On Saturday, September 14, 2019 at 7:12:34 AM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote: > > If the early universe, say before the emergence of the CMBR, consisted of > a random collection of electrons and photons, wouldn't this correspond to a > *high*, not low entropy? Wouldn't it be analogous to gas with many > possible states? Yet cosmologists seem hard pressed to explain an initial > or early state assuming the entropy is low. AG >
When I was an undergraduate I took a course in Classical Thermodynamics and recall being satisfied that entropy was well-defined. I never took a course in Classical Statistical Mechanics, but I've seen Boltzmann's equation for S and wonder how N, the number of possible states is defined. If we have a gas enclosed in a container, we can divide it into occupation cells of fixed volume to calcuate S. But why can't we double the number of cells by reducing their volume by half? How then is S well defined in the case of Classical Statistical Mechanics? TIA, AG -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/35a78e16-25fd-4bd7-91df-888c01b62d63%40googlegroups.com.
