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What Is the Field of Thermodynamics? ---------- Nature has no internal mind. Entropy and relativity and space time are as mystical as a bag of potatoes falling
by steve76 6y ago
What Is the Field of Thermodynamics?
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Nature has no internal mind. Entropy and relativity and space time are as mystical as a bag of potatoes falling on the floor at the grocery store. Thermodynamics, why we study it and why it's important, is as best of a model one can get which strips out the internal mind from nature. No momentum. No charge. Just internal probability and the external environmental constraints needed to maintain it.
What Are Particles?
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Not what most people think. Can heat be transferred to or from the object in question? That's one part. Is there a capacity for heat, or a latency between heat transfer and external environment effects? Then you have a particle. So it's not little grains of sand or little specks of dust. Anything that absorbs energy without moving the thermometer or multimeter.
What Is the Second Law?
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If there is no conductive surface or convective medium, such as the Sun warming the Earth, what is the medium of heat transfer? Relativity, speeding up and slowing down internal clocks, works just the same for heat transfer. So does uncertainty, nature's built in tolerance of measurement. Their amount is much more than any cloud of dust in the air or specks of pollen in a slide. They have a long time to go before reaching equilibrium. The insight is the Second Law is not some mystical holistic property. It's a bath of internal states working themselves out.
Why Is Explaining This Important?
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Entropy, uncertainty, cosmic scales, tend to cower people's ambition. It should send us the other way. Go for coherent control and pair production. Think of applications where the Earth is enveloped in a matter wave, and the medical treatments we could have down to the quantum biological level of mitosis.
Or if we had control of fusion of the Sun. That core is orbiting a black hole. We make it easier for particles to pop in and out of existence on the surface of the black hole, than it is for them to complete an entire orbit. That's a microwave, ready to melt any incoming asteroid, and will likely be humanity's first gravity application, giving a little black hole-ness to our Sun itself!
Part of me thinks humans, at the very high levels of power and state secrets, have been doing this for decades, if not for over a century.
Horrifying!!!