for the strong nuclear force to kick in and form an atom), it will appear there is no more energy at all, since all of it will be so far away the effects or interactions to happen.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Tacvek]

Neither the heat nor the energy can reduce to zero. The temperature of the universe will approach absolute zero, but it cannot be actually zero. What does happen is that the amount of energy that can be converted to useful work will reach zero. The amount of energy is constant (as long as mass is considered a form of energy, see: conservation of mass/energy).

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Tacvek]

AIUI, The universe is not expanding into anything. It is strictly equivalent to the universe remaining the same size, and everything in the universe shrinking. Since anything that we would use to measure would be shrinking too, it has the appearance of the universe expanding. Things close enough are held together by gravity, which is why the measuring stick does not stay the same size, but shrinks at the same rate as the individual particles. If this were not the case, the measuring stick would not be shrinking, only its particles would be, which would result in the universe appearing to remain the same size.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[citizenr]

The universe is still expanding in all directions at the speed of light

Are you saying my ear is getting further away from my eye at the speed of light just as I write this?

Re:Is this really a problem?

[strikethree]

"The universe is still expanding in all directions at the speed of light, then the entropy per unit volume will still stay low enough to be habitable, right?"

No. You do not add entropy, just as you do not add dark. The expansion of space actually increases entropy as entropy can be characterized by a lack of usable energy (kind of like how dark is defined as a lack of light). Energy can only be extracted from a difference in potential (hot/cold, positive/negative, etc). Entropy "places" everything at the same potential.

strike

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

The universe is assumed to expand at the speed of light, because nothing can exceed it, and wherever you go, there you are.

This expansion can be observed by the red shift in distand galaxies and cepheids, which is assumed to be due to the Doppler effect.

Assuming the universe is of constant size, on account that there is no outside, so nothing to expand into, we must assume everything in the universe is getting smaller, which has interesting implications for time (conservation of impuls). The red shift is still observable, but now due to differences in scale (and time).

I wish I knew a way to tell those two kinds of red shift apart.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[ShakaUVM]

Any time work is done, S increases, right?

Is the converse true? Is it true that any time you see S increase, there is a possibility for usable work to be extracted?

It's something that has been bothering me recently.

Death by Entropy, the Movie

[LitelySalted]

This is going to be the next mass destruction movie that Hollywood makes (they seem to be out of Natural disasters). Quick! We must fight entropy! Arrange the crayons in your box alphabetically and color.

It would be right up there with Speed 3, Glacier of Doom.

Re:Death by Entropy, the Movie

[wastedlife]

Stephen King already wrote a novella about obsessive compulsive disorder saving the world. According to the wiki entry they made an animation of it in 25 segments, each running a minute and a half long.

Entropy source

[argent]

So if I connected my server's entropy generator to a black hole I'd never have to type a page full of gibberish to generate my SSH key pair again!

10^104 - 10^102 = 10^2

[circletimessquare]

so hire 100 maxwell's demons

with the economy they probably need the work anyways

no big deal, problem solved

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon

Re:10^104 - 10^102 = 10^2

[maxwell demon]

I don't work for bad-math people! :-)

10^104 - 10^102 = 9.9*10^103

What?

[Seth Kriticos]

So does this mean that the time it takes to evenly spread the matter / light which is not swallowed by the black holes is shorter than we thought previously?

I read through all the articles now, and I still don't have a clue.

What than, will the big black holes (without mass surrounding them) merge to a new gigantic super massive singularity effectively reseting the universe and causing the next big bang, and the next round?

I'm so confused..

Re:What?

[Virtucon]

No, it means that ultimately the Universe pales in comparison to government. Within any bureaucracy, super massive singularities can effectively stop time and reset the universe whenever they want.
I've said it again and again, if scientists were to just model a government organization end-to-end, they could then apply that model to the rest of the Universe with slightly smaller scale.

Re:What?

[Linker3000]

I think it means you still shouldn't cross the streams.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

What than, will the big black holes (without mass surrounding them) merge to a new gigantic super massive singularity effectively reseting the universe and causing the next big bang, and the next round?

Gawd I hope so. The universe could use a reboot to install all those updates that have been queued up.

Re:Fourth Law - Murphy's Law

[kakrofoon]

Wouldn't that be Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics?

A couple of questions

[maroberts]

As black holes evaporate due to Hawking radiation, does that mean that they defeat the laws of thermodynamics in some way? Next question. Would quantum mechanics offer any explanation as to why we are less close to heat death than we think we should be?

Re:A couple of questions

[osu-neko]

As black holes evaporate due to Hawking radiation, does that mean that they defeat the laws of thermodynamics in some way?

No.

Next question. Would quantum mechanics offer any explanation as to why we are less close to heat death than we think we should be?

Um, your question has too many false premises behind it to have a direct answer. We're closer to heat death than we thought we were. If there are people who think we are either closer or further away than we "should be", well, quantum mechanics might offer an explanation, or might not, depending on why the subject in question thinks things aren't the way they should be. You'd have to be more specific.

Actually it just increased 100X.

[Anonymous Coward]

My divorce papers go through tomorrow.

Re:People of the universe, please attend carefully

[whovian]

Well-played. Clearly you are The Master.

A Briefer History of Black Holes and Entropy ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Having read 'A Briefer History Of Time' (both editions) I think it might be about time for 'A Briefer History of Black Holes and Entropy'. So Hawkings, you reading Slashdot and care to write another epic book like that ?

Re:Black ho's?

[Mr. Firewall]

And I was under the impression that all that black ho's were good for, was for sucking stuff in that never can get out?

Well... that's what SOME people believe...

fuck

[loafula]

that's all i can say

Neutron decay isn't an entropy source

[Late Adopter]

Free neutrons decay. Helium (and many other) nuclei are forever stable, because the energy gain in neutron decay is less than the nuclear binding energy. Lower energy states are only available through fusion, with an optimum at Iron (where they'll be met by nuclear fission from the other side).

I did not know that 9 chevrons dialing need that m

[Joe The Dragon]

I did not know that 9 chevrons dialing need that much power.

So what your saying is....

[mace9984]

The answer is now 84?

Re:So what your saying is....

[yurtinus]

No no no, greater entropy-- less time. Sounds like things are still fuzzy on the specifics but I'd wager the answer is now somewhere between 29 and 38.

Re:Black ho's?

[Anonymous Coward]

And I was under the impression that all that black ho's were good for, was for sucking stuff in that never can get out?

Well... that's what SOME people believe...

Well *my* black ho's got holes that are only usefull for stuffin' things in....

Units? We don't need no stinkin' units!

[catmistake]

Not RTFA.
TFS fails to use them, so I must ask,
What are the units of entropy? Can they be useful at a macroscopic level... like in describing how much entropy your bedroom contains (before it simply must be cleaned)?

Re:Units? We don't need no stinkin' units!

[onto_dry_land]

Yes, they are called bits or bytes. The entropy of your bedroom is simply the number of bytes you need to keep in your head to remember where everything is.

Re:Units? We don't need no stinkin' units!

[GuldKalle]

I was looking for the same thing, and the closest I found was on wikipedia:

Thus entropy as energy Q in relation to absolute temperature T is expressed as S = Q/T

So I guess the unit would be J/K.
And no, i'm not kidding :)

Imagining entropy

[Tibia1]

Imagine what the universe will look like when the entropy has gone, lets say half way between now and heat death. It must be: a) Extremely random and unimaginable b) The exact same with extremely random black holes that pull the average up. Or does the increasing level of entropy in a black hole effect the outside of that black hole? Maybe the entire universe will be one massive black hole to account for every atom in the universe being completely random... I feel the entropy in my brain increasing... ugh

David Letterman Joke

[Dareth]

That was a David Letterman style joke apparently!

Re:No, wait! That can't be!

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I'll take this a step further. Science is a useful methodology for the building of models that are extremely useful for making specific predictions. Whenever you forget that its a model, and start BELIEVING it, its no longer science. Most laypeople don't really care about science, or models, so long as "it just works" when you flip the switch. However, they like certitude. It makes them comfortable that when flipping the switch next time, the TV will keep working. Now, Newtonian Mechanics, for instance, works pretty damn well for building bridges. Is it real? Nope. But its a really useful model. It works within a context (things are large enough we can ignore quantum effects, relative velocities are low enough that relativity isn't worth considering, etc...). To say that Newtonian Mechanics is "right" or "wrong" misses not only the mark, but the target. Science is never "right" nor "wrong" in the manner in which you used the terms. It is, however, extremely useful.

If ever there were a case...

[wjsteele]

for TMI (To Much Information) this would be it!

Bill

Don't wory!

[changa]

Currently Logopolis is venting much of that entropy into another universe using lock transfer computations.

Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

heat death is absurd. there will always be something in motion in the universe. if it stops expanding and sits still, it would not appear still to someone that lived for 100^100 billion years. eventually, gravity will pull it all back together. eventually, we'll have a reverse big bang....then another big bang...we live in a matrix that reboots...some infinitely bigger scientists laboratory beaker...he put his blood into the centrifuge to separate the good parts from the bad parts...

Silly discussion of Entropy

[Anonymous Coward]

We do not have enough information to predict an end of the universe. In fact, the universe we know and *can* know is only an infinetly small piece of the whole. Most of the scientific community points to the Big Bang as the beggining of the universe, side stepping the logical paradox of beggining this creates. In fact it is likely that the Big Bang is a reletively local event created by the critcal mass of a Nova Black Hole.

Black holes are essentially super-super massive stars that have reached a state so massive that light can not escape. It is logical to assume that at some level of size and instability they will behave somewhat similarly to the super massive stars we can still see, namely the supernova.

Hog Wa5h!

[Tablizer]

Pffft, that's a buNch of b8la r aMlb m alkk)9()* 09 aKdf +!`af1 m 54& 783*hjT N6 2

Solomon Short was right

[Anonymous Coward]

"Even entropy isn't what it used to be." -- SOLOMON SHORT

Re:Some back ground on entropy of the universe:

[mujadaddy]

Why do you assert that E=m? And why would E remain constant? (E+m) would be a constant, of course, but I think you're mixing terms and coming up with $something incorrectly.

And most of that entropy...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

is in my garage and three of my closets, if the level of disorder there is any indication. I'm sure there's at least one supermassive black hole in there...

Hey Al

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Is that you ? Can you return my hockey stick, the kids are asking for it ?

Re:Hey Al

[Anonymous Coward]

* <- joke

~WHOOSH~

o_0 <- you
/|\
/ \

---

The reference is to a Muse song, by the way. Not Global Warming.

Re:People of the universe, please attend carefully

[GMFTatsujin]

And apparently that meddlesome Doctor has modded my message of universal conquest down, thereby denying me the victory once again. Confound him!

Messier

[ozbird]

A new calculation of entropy upholds that general result but suggests that the universe is messier than scientists had thought

I propose a three level scale: Messy, Messier, and Messiest objects.

Check The Title

[DynaSoar]

TFA gets it goofy.

"Universe Has More Entropy Than Thought"

Certainly more than the amount of thought that went into that title.

Re:Check The Title

[John Hasler]

It's a Slashdot title. The editor put all the thought he had into it.

Read the deatils here

[hisperati]

I already posted about this over a week ago on my blog: http://theastronomist.blogspot.com/2009/09/entropy-of-universe.html

Re:No, wait! That can't be!

[Chris Burke]

This would mean that yesterday, SCIENCE WAS WRONG. I keep getting reminded how this can't happen, usually from people looking at fossil records of CO2 use to cool the Earth, then supporting things to remove CO2 from all industry.

Who was it that kept saying science can't be wrong?

Are you sure they weren't just saying that your arguments of why the science is wrong were, themselves, wrong?

Science can be wrong, huh? Are ya listening guys?

Yes, but that doesn't mean that science being wrong in the way you presuppose it to be is any more likely. So, yeah. There's more entropy in the universe than thought -- but still within the theoretical upper bound, so basically this is a refined measurement not an undoing of thermodynamics and cosmology. Newton was "wrong", but it's not like we discovered that actually masses repel each other. Similarly, our climate models are certainly inaccurate and will be improved, but it is highly unlikely to be in a way where CO2 is no longer a greenhouse gas and threat to the environment.

This is how science works. We guess, then we confirm it. THEN, AND ONLY THEN, is it considered fact.

To be pedantic, it's still not considered fact.

Perhaps you've been fooled by the people with the "If the government pays, I'll give whatever results they want" model.

Yeah, that's why when the government wanted the result that you do, the scientists in their direct employ still came up with the same answer as they had before and since. The administration had to tamper with the report and tone down the language, because scientists always make sure the result of their research says whatever the government wants.

Science is often wrong, because the whole process of science is one of theories refined through observation. "Science can be wrong" does not mean that your wishful thinking is an equally viable alternative. "Wrongness" is not binary.

Save us, Doctor Who!

[Anonymous Coward]

What we need is a couple of Charged Vacuum Emboitments. Either that or a few TARDIS's that could be converted into time cone inverters.

Re:No, wait! That can't be!

[maugle]

Woah, there, buddy. You've got the scientific process exactly the wrong way around. You guess, then you try to disprove it. If you can't, you see if others can disprove it. If they can't, then your guess becomes a working model for some small aspect of the Universe until either evidence contradicting your guess is discovered and someone else makes a better, more refined guess.

That's Science. Constant improvement to our understanding of the Universe via learning that what we thought before wasn't quite right.

Take this with a grain of salt.

[bcrowell]

Take this with a grain of salt. There are a lot of issues here that are not well understood. TFA points out that we don't know whether there are black holes with masses intermediate between stellar black holes and supermassive black holes. The whole meaning of entropy is not well understood in the context of general relativity. The jury is still out on the black hole information paradox. It's still a matter of opinion whether black hole radiation is purely uncorrelated blackbody radiation, or whether it contains subtle correlations that encode the information that was "lost" when various information went into the black hole. Basically you need a theory of quantum gravity in order to be sure about the answers to these questions, and we don't have a theory of quantum gravity. Another issue is that nobody knows the structure of the vacuum around a black hole. When you try to calculate the polarization of the virtual particles in the region of high curvature around a black hole, you run into all kinds of problems. The zero-point energy of the vacuum is infinite in flat spacetime, and it's infinite in curved spacetime. Nobody is sure what that means, but they can try to subtract the one infinity from the other and find the increase in the vacuum energy that comes from curvature. Then when they try that, they seem to get answers saying that the structure of black holes can be radically different from what was previously assumed. Nobody really knows if this is right, or just an artifact of not knowing how to do the calculations correctly.

Meaning of Life is to fight entropy.

[ihaveamo]

I was talking to a very smart friend of mine who was feeling depressed. He said "Now that religion is proven null and void, I don't know what to live for - what is the meaning of life?", my answer, the one which fills a hole for me in a way, is to fight entropy. Maybe the most noble of all future human ventres, will be to fight entropy. I have a feeling only intelligent life can do it. That made him feel better.

Black holes contain entropy?

[Mes]

Can someone explain why black holes contain the majority of the entropy in the universe? Singularities would not seem to contain so much randomness. thx.

Re:Black holes contain entropy?

[Hellpop]

I think that Entropy is not purely about randomness, although that is a part of it. It is also energy in an "unusable" state. (Like where it would cost more energy to extract energy from it, so it is not worth wasting the energy to extract it in the first place) Since matter = energy, all the matter tied up in black holes is irretrievable and hence, unusable. At least as far as we know now. A lot of these depend on our current level of understanding, so I expect they will change as we learn more.

Damn it...

[LordofEntropy]

Someone has figured out my plan. Don't worry it's all under control.

Black Stars not Black Holes

[witherstaff]

Scientific American just had an article about a theory that quantum effects would stop a Black Hole from actually forming, instead it'd be a Black Star. Interesting read, even if I'm not a cosmologist.

Whimper...

[Anonymous Coward]

No bang

Spooky

[Xanavi]

The real world is curled into 10^33. The spooky side. Hologram we live in. God exists, you have someone to answer to. Deal with it already.

In the beginning...

[ctrl-alt-canc]

there was chaos. Now measurements confirm that there is more chaos. Why should I worry about the chaos on my desk ?!?

Dark matter energy

[Anonymous Coward]

If the estimates are true then we have a mechanism to explain universe without the above concepts.

excuse me, WRONG!

[Anonymous Coward]

excuse me how is this possible? how can a
blackhole CONTRIBUTE to an entropy INCREASE?
a black hole swallows EVERYTHING, including SPACE!!!

now entropy "lives" in space, so to speak, there's a lot
of dust in a room (universe).

imagine now, that in the middle of the room, there forms a
blackhole; it starts to eat up the dust AND the ROOM!!!
the room gets smaller and smaller and were can the dust now go?
-
this is hilerious: "blackholes increase overall enthropy" hahahaha!

Re:excuse me, WRONG!

[Hellpop]

'Hilarious' is you creating more entropy with that post than most people do in an entire lifetime. You have an incomplete understanding of entropy as well as singularities. Including, not least of all, the English language. Anything that removes usable, ordered energy from the universe, contributes to entropy. Entropy is a decrease in something else, not an entity in its own right. You treat it like phlogiston. Heat is not the absence of cold. Cold is the absence of heat. As far as we know NOW, ordered matter and ordered energy tied up in a black hole are effectively unavailable. If it would cost more to extract them from a black hole than what we could extract from them after being extracted from the black hole, entropy is increased. Check your rectal entropy thermometer to make sure.

Not a physicist or really even geeky, but........

[Anonymous Coward]

Well okay I'm slightly geeky, otherwise why would I be on this site. Here's my question. Entropy only works if there is a starting point. A point by which a certain energy level is commenced, unevenly between a larger system (in this case the Universer) and entropy eventually evenly distributes the energy (and conceivably the matter as well) throughout it's volume.

However, follow me on this. If we conceive that time and space in the Universe are both endless, that means that not only does time continue infinitely into the future, but also into the past.

If we concede this point, we have to imagine that if entropy were possible, it would have already occurred. Since it has not, doesn't that negate the possibility of a future "Heat Death" of the Universe? Email me at jspielfogel@yahoo.com with your thoughts.

Again, I'm not a physicist. I took AP Physics in High School (20 years ago) and never took anything beyond Astronomy 101 in College, so I'm sure there's something I'm not considering.

Every other reply to this is hilariously wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't expanding into something else. It isn't expanding into "emptiness". It isn't even expanding into "nothing". It's just expanding. It's like asking "What's outside of the universe?" As far as science knows, there is no outside, so things like asking what it expands into are rather nonsensical.

Now, going with the title of this post, responding to the posts above: No, our universe is not growing new dimensions, and there is no current evidence for other universes, and certainly no evidence for ones we can "bump into". Current scientific consensus is that quasars are caused by matter falling into black holes. "Universes bumping into each other" is an astoundingly absurd idea by comparison. Yes, the universe really is expanding. No, particles are not shrinking. I don't know where you got this idea from, but it's wrong. No, the universe does not expand at the speed of light; in fact, it can expand much, much faster than the speed of light. Relativity says things can't go faster than the speed of light, space itself doesn't count. This is why things like the Alcubierre drive are possible at least in theory, even if not so much in reality. Again, no, things in the universe are not getting smaller. Space itself is expanding, and it doesn't need anything to expand into.

Everyone here really needs to read this article.