How do Catholics respond to the law of entropy?

[Monte_RCMS]

Of course, but all the monkey scenario does is explain how extraordinarily unlikely this sort of spontaneous ordering is. In the observable universe the probability is effectively zero, I said as much in my post. This is why the second law is so well regarded and presented without qualifications. However, we are not talking about the observable universe. For example, if the monkeys in your example type for 10^183,800 times longer than they already have (i.e. after the heat death), their odds look a lot better. The timescale does not have to be infinite, just long enough.

In our universe there is a non-zero probability that entropy will spontaneously decrease; it has been experimentally observed in microscopic scales.
adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002PhRvL…89e0601W

For anything other than micro-states, the probability of a violation is similar to the monkeys typing. Certainly people have a hard time imagining probabilities so tremendously small, but they have an equally hard time conceiving of time scales long enough to realize those small probabilities; this is understandable, because both are completely foreign to our daily experiences.

One of my friends said that “theoretically” it is possible [the monkey thing] … and I said no, it’s not.

The problem is that once you admit that some “farfetched” thing is theoretically possible, then you open the doors to all kinds of logical abuses.

And, believe it or not, these “beliefs” carry over and pretty soon folks are trying to legislate all kinds of ridiculous things. Like declaring that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. And we have zero tolerance for pollutants. So, we end up killing all the plants, which as you all know won’t grow without carbon dioxide and which thrive at ten times or more of our present levels of CO2.

OR, we ourselves die trying to abolish carbon dioxide.

What you end up with is “mutant logic”. Some genetic logical mutation. Neither fact nor fiction.

 

[Monte_RCMS]

It would also be cool if they built an enthalpy engine. After a drive you would have more gas in the tank than when you started. When you got to the gas station you would have to pump gas out to make more room.

Some guy said we already have that … you install special spark plugs that save 25% and some new tires that save 50% and some new magnetic thing on the fuel line that saves 30% and a fuel-air gadget that saves 30% and some new teflon lubricant that saves 15%. And you are now saving 150% … and like you said, every few hours of driving you have to pull over and drain out the overflowing gas tank.

But the enthalpy engine is special, no question.

We have the Otto Cycle and the Diesel Cycle and the Sterling Cycle.

Why not the Moontown-Enthalpy Cycle!

 

[Moontown_Rabbit]

In our universe there is a non-zero probability that entropy will spontaneously decrease; it has been experimentally observed in microscopic scales.

If “spontaneously” means “without increasing the entropy of another system” then they have experimentally proven that the second law of thermodynamics is sometimes broken. This is exactly what Catholic theology predicts. If you had mentioned this earlier I wouldn’t have had to spend all that time talking about monkies.

 

[TheTrueCentrist]

One of my friends said that “theoretically” it is possible [the monkey thing] … and I said no, it’s not.

The problem is that once you admit that some “farfetched” thing is theoretically possible, then you open the doors to all kinds of logical abuses.

And, believe it or not, these “beliefs” carry over and pretty soon folks are trying to legislate all kinds of ridiculous things. Like declaring that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. And we have zero tolerance for pollutants. So, we end up killing all the plants, which as you all know won’t grow without carbon dioxide and which thrive at ten times or more of our present levels of CO2.

OR, we ourselves die trying to abolish carbon dioxide.

What you end up with is “mutant logic”. Some genetic logical mutation. Neither fact nor fiction.

The problem here is that philosophers are trying to philosophize when the should be science-ifizing. Only someone who understands what sort of qualifications and assumptions come along with a scientific law or theory is qualified to explore what happens when those qualifications and assumptions are relaxed. For example, I believe that someone who was unsure about the status of entropy as a law earlier this week lacks the understanding of entropy to discuss how entropy acts in typical situations, let alone fringe cases. Take the monkey example. It is possible to calculate the probability of generating Hamlet, it is not very hard to do. In fact, we know that on average, it would take 3.4 × 10^183,946 random keystrokes to generate Hamlet. The probability is non-zero. The problem is that our universe will not exist long enough to generate that many random keystrokes. If our timescale is not limited to the observable universe (i.e. extends beyond the heat death) then we can certainly generate Hamlet. In fact, the equation for how long it would take on average is pretty simple:
time to generate Hamlet = (3.4 × 10^183,946 keystrokes) / (keystrokes per time per typist) * (number of typists) ]

Consider the red herring case of CO2. We know how much CO2 plants need, and we know how CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas. These things are not philosophical conclusions, they are scientific ones. We also know how much CO2 is produced naturally, we know how much CO2 is consumed naturally, and we know how much CO2 we are releasing through human activity. It turns out that human activity now comprises around 4% of the total CO2 emissions annually. We know that this 4% excess results in an accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. None of these are things can be philosophized away, they are scientific questions; scientists went out and measured them, and found the results.

 

[Monte_RCMS]

The problem here is that philosophers are trying to philosophize when the should be science-ifizing. Only someone who understands what sort of qualifications and assumptions come along with a scientific law or theory is qualified to explore what happens when those qualifications and assumptions are relaxed. For example, I believe that someone who was unsure about the status of entropy as a law earlier this week lacks the understanding of entropy to discuss how entropy acts in typical situations, let alone fringe cases. Take the monkey example. It is possible to calculate the probability of generating Hamlet, it is not very hard to do. In fact, we know that on average, it would take 3.4 × 10^183,946 random keystrokes to generate Hamlet. The probability is non-zero. The problem is that our universe will not exist long enough to generate that many random keystrokes. If our timescale is not limited to the observable universe (i.e. extends beyond the heat death) then we can certainly generate Hamlet. In fact, the equation for how long it would take on average is pretty simple:
time to generate Hamlet = (3.4 × 10^183,946 keystrokes) / (keystrokes per time per typist) * (number of typists) ]

Consider the red herring case of CO2. We know how much CO2 plants need, and we know how CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas. These things are not philosophical conclusions, they are scientific ones. We also know how much CO2 is produced naturally, we know how much CO2 is consumed naturally, and we know how much CO2 we are releasing through human activity. It turns out that human activity now comprises around 4% of the total CO2 emissions annually. We know that this 4% excess results in an accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. None of these are things can be philosophized away, they are scientific questions; scientists went out and measured them, and found the results.

Actually, the CO2 data is mostly based on assumptions. “One or two” observations, followed by some humongous multiplication, = some ginormous leap.

 

[rossum]

If “spontaneously” means “without increasing the entropy of another system” then they have experimentally proven that the second law of thermodynamics is sometimes broken. This is exactly what Catholic theology predicts. If you had mentioned this earlier I wouldn’t have had to spend all that time talking about monkies.

The law is not broken. It is a statistical law and so gets strange with very small numbers of particles. Notice that TheTrueCentrist said “microscopic scales”.

If you have ten billion gas molecules in a container then the chances of all of them being in the same half of the container are negligibly small. If you have just one gas molecule in the same container then the chances of it being in the same half of the container is 100% since it can’t be in both halves at the same time.

With two particles the chance is 50% that they are in the same half and 50% that they are in different halves.

The SLoT applies to macroscopic quantities of matter; don’t rely on it for small numbers of particles.

rossum

 

[Moontown_Rabbit]

The law is not broken. It is a statistical law and so gets strange with very small numbers of particles. Notice that TheTrueCentrist said “microscopic scales”.

If I define “breaking the SLoT” as any event where a system’s entropy decreases without increasing the entropy of another system, and I introduce as an axiom the idea that God is unchanging (in particular in the entropic sense) then I can then find violations of the SLot at every scale imaginable:

1. Ultrascopic - the creation of the universe.
2. Macroscopic - Jesus walking on water (think of it in terms of gravitational potential energy rather than heat flow).
3. Microscopic - See post from TrueCentrist.

The original question was “how do Catholics respond to entropy”, not “please explain entropy while ignoring Catholic teaching.”

 

[Moontown_Rabbit]

The real problem with using the monkey theory to explain the origin of the universe is that it presupposes that some kind of creation has already taken place (in the case of the analogy, monkies with typewriters). This is a “bootstrap fallacy” similar to the error made by some evolutionists who suppose that natural-selection-type processes can take place before there are such things as biological reproduction and DNA.

 

[Warrior1979]

Entropy is usually [or should be] reserved for third year college thermodynamics.

That’s when I took it (I a physics grad).

If nature tends to move from order to disorder, how did it get ordered in the first place?

Entropy doesn’t state that everything is or must be disordered. One can have a highly ordered system, but it creates an even greater amount of disorder in the surrounding environment. While people may think the earth is a gigantic ordered system, fact is it is infinitesimally small compared to the disordered system that surrounds it, as it must be.

 

[Prophesy]

I have a book for my Chemistry class which explains the concept of the “law of entropy”. I haven’t looked deeply into it (or the pages after, like Free Energy and Redox), but I’ve taken a glance. Essentially, entropy is a measure of disorder within a system. The book describes it’s fundamental idea as “the concept of entropy is that nature tends to move from order to disorder in isolated systems. For example, gas molecules spread out over time to fill a space, increasing their entropy over time”.

I’ve heard it said that the underlying principle of entropy is that in randomness, lies stability (the more random something is, the more stable it becomes).

Catholics often use the Teleological argument to assert that God exists. The teleological theory basically says that everything seems too perfect for it to have come out randomly, and there must have been a Creator behind it all, that being God. But if Chemistry says that in randomness lies stability, how then can the Teleological theory assert the existence of God, or God creating the universe/world, if everything is seemingly stable? Is there something I’m missing?

Thank you,
Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk

We have to be careful in our application of entropy. We see animals grow in complexity during the span of evolution (guess who’s getting flamed next). An isolated system is a particularly difficult thing to make. Think about our oceans, if entropy simply meant that there was no order in such things, water wouldn’t gather in pools. But what we’re talking about is a very specific thing.

We can say that if we introduced D2O into the ocean (that’s an isotope of water with deuterium instead of hyrdogen), it would be dispersed over time. But we can also expend energy to contain the water in a place. Having a low entropy system is possible, but usually requires energy in order to make it happen.

The Teleological pertains to the seemingly fined-tunedness of our universe (I don’t really consider an argument I would use). But consider for yourself something else you see in your chemistry book (this discussion I had with a professor of quantum mechanics I had (I feel as though I should mention that he finds the Teleological argument interesting as a devoted Catholic himself), you see that the atom is labelled with protons and neutrons in the centre of the nucleus, and electrons flying around on the outside. The protons are all positively charged and the electrons are negatively charged. Now, we, as chemists talk about neutrons helping keep the protons of the atom together. But we can have deuterium without neutrons and with protons with positive charges, the nucleus should want to destroy itself by similarly charged particles wanting to speed away from each other.

The second is the charge of the electrons. Electrons move in brilliant orbitals (s, p, d and f), but within the quantum mechanical model, there is always a node at the nucleus, shouldn’t the electrons be attracted to the positive centre and collapse the atom upon itself?

So we talk about the strong and weak interactions. My professor explained that if the value of these interactions was slightly larger or slightly smaller, life would never have existed.

Similarly people talk about gravitation and the expansion of the universe not happening if the constant was larger than it is.

I hope this helps.

-Prophesy

 

[Monte_RCMS]

Electrons may merely be a cloud of electrical charge.

 

[Monte_RCMS]

Entropy is real enough but you are correct in putting it into perspective.

Entropy is something you study after you have mastered all the basics of organic and inorganic chemistry, a lot of basic physics and calculus, plus thermodynamics and fluids.

I was at a bookstore looking at the current crop of chemistry textbooks and they all seem to AVOID talking about the basics. Almost nothing about the periodic table, which apparently is boring. Or basic chemical reactions. Or basic chemical equations.

Everybody seems to want to launch into quantum mechanics.

And watching Star Wars or Harry Potter just isn’t adequate preparation for quantum mechanics.

The Jeffreys Tube was named after a crew member of the television/movie production company.

There is just too much “melding” of science fiction with science. And science loses out.

 

[Prophesy]

Entropy is something you study after you have mastered all the basics of organic and inorganic chemistry, a lot of basic physics and calculus, plus thermodynamics and fluids.

I was at a bookstore looking at the current crop of chemistry textbooks and they all seem to AVOID talking about the basics. Almost nothing about the periodic table, which apparently is boring. Or basic chemical reactions. Or basic chemical equations.

Everybody seems to want to launch into quantum mechanics.

And watching Star Wars or Harry Potter just isn’t adequate preparation for quantum mechanics.

The Jeffreys Tube was named after a crew member of the television/movie production company.

There is just too much “melding” of science fiction with science. And science loses out.

I’m hoping that those were college/university textbooks you were looking at. The periodic table and the structure of the atom should be taught in high school alongside the structure of the cell (which I know gets covered again and again and again).

-Prophesy