Posted by
Nick Thompson on
Aug 12, 2010; 6:48pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Please-don-t-yell-at-me-tp5416512p5417406.html
Ok. But the more I think about this the more I think that the idea that
"entropy increases" has less and less to do with any of the things we
actually talk about in FRIAM.
Nick
-----Original Message-----
From:
[hidden email] [mailto:
[hidden email]] On Behalf
Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2010 1:16 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Please don't yell at me.
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.
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
http://www.friam.org