4 ms·
I agree about the second law, but aren't there also other reasons to expect gloom and doom? Like an ever decreasing energy/mass density as everything drifts awa
by im3w1l 3y ago
I agree about the second law, but aren't there also other reasons to expect gloom and doom? Like an ever decreasing energy/mass density as everything drifts away into infinity? I dont think thats a question of probabilities but rather something that must happen based on the equations of motion?
- A_D_E_P_T 3y agoEntropy is a measure of the number of possible states. In unbounded/infinite time, all states will be cycled through. However diffuse, all particles in space will be akin to H2O molecules in an ocean of water: they will move freely, interacting with each other, each assuming any number of positions. In an idealized ocean in boundless time, every H2O molecule will occupy every possible position, and then every possible configuration will repeat. Post heat-death, the number of possible states that describe maximally (or near-maximally) disordered and diffuse systems is almost -- but not quite -- infinitely larger than the number of possible states which describe structures of some sort, indeed of any possible sort, emerging. That "not quite" does a lot of work, in view of unending time. So, in boundless space, in boundless time, should protons and other elementary particles not decay, very interesting things will still come into existence with some degree of statistical regularity.
- im3w1l 3y ago> all states will be cycled through That's only true if there are finitely many states.
- eru 3y agoNot sure. You can cycle through all integers an infinite number of times each, if you have infinite amount of time. An example in Python: import itertools for limit in itertools.count(): for i in range(limit): print(i)