Re: Please don't yell at me.

Posted by Roger Critchlow-2 on Aug 12, 2010; 5:16pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Please-don-t-yell-at-me-tp5416512p5417049.html

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 9:18 AM, Nicholas  Thompson
<[hidden email]> wrote:

> 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.

But it is, as always, the entropy of the universe that increases.  The
collapse of a cloud into a planet, or into a star for that matter,
releases a lot of heat.   There are more ways to be a cloud than a
rock, but becoming a rock liberates a lot of radiation and there are
lots and lots of ways to be a cloud of photons radiating into space.

-- rec --

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