Science's ultimate goal is to discover the essence of universals by means of examining singular objects that collectively govern a universal.

I don't think that's science's ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is more generic, more to do with simply learning about the world. I'd also point out the experiments which include observation of larger systems to deduce fundamental laws. There are also many concepts such as entropy that apply to larger systems.

Certain laws exist that assist Life in it's quest to swim upstream against entropy.
It is a clear violation of the law of entropy, is it not?

Not at all, for the reasons that johnson mentions above. Where is the force that will eventually destroy a snowflake? Where is the force that will eventually decay our cities? Where is the force that will eventually cause us all to die and decompose? There isn't a "force", but merely a tendency. And it is a relentless tendency in spite of being held at bay all over the universe. There are stellar arrangements which go against the uniforming forces of entropy. But in the end, entropy will prevail.

Entropy doesn't act in an "instant", especially as the system becomes larger than a steam engine. Especially when there is a nearby star pouring it's energy into us to help increase localized order. But it is happening, and the end result will be the decay of our planet, the fading of our sun, etc. Your layman understanding has these points in time labeled as the "death" of the sun/planet. But if you want to homogenize with an understanding of entropy, it's more like entropy finally catching up. But in a semi-closed system such as our solar system will take billions of years, which we're well aware of.

It's not as though something mysterious is happening to allow constituent particles to form into higher order. The laws of particle physics are in a sense countervailing forces to entropy. Higher order is achieved for a time, only to go away. Like bubbles forming in a bath, only to eventually pop and allow their air to mingle with surrounding air.

It's amazing to consider life having "sustained" in spite of the homogenizing forces of entropy. Evolutionary algorithms, when understood in a generic sense and not the TOE sense, stand out in beautiful contrast once you get a sense of all the forces working together and against each other.

Certain laws exist that assist Life in it's quest to swim upstream against entropy.
It is a clear violation of the law of entropy, is it not?

No laws exist that allow life to swim against entropy. Entropy is always winning, no exceptions.


So lets examine where this disconnect may be coming from. Entropy does not mean that no order can form. It means the net trend is always toward uniformity.


When you talk about a closed system you have to define what you mean. The 2nd law refers to closed systems and it was initially produced in the study of steam engines and whatnot during industrialization. In that case a closed system means the engine. Without inputting new fuel the energy of the system is exhausted and the engine grinds to a halt.

You set up the boundary conditions in that case and you can test how far a certain amount of fuel can power an engine.

When you talk about life the boundary conditions are wider. This is a naturally occurring system and you’ve got to take into account all the sources which have in input to the system, and those would need to be included before you could say the system is closed.

If you take just one person and say, what is the closed system this person functions in, what do you have to include?

If it was just the person floating in empty inter-stellar space they would die instantly. All their energy would radiate outward (they would freeze) and their blood would evaporate due to the low pressure. They are the lone spike in outer space and they would be flattened quickly. There would be a large difference in energy concentration between the person and the empty space.

Put that person on a planet without an atmosphere and the same thing would happen. Surround the planet in an atmosphere, the same thing would happen, but slightly slower. Heat the planet at just the right level and the person can survive. They still lose energy to the atmosphere, but the atmosphere is pushing heat energy back into them at the same time. The energy exchange goes both ways and so just to have a person standing there alive, you have to include in the closed system a solar system with at least a planet and a star at the right distance to prevent instant death.

So when you talk about the system that includes all the life on our planet, that includes the sun. The sun is the major spike in our system and it is in reference to THAT that you must take note of changes in overall entropy levels. The fact of life’s evolution on our planet is trivial in comparison to the torrent of plasma and energy bursting off the sun in all directions for all this time.

So when a new leaf grows on the tree in your yard this spring that’s a tiny bit of new order in the world. That’s perfectly allowed. Because on the other side of the sun billions and billions and billions of calories are ejected into empty space. Entropy wins that exchange.

What does entropy say can’t happen? With no force acting on it, no outside energy injected into it (somebody lifting it, wind blowing it, an explosion shifting it, etc..) a bag of sand lifts into the air and stacks on top of another bag of sand. That can’t happen.

Because it requires energy to do this kind of work. Energy that must come from outside. To put that bag of sand onto another would mean something would have to happen to it. If you pick it up and move it over there you’ve increased order, but in the act of doing so you’ve disturbed the ground, invested the floor with kinetic energy from your steps, spent chemical energy in your muscles, and radiated heat. This is all lost energy and increase in entropy.

So to violate the principle that entropy increases, you have to have free work. It’s often illustrated by running film backwards. Buildings assemble from dust clouds back into whole buildings. Broken eggs re-assemble. Etc… Entropy’s constant creep toward uniformity is the reason for the arrow of time.

As for the force behind entropy, there is no force specific to entropy. It’s just statistics at work in the other forces.

Here are the guys at sixty symbols talking about entropy.

The second video is about the arrow of time, but toward the middle they talk about what entropy has to do with that.

http://www.sixtysymbols.com/videos/entropy.htm

at 1:47 it is said that "unless you try really hard, and put lots of work in, entropy will always increase."

Which i think has the capacity to confuse people. Entropy will always increase. Where it increases can be changed. So, you can stave off entropy in one place by expending energy somewhere else. This is the source of the apparent inconsistancy people think they see when it comes to the existence of evolving life on earth. Yes order is increasing on earth, but entropy is being created by the source of the enrgy which is "trying really hard, and putting lots of work in", the sun.

analogy time!

You can keep your house clean by letting the dog poop outside, but somewhere there is a growing pile of dog poop.

Now a video on the arrow of time, that is, the path from the past to the future.

http://www.sixtysymbols.com/videos/arrow_of_time.htm

I think Feynman did a better job discussing this topic, but it is an hour long, and ain't nobody got time for that.

http://www.yovisto.com/video/20664

Why do things become more complex with time?
In other words, why does an arrow need to point in the opposite direction of entropy's arrow?

well, what is different about the past vs. the future?

If you come across an egg that is shattered on the ground, what can you say about it's future?

It could just lay there and rot. It could be eaten a dog that wanders by. It could be scooped up and put in the trash by a person. It could be run over by a tire, or stuck on a shoe. The options of the future are almost limitless. Suggesting any of these future events is picking one possible future out of the vastness of possibility, with not very good odds of being right.

What can you say about it's past? One thing you can say for sure about the shattered egg, is that it once was a whole egg. There is one history for this object, and an almost infinite possible future.

This example is telling you why things don't go back to the way things used to be. Because there is only ONE way things used to be, but the future has infinite permutations that COULD be.

So there's a particle in space and it's at point A at a given moment in time. The next moment of time the particle is at point B. In the very next moment it COULD go back to A, but it could also go in any direction at all, with A being only one option of the millions. Statistically, it is very unlikely to go back to A, but it could.

But there are not only 1 particle, but zillions. Each of them could potentially go back to where it last was a moment ago, but the liklihood is small. For two particles to go back to where they were is even smaller still. And by the time you are talking about enough particles for you to see with your eye, the liklihood may as well be zero.

This means it is overwhelmingly more likely for things to get diffused over time, to spread out, lose concentration, and therefore energy concentration.

That's why things don't go backward in "time". Because the past is 1 fixed option, where the future has so so so many more options. And even when one particle does go back to where it was a moment ago, everything else around it has moved away from where it was when that particles was in the past. So even when it returns to where it was, where it was has gone elsewhere! Going backward in time is also equivalent to gaining "order", or certainly to decreasing entropy.

It is a property of our universe that the less energetic things are the more they are able to crystalize into complex structures. Brian Cox is fond of saying the reason for building atom smashers is that they simulate the conditions of the early universe where everything was much hotter, and therefore simpler to understand.

Like the complex structure of a snow flake, when it melts in your hand you can see that it's really just water. And if you understand the properties of water, you can understand why snow flakes are the way they are, and the behavior of ice bergs.

So what makes cooler matter more complex is the fact that the electrons have lost enough energy so that the electromagnetic attraction between the electron and the proton can form atoms. When electrons were still being bombarded by super-high energy photons at every turn, they were too energetic for that attraction to keep them in a potential around the proton. Then it's to electromagnetism that we look for all the complexity of chemistry.

If the universe weren't old and cold, there could be no chemsitry. And chemistry seems complex to us, but it's not so much pointing the opposite direction of entropy.

Remember at the beginning i spoke about how hydrogen and oxygen come together, form a more complex molecule, water, but in the process dump a huge amount of electromagnetic energy. That's three pretty tall spikes, two hydrogen atoms, one oxygen atom, combining to make a spike taller than any individual spike before hand, but shorter than the content of the three spikes just added together. So what that means is you reduce the energy concentration of those three particles by allowing them to share electrons which results in one larger particle and energy emitted into empty space.

Forming water, a complex molecule compared to it's constituants, results in an increase in entropy. This is what it means to be an energetically favorable state. States with less energy, like water vs the three elements seperate, are more likely to persist precisely because they are less energetic, which is like saying they don't move as much. When they don't move as much, or as powerfully, the bonds are less likely to be defeated, so the configuration is likely to remain.

Less energy means more stability. More stability means staying power. So, complex molecules accumulate on average.

Sean Carroll wrote a book on the arrow of time which is all to do with entropy.

Remember i said that evolution is not going against entropy? Sean did some calculations and indicates that the amount of energy we receive from the sun each day is almost precisely the same amount of energy which we radiate into empty space. Due to the green house effect, we are holding onto a tiny sliver of that energy for longer than we would want, but that too will dissipate in the end.

The difference in entropy is, that for every single high energy photon we get from the sun, which represents a single high spike in the "entropy graph" i've been using, we emit 20 photons into space. That's 20 times the amount of clutter, twenty times as much low energy, dispersed, more homogenous energy lost into space. We are taking tall spikes and flattening them.

Watch this video from numberphile.

This video explains why almost all integers have the digit "3" in them.


http://www.numberphile.com/videos/three.html




Really, watch the video. I'm going to explain it below, but the video will probably make it more clear, and you need to understand that video, i think, in order to understand what i say next.


so the equation is this:

T=1-(9/10)nth

(sorry, hard to write equations in the forum editor)

T is the number of integers which contain "3"
1= 100 percent of the numbers you are condisering
N = the number of digits in the total number, so for 1000 N=4
and there's a 9/10 chance of NOT getting a 3 in any digit place.

What this equation says is that there's a 90% chance that each digit won't be a three, but a 10% chance that it will. For each digit you add the chance there will be NO 3's has to be multiplied by 90%. so for two digits, it's 90% of 90%, or a slightly greater chance of there being a 3.

The more digits you add to the integer the closer T gets to 100% until almost every number there is has a 3 in it.

This same structure works for why time doesn't go backwards. For time to go backwards a particle has to go from A to B, and then retrace itself back to A.

For any particular particle the same rules apply. For simplicity, lets say there are ten directions the particle could go in the next instant (in reality there are far more which would make the ultimate numbers i come up with here a very conservatively small number in comparison), and one of those options is back to A, where it came from. Going back to where it was is just as likely in this scenario as any other direction with a 10% chance of happening.

Just like when adding more digits to that integer adding another particle means you have to multiply the odds together. The difference between the two outcomes is that in the first instance we were looking for a number where ANY digit was 3. In the case of time going backwards, we are in essence looking for the number where ALL digits are 3. They all go back to where they started, in other words.

So if each particle had ten directions it could go, with one direction being back where it started, with two particles, the chance of going back in time is 1/100 from moment to moment. But for time to truly go backward, not just 2 particles have to go back where they were.

Not just a million particles(1/10to the -6 chance of going back in time), not just a one in a trillion particles (1/10 to the -12 chance) but all particles in the universe (estimated to be about 1/10 to the -82 atoms), not even counting all the bosons and virtual particles that would ALSO have to go backward which means that 10 to the 82 is a woefully small number compared to what would actually be involved, and that's to go backward in time to the immediately proceeding instant.

To go back to the instant immediately proceeding probably means the smallest time length i know of which is the plank time. That's the time taken for a massless particle to travel the plank length. So to my estimate that means to go back in time one 10 to the -44th of a second there is (extremely generously, considering i started with only ten directions a particle could go, then called the whole nucleus and electron arrangement one particles and left out bosons, virtual particles and whatever the hell dark matter and dark energy and space are...) a 1/10 to the -82 chance of that happening randomly. And that's assuming all paths are as likely.

Want to see what that looks like?

0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%

That's the chance time will go backwards one plank time from these numbers. As i said, there are probably a lot more zeros involved when you take into account all the things i was generous about.

(What about the odds of winning the michigan lottery?

0.000011%)

And to go back two plank lengths, you have to square that probability... you see where this is going, right?

And that is why something ELSE happens... time goes forward.

What's interesting is that by these statistics any SINGLE future is just as unlikly as going backward in time. If you picked one randomly, you would almost certainly be wrong to the same tune that almost every number has a 3 in it. But in essence almost 100% of all options is not the past, so no matter which of the futures does occur it will be from amongst this vast range of improbbable futures that it will be selected.

That's just using the numbers, but in real life, there's a pretty good reason that balls roll down hill, and not up, and that is the forces acting upon it, and inertia, which are not accounted for in my example, and those are additional compulsions toward not repeating the past.

The point of this is to show how statistics helps grasp entropy, and i think is a nice qualitative look at how time flows in one direction.

"Remember i said that evolution is not going against entropy?"

Yes, but I would say intuitively speaking evolution is going in the opposite direction of the arrow of entropy because complex systems are dissipative systems: that is, they are open systems which "exhale" entropy into the environment in a willful manner to maintain organization - the very antithesis of entropy.

Isolated systems can not accomplish this. Why is that? Is it because isolated systems are not complex enough?

And if that is the case, would it not be reasonable to say that complex systems willfully swim against the tide of entropy?

I like the smashed egg analogy. It was good.
Let me ask this: We can not roll back the clock on the smashed egg because of the effect the arrow of entropy has on the macro world, correct?
Why does the arrow of entropy not have the same effect on the micro world? Is it because the micro world lacks complexity?
And where does the information originate that enables open systems to develop?

I just thought of another question that may or may not be related:

The universe is a huge tug of war in progress: expanding thanks to a big bang that banged 13 billion years ago into who knows and gravity, pulling things together.
To my knowledge, no one knows which side will win.
Or do you?
If expansion wins, then entropy will "win" in clear and convincing form.
Everything will smooth out, correct?
What if a "big crunch" wins? What will the implications be for entropy?

Ant. check out this video.

This is sort of an analog for what is happening in life.

http://www.sixtysymbols.com/videos/restitution.htm

you start off with objects more or less evenly distributed on either side of the partition. This uniform configuration is a higher entropy state than having all particle on one side.

Left alone, the particles can never stack up all on one side.

But then he adds energy into the system by jiggling the surface. The particles arrange themselves into a configuration that we humans think of as ordered, and it is true that once the energy is no longer being applied it IS in the lower entropy condition.

But while the energy is being applied any particle in the less dense area receives much higher kinetic energy from impact with the floor. That high energy impact is equivalent to one of the tall spikes i keep mentioning. Because it is hit so hard it flies very far and has a certain likelihood to land on the dense side over the partition. Once it gets there the interactions with the floor are spread out across all the objects and instead of single tall spikes, there are dozens of shorter spikes. So in order to flatten the high energy impact spikes a structure emerges which we think of as ordered.

The order that we appreciate as pattern seekers, in other words, is a byproduct of the real work of dispersing the high energy spikes.

Any other configuration of those particles in the plastic case would be higher energy arrangements, and so don't last.

Plants receive high energy photons from the sun, the tall spikes. They break those tall spikes out into useable energy which lets them perform their living tasks, and emit the energy back into space in the form of lots and lots of smaller photons in the form of heat energy. Each of those heat photons is capable of doing far less work than the high energy photon that the plant originally recieved, but if you add them all together they exactly equal the high energy photon. The plant has converted a tall spike capable of doing work, into a bunch of little spikes which are more or less useless. That's flattening the spikes, and that is entropy at work in life.

Yes, but I would say intuitively speaking evolution is going in the opposite direction of the arrow of entropy because complex systems are dissipative systems: that is, they are open systems which "exhale" entropy into the environment in a willful manner to maintain organization - the very antithesis of entropy.

So are simple systems. Sand on the beach does the same thing. High energy tall spike photons hit grains of sand and the sand particles absorb the energy, over the course of the day they re-emit that energy in the form of low spike, low energy photons which can do far less work. Otherwise, if they didn't produce entropy, and lower ordered light, they would be as bright as the sunlight they absorbed. in this respect, if life is willful, then so is sand.

The arrow of time is evident on the macro world because of the numbers of players involved. Even when one object retraces it's previous path, everything else in relation to it has changed, so you can tell that the system is different than the previous configuration, even if some things are the same. When you have far fewer particles you can look at a system two different times and if everything is back to where it was, there would be no way of knowing if anything has changed, or if its the same configuration as before, or merely another instance of the same configuration. That doesn't work with human observers, though, because we have too many moving parts. Even if there were only one person, and 2 other particles in the universe that you were trying to observe, you could tell the situation was different the second time you looked because you yourself would have been undergoing changes in the interim that would indicate the moment was different from the previous instance.

I didn't understand what you were asking about with this:

And where does the information originate that enables open systems to develop?

The expansion / crunch issue was well sorted out in the late 1990's. Observers at that time set out to quantify exactly how the big crunch was going to happen, as they didn't see a way that it could continue to expand while objects had gravity. Instead, much to their surprise, they found data saying that the universe would expand forever, and in fact the rate of acceleration was speeding up!

It was from these observations that dark matter and dark energy were taken up as serious issues which must be dealt with. And you are right, entropy does win. It's called the "heat death" of the universe where eventually energy densities will flatten so much that nuclei will not even be able to hold together. That's the end state of thermal equilibrium. Nothing anywhere will be different from anywhere else. That is very far in the future indeed.

To me this does suggest a kind of symmetry, though. I'm no professional, and this is strictly speculation, but to me there is a sort of thermal equilibrium at the big bang too. Could it be that once we've reached thermal equilibrium and there are no particles by which to make sense of dimensions, that the whole of our expanded universe could be considered as a point-like singularity? and at that point wouldn't all the energy content of our universe reside in that singularity? Boom?

I've never heard any physicist say that, and that's me just day dreaming about physics. It makes sense to me, but maybe that's because i don't know shit! haha!