Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Basic physics.

Bogus physics
ER — (archived)

Energy is not destroyed, but it is diluted, and it effectively ceases to exist because it is no longer recoverable. The I Love Lucy signal attenuates according to inverse square law until it vanishes into the noise. It's only evidence of past existence is that is has minutely increased the temperature of the interstellar medium, but that temperature is also being affected by innumerable other processes and the cumulative temperature increases are indistinguishable from one another. That is what entropy is all about, complexity degrades leaving only heat, and that heat is exactly like the heat generated by innumerable other sources. You cannot run the film backwards and reconstruct the past because the frames are shredded and mixed up.

All these vibrations and frequencies form a cacophony that cannot be untangled, any more than the ripples from a rainstorm at sea can be recovered and reconstructed. The arrow of time flows only in one direction. The initial energy of the Big Bang has been running down, dispersing, since the instant the Universe was born, there are bottlenecks here and there that slow down the process (like the time it takes the stars to consume their nuclear fuel) and there are eddies and backflows, but the general direction is entropic, the ultimate, inevitable, unstoppable heat-death of the universe. It will all end up as a thin, tenouous gas expanding into nothingness.

That is the future of the universe, what makes us so special that we're going to be able to cheat out fate?

Log in or register to post.

The whole thread (59 posts)