This is probably an extension of the entropy…uncertainty theme.
I am reading Sean Carroll’s book From Eternity to Here, because I want to know just how much to hate him. He is the guy who has written the two amazing books on EvoDevo that will be the foundation for our fall seminar by that name. He is a player in the EvoDevo literature, so it is not surprising that he knows what he is talking about there, but if he can actually manage to pull off a brilliant summary of cosmology and physics, then I will be free to hate him totally and utterly.
He is humming along talking about the universe since the Big Bang, when he reminds me that the planets in the solar system are in a higher entropy state than the gas cloud from which they formed. (“The Solar system…evolved out of a protostellar cloud that had an even lower entropy; … [FETH, p. 45]”) Really? There are more ways to be a few rocks circulating around a sun than there are to be a cloud? How does that work? How I thought that was going to work was that the constraints of gravity somehow allowed the solar system to export entropy elsewhere while the solar system itself was a temporary non-entropic structure. But now we are back to that question I asked a couple of months ago about how that structure-making force gravity gets to be outside of the entropy calculation.
And THEN I remembered that the salad dressing separates in the jar we keep it in and that, presumably, the separated dressing is a higher entropy state than the mixed dressing, since we have to do work to mix it.
And then I wrote you. I fear a tautology lurking here. Entropy is just what things tend to.
Nick
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