![]() You might think this crazy…but it’s mathematically sound. ![]() In fact, it’s possible this just happened, and all of our lives, memories, creations just came into being…but we would have no evidence of it. At some time in the past our universe was very disordered, and through random fluctuations everything came together and created our reality. But, in the other world, entropy actually started out higher. That has certain implications in our models of the early universe. In one world, entropy began in our universe at a very, very low value, as most people are talking about in this thread. We observe a certain mid-level of order in the universe right now – namely, intelligent life, galactic formations, etc – and this implies only two options for our past. The crazy thing is what this means for our timeline of the universe. So, from a bird’s-eye perspective, entropy always increases, but the truth is that if you zoom in, it jumps up and down, always trending towards an increase. The entropy, through random fluctuations, would decrease. But if left to himself, eventually he will type out an entire Shakespearean play, word for word. The letters he types is assumed random – a state of “maximum” entropy. The second law says entropy is always increasing…but from a macroscopic perspective, not an absolute one.Ī classic analogy is a monkey typing on a typewriter. ![]() If a system is in an ordered state (and there are ways of quantifying this) then it is much more likely that, through random internal and external interactions, that it will become less ordered. The second law, regarding entropy, is an empirical law based on statistical reasoning, and not a statement about underlying mechanisms. We have never observed energy being created/destroyed, and such that law is a firm statement about reality. Firstly, the second law of thermodynamics is almost a misnomer – it is not a ‘law’ like the first law of thermo, which states that energy is always conserved. Please let me know what you think or correct me where I am wrong.Įntropy has always confused me, as well, but recently I had my understanding of it skyrocket while reading Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos. If you look at the universe, there is a lot more emptiness than there is matter so naturally we would be a very low entropy universe if the big bang theory is accurate. When I begin to think about this, it seems to me like the only way you could confidently decrease entropy would be to expand space. It would then make sense to assume that when the big bang occurred and space expanded, the number of possible microstates increased on an exponential level due to expanding space (like "room to move around" and occupy more states) and, ultimately, lower entropy. Even if it was not a singularity and just a very small space, there would still be very few microstates and a small range of possible entropy. Theoretically, this is the lowest entropy state possible because if all matter is compressed into one spot and space is just barely big enough to contain it there are zero other possible microstates (but I would think that entropy itself would not exist due to the space boundary). It occurred to me that, before the big bang, the universe was supposedly condensed into a singularity with space just barely surrounding it. I was recently reading a previous askscience question and began thinking about entropy and why our universe had such a low entropy at the beginning.
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