Recent Features
| |||||||||||||
Good pieceGood piecePosted Dec 4, 2012 22:31 UTC (Tue) by chithanh (guest, #52801)In reply to: Good piece by man_ls Parent article: LCE: Don't play dice with random numbers
> You are aware that Laplace's demon (as Maxwell's) is nothing short of God-like in nature. And that its very nature was refuted (as seen in Wikipedia) by the second law of Thermodynamics:
And the second law of thermodynamics has been refuted by Poincaré recurrence.
(Log in to post comments)
Good piece Posted Dec 5, 2012 8:35 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Hardly a rebuttal since this theorem and the second law operate on different time scales. Boltzmann had a similar argument for the whole universe; it only made the second law stronger.Whenever something contradicts the second law, that something loses. But if you feel better with a recurrence every 10^10^100... seconds or so, then so be it.
Good piece Posted Dec 5, 2012 21:25 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
> recurrence every 10^10^100
And don't fret, those 10's are rounded up from e, so it's not as long as it might seem (though I think you're missing few stacks and should be 10^10^10^10^10^1.1).
Good piece Posted Dec 5, 2012 21:38 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] You are right, I added the ellipsis on a Googolplex because I could not find any good estimate at the moment. Now I have: in the Wikipedia no less, and it is as you say. Saying it is bigger than the age of the universe is a bit of an understatement. So don't hold your breath for a recurrence.Besides, it would only happen if our universe is an energy-conserving system; probably just changing size would break the recurrence. Finally, even if a recurrence was possible in an expanding universe, it would just leave us at the starting point; not just diminish the entropy.
|
|||||||||||||