On 2 July 2014 10:16, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > On 7/1/2014 2:55 PM, LizR wrote: > > I agree. As Victor Stenger mentions in "The Comprehensible Cosmos" > causality is just another word for the 2nd law, and the 2nd law is an > emergent result of the universe being in a special state - namely > expanding. The expansion determines an arrow of time via various processes > where initially time-symmetric systems "freeze out" into bound states > (quarks, nuclei, stars etc). This has the effect of allowing the entropy > ceiling to rise so a system that was originally at thermodynamic > equilibrium is able to move away from it as it cools / expands. > > So the question boils down to whether the expansion is a result of > fundamental physics, or incidental / local. Eternal inflation seems to > suggest it's fundamental - or does it? Can someone more knowledgeable > correct me on that, if necessary? > > If the universe is big sometime and small others then physical time is > probably going to point to inflation (not deflation). >
Absolutely, probably because of a mechanism similar to the one I mentioned above, which boils down to "more space = more room to do stuff in". I'm not questioning how the entropy gradient is derived from expansion, that seems fairly obvious, at least to me. My question is: Does Eternal Inflation make expansion the result of fundamental physics? E.I. appears to be time asymmetric - indeed, it appears to be *vastly* time asymmetric, with our local entropy gradient a pale shadow of the asymmetry built into a field that expands space exponentially forever. That would, at first sight, appear to be a time asymmetry built into fundamental physics. But is it, really? And if so, how come? > But still, the fact that the universe seems to have started in a low > entropy state needs explanation (c.f. Sean Carroll's "From Eternity to > Here"). > Obviously EI is one potential explanation for this, with "big bang bubbles" popping out of the inflaton field, each giving rise to an infinite universe. Each nucleation (I think it's called) creates a smooth expanding space-time filled with some form of energy that turns into quarks and leptons when it cools sufficiently, which it does due to the residual expansion. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
