Physicist: The increase of entropy is just how a scientist talks about the fact that the universe tends to do the most likely thing. For example, if you throw a bucket of dice you’ll find that about a sixth of them will be 1, about a sixth will be 2, and so on. This has the most ways of happening, so it’s the most likely outcome, and for the same reason it’s the outcome with the highest entropy.
High entropy. Arrangements of lots of dice tend, over time, to end up like this.
In contrast, you wouldn’t expect all of the dice to be 4 at the same time, or otherwise assume one particular pattern. That would be a very unlikely and low entropy outcome.
Audrey Hepburn is one of the lower entropy states you'll find. Or rather, will never find, because it's so unlikely. You have to sit back and squint a little to see it.
“Entropy” is just a mathematical tool for extending the idea down to atomic interactions, where we don’t have a nice idea like “dice” to work with.
One of the things that increasing entropy does is to spread out heat as much as possible. If you have a hot object next to a cold object, then the heat will spread so that the cooler object heats up, and the hotter object cools down, until the two are at the same temperature. The idea (the math) behind that is the same as the idea behind mixing fluids or sands together. There are more ways for things to be mixed than sorted.
The same thing happens on a much larger scale. The Sun, and every other star, is radiating heat into the universe. But they can’t do it forever. Eventually the heat will have spread out so much that there won’t be warmer objects and cooler objects. Everything will be the same temperature. The same, very cold, temperature. The vast majority of the universe is already screaming cold, so the heat death of the universe is just about burning what fuel there is and mixing the heat so created into the ever-expansive, cold, and unyielding cosmos. Both the burning of fuel (mostly through fusion in stars) and the distribution of heat are processes which increase entropy.
The cold and unyielding cosmos. What's the stupid point of anything?
Once everything is the same temperature, the universe attains a “steady state”. With no energy differences, there’s no reason for anything to change what it’s doing (all forces can be expressed as an energy imbalance or “potential gradient“). Heat death is the point at which the universe has finally settled down completely (or almost completely), and nothing interesting ever happens again.
Which is depressing, but it is a fantastically long time away. There are a hell of a lot of other bad things that’ll probably happen first.
The eminent philosophers Flanders and Swann have a more up beat take on the heat death of the universe:
“Heat is work, and work’s a curse,
and all the heat in the universe,
is gonna cool down. ‘Cause it can’t increase,
then there’ll be no more work, and there’ll be perfect peace.
That’s entropy, man.”
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So, humans are flying around in the space ships, and living on space stations, but the heat death of the universe is approaching. The last stars are slowly dying and no new stars are being born.
Will it be likely (or even possible) for human civilisation to continue existing when the universe is in a heat death situation?
No, that won’t be possible, since flying around in spaceships (or even living) requires an non homogenous distribution of heat, so the combination of people living and the universe being heat dead is impossible.
Kinda by definition, if there are still people around using usable power, then the heat death hasn’t happened yet.
But keep in mind that the age of the universe (so far) is very small compared to the time it’ll take for the heat death to settle in. If any of our descendents are still around, they definitely won’t be remotely human. We got from single cells to people in a couple billion years, and the heat death is at least many, many trillions of years off.
What about parallel universes and M theory? What do you think of that?
Maybe? Haven’t studied it. However, for what very little it’s worth, it’s likely that the laws of thermodynamics hold in other branes.
The equation: (entropy)=(heat content)/(Temperature) shows that more energy added makes the entropy of that system decrease. What is the mathematical relation of energy as a function of complexity (information)?
This is one equation i found but it doesn’t explain how probability (P) is related to information… or maybe I am way off.
S = -k∑[P log(P)]
It looks like you may be thinking of one form of the fundamental thermodynamic relation.
In the case of ideal gases, temperature is proportional to the derivative of the heat content with respect to entropy. This is very similar to (temperature) = (change in heat content)/(change in entropy).
Non-uniform probabilities don’t tend to show up in thermodynamics. In information theory we routinely talk about state 1 having a particular probability, state 2 having another, etc.
In thermodynamics we assume that all states have the same probability. This may seem a little strange, but it’s a result of the “asymptotic equipartition property“. When you have a whole lot of identical parts (like you find in most complex physical systems) you find that the chance of randomly picking a state that has a probability different from the average is nearly zero.
If you’re interested in learning about just the information theory side of entropy, then Shannon’s original paper is a good place to start.
“What is the mathematical relation of energy as a function of complexity (information)?”
The short answer: None.
Claude E. Shannon introduced the term ‘entropy’ into information theory to describe randomness in information, or jumbled-up-ness, or compressibility. In a sense, he borrowed the WORD from physics mostly because the concept ‘appeared’ similar and could be described with similar math. However, that is where the similarities, and more importantly, the connection with thermodynamics end.
The laws associated with entropy and thermodynamics do not carry over into information theory. They were never meant to. Had Shannon picked a different word(i.e. compressibility), this confusion may have been avoided, but alas, we are stuck with it.
Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped some unscrupulous evolution theory deniers from trying to link the two with cheap equivocation logical fallacies. This is where I have personally seen this question come from in most instances.
I read your answer to the above question, stating that:
” The Sun, and every other star, is radiating heat into the universe. But they can’t do it forever. Eventually the heat will have spread out so much that there won’t be warmer objects and cooler objects. Everything will be the same temperature. The same, very cold, temperature. The vast majority of the universe is already screaming cold, so the heat death of the universe is just about burning what fuel there is and mixing the heat so created into the ever-expansive, cold, and unyielding cosmos. Both the burning of fuel (mostly through fusion in stars) and the distribution of heat are processes which increase entropy. Once everything is the same temperature, the universe attains a “steady state”. With no energy differences, there’s no reason for anything to change what it’s doing (all forces can be expressed as an energy imbalance or “potential gradient“). Heat death is the point at which the universe has finally settled down completely (or almost completely), and nothing interesting ever happens again.”
Okay. But once all heat has left the Universe, and nothing ever changes, then “Entropy” would seem (intuitively) to no longer exist. And even before that, as the Universe cools, shouldn’t Entropy become reduced to a minimum state at 0 (zero) Degrees Kelvin? And if so, wouldn’t that violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Or, is there any measure of entropy or disorder/order in the universe outside of thermodynamics?
Please let me know. Thank you.
The universe won’t be at 0 K, but instead at “pretty much” 0 K, and all the energy in the universe will be uniformly distributed. No energy can leave the universe (kind of by definition of a universe) and so it must still exist somewhere, which is everywhere. Think of entropy as a measure of how much energy there is that cannot be used for useful work. All our processes require a gradient of some sort (e.g. a temperature gradient across two things so that one of them can heat up) and the heat death has no gradients, because everything is uniformly distributed, and so the maximum entropy (i.e. max amount of energy that cannot do work) has been reached. So entropy will be unchanging but at the maximum level.
what do you do if things disappear like pictures from the bible other things energy through body at one point hearing voices allthe time I NEED HELP TO BREAK THIS CURSE ITS SCARY
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