SO the AoT comes from the statistics of increasing entropy and is quite disjoint from the expansion of the universe.
Bruce, I haven't got time to reply at length but one thing stands out. You have said a few times that the AOT derives from the 2nd law / increasing entropy. That is however just the definition of the (thermodynamic) AOT. They're equivalent - you need something else from which to *derive* the 2nd law. That is, you have to answer the question - why was the universe in a low entropy state in the past? (I'll leave aside the radiation arrow and any others that might be around the place. The thermodynamic one is enough to be going on with, and I suspect they're all related anyway.) I've come up with one suggestion which may or may not be correct (I originally got it from P.C.W. Davies, although admittedly he only applied it to the entropy of large scale systems, IIRC, not the BB fireball) and I can think of at least a couple of others, although I still think cosmic expansion is the most likely simply because it's available everywhere at the start of the universe and certainly generates the bound states which (I contend) act as useful sources of negative entropy, allowing stars to run nuclear fusion and life to exist - which already gives us some features of an entropy gradient. Do you have a suggestion for an alternative mechanism that creates or drives the entropy gradient? I'm just curious (but if you do, it might enable me to get a better idea of where you're coming from on this). -- 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.
