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Universe Closer To Heat Death Than Once Thought
TapeCutter writes "In a paper soon to be published (PDF) in the Astrophysical Journal, Australian researchers have estimated the entropy of the universe is about 30 times higher than previous estimates. According to their research, super-massive black holes 'are the largest contributor to the entropy of the observable universe, contributing at least an order of magnitude more entropy than previously estimated.' For those of us who like their science in the form of a car analogy, Dr. Lineweaver compared their results to a car's gas tank. He states, 'It's a bit like looking at your gas gauge and saying "I thought I had half a gas tank, but I only have a quarter of a tank."'"
Fortunately, that quarter of a tank will still get us as far as we need to go and then some.
So as well as peak oil now we have to worry about peak universe?
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
So how much entropy does the fact that this story is a duplicate add to the universe?
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
So is this 30x higher than the 100x higher that was reported here on Slashdot a few months ago? http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/10/06/1641232/Universe-Has-100x-More-Entropy-Than-We-Thought
...given the not-quite-set-in-concrete nature of theoretical physics, string theory, and especially M-theory (...don't like this universe? we got more!), I don't think I'm going to sell the house and walk around in animal skins just yet.
(definitely not saying that entropy itself doesn't exist - that much has been proven. OTOH, I suspect there's a whole lot more going on out there/here/everywhere that we simply do not know about yet, eh?)
Besides, the universe had damned well better not die - at least not until I get my flying car, copy of Duke Nuken' Forever (running on HURD), and an army of Linux fembots with a penchant for evil, damnit!
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
> Fortunately, that quarter of a tank will still get us as far as we need to go and then some.
And where is it that we're going?
Does it bother anyone else that a guy named "Lineweaver" is making a car analogy that doesn't involve alcohol?
John
Fortunately, that quarter of a tank will still get us as far as we need to go and then some.
Yes, fortunately for us, maybe... but what about our children's children's children's ... (* 10^80) children? Won't someone please think of them?!?!
You mean we may never make it to:
- seeing a computer which can run Crysis?
- Duke Nukem: Forever release date?
- Hurd 1.0?
- kdawson leaving a story alone and publishing something accurate?
:-O
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Just because the laws of physics IN THIS UNIVERSE prevent that doesn't mean it can't happen since by definition the low entropy state the universe started in was created (in some form) by alternative laws of physics possibly outside this universe since the laws we know didn't exist at that point.
There's no reason why these alternative physical laws couldn't suddenly kick back in when the universe reaches a certain entropy state and start to reverse the whole process back to zero. Some people would say time would then be going in reverse but this doesn't need to be the case.
Considering that red dwarfs are expected to last trillions of years (no red dwarf has ever died. The universe is too young), we just need to move to a planet around one of them, assuming they have habitable planets.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Star formation is believed to end about 10^14 years from now, the total entropy of universe only affects events after that. Not a worry. If protons decay with 10^32 year half-life, then practically all nucleons decay after 10^40 years, which leaves all black holes to evaporate after about 10^99 years.
If protons don't decay as we suspect, then universe slowly tunnels to iron-56, (light nuclei via fusion and heavier via fission) in about 10^1500 years, which coalesce into black holes or neutron stars in about 10^10^76 years (yup, double exponent).
So quite frankly, this bit about more entropy means little for life as we know it, though if life can arise by some heat-engine powered means (due to temperature differences only). still the time scales are staggering.
but all mute if Big Rip is possible, we might only have 22 billion years left!:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip
I've for one have never forgiven them for Hitler.
Singularities are not a requirement of black holes. Until about 25 years ago, the entire universe was theorized to maybe have the critical density necessary to be a black hole itself (with an inevitable "big crunch" producing a singularity in the very distance future), and obviously the universe isnt a singularity right now.
Black holes can contain lots of usable energy, for those that might be in the black holes.
"His name was James Damore."
Jack: "The fact is that the universe is going to stop expanding and it is going to collapse in on itself. We've got to do something before it's too late!"
Patrick: "How much time do we have left?"
Jack: "Sixty trillion years, seventy at the most."
Patrick: "Oh, no."
Caffeine is my anti-drug!
Duranin - A NWN2 Roleplaying Persistent World
So on the previous iteration, a man named, coincidentally "Douglas Adams", in a language totally unrelated to but oddly identical to English, wrote a series of books where he concluded that the answer to life, the universe and everything was 41?
emperically, thermodynamics is fundamentally wrong. consider events around the end of the 19th century. thermodynamics was around. the equations were established. in fact, there was, based on a flakey idea that physics was finite, the thought that we knew everything. There were a few unimportant oddities. One of them was radioactivity. so the thermo equations on the blackboard got rewritten. right at that point, thermodynamics did not hold. so what does this say about the fundamental nature of the universe?
The only thing that thermodynamics can't explain is why aren't we already at maximum entropy? Everything else that we know of (such as radioactivity) is fully consistent with thermodynamics.
The new hot theoretical speculations hold that gravity is a thermodynamic effect too, not a regular force. This dude explains.
Still highly speculative, mind you, but definitely hot stuff.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
we're all going to end up as cosmic farts.
Entropy is a statistical thing. When you consume energy, it looses order. A charged capacitor is very ordered: You have a positive charge on one side, and a negative charge on the other. When you hook it up to a lightbulb, the energy will transform into heat and light. But try as you might, warming and shining light on a lightbulb hooked up to a capacitor will not charge it up again, because out of all the ways this light and warmth can go, very few of them act towards charging the capacitor.
Ordered energy is more useful than "random" energy. What the second law of thermodynamics says is that on average, energy tends to become more "random". While you can turn random energy into ordered energy, it is never efficient: You always spend more energy turning it into ordered energy, than you gain spending it again.
So it's not that energy with high entropy is unable to do work, it's that the work it can do is less useful.
Which is for example why you should never use resistive heating to warm stuff, it's a waste of entropy. You should use that electricity to do meaningful work while creating heat as a by product, not as a goal in it self.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
read "The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov He wrote: This is by far my favorite story of all those I have written. After all, I undertook to tell several trillion years of human history in the space of a short story and I leave it to you as to how well I succeeded. I also undertook another task, but I won't tell you what that was lest l spoil the story for you. It is a curious fact that innumerable readers have asked me if I wrote this story. They seem never to remember the title of the story or (for sure) the author, except for the vague thought it might be me. But, of course, they never forget the story itself especially the ending. The idea seems to drown out everything -- and I'm satisfied that it should. The last question, posed in 2061, was this: Will mankind one day without the net expenditure of energy be able to restore the sun to its full youthfulness even after it had died of old age? Or maybe it could be put more simply like this: How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?
We'll just have the Logopolitans open a charged vacuum emboitment to E-Space. Entropy problem solved!
And just how far is that?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Black holes can contain lots of usable energy, for those that might be in the black holes.
No, there's a large amount of energy inside, but it's all in the form of a high temperature, and there's no colder heat reservoir available to anyone down there that would try to extract useful work from it. (Since nothing outside the singularity is reachable once you're there.) Useful work could be extracted from outside the hole by letting stuff fall in, like the way a hydroelectric generator works, but not if there's nothing outside left to fall in.
There's an asymptotic limit to the universe's entropy that is approached but not necessarily reached, where everything would have fallen into one massive hole, free to explore an immensely large number of quantum states available to it at its high temperature. When you fall in your mass contributes to the number of states (and the temperature). The entropy rises with the logarithm of the number of states. A black hole singularity is postulated as being some single particle with a complicated wave function composed of a large number of available component states.