Vladimyr Ivan Burachynsky wrote circa 10-07-16 06:53 PM:
Another confused old guy, But there was something called Planck's Distance
that said that two atoms could not get any closer under normal circumstances
without enormous forces yet Bose condensates are literally superimposed
indistinguishable atoms albeit identical. From my meager metallurgy days.
So there seems to be some kind of stand off between the two.
Right. I think the admission of an "entropic force" (distinct from the
non-causal measurement problem pointed out by Russ in the other thread)
as a force says something about the _agility_, instability, or
sensitivity to perturbation of the system being studied.
A completely "disordered" heat death (I assume) is a completely stable,
robust equilibrium. So, although we'd say it has maximum entropy, it's
actually quite orderly, as it were.
On the other hand, as Nick put it, all the matter in the universe lumped
into a singularity, which (again, I assume) would mean minimum entropy,
is also quite orderly.
So, I suppose it's important to remember that entropy is _purely_ a
relative term... a way of relating one system to another (or two systems
to the third they become when mixed). If there's only a single system,
then the term "entropy" is meaningless.
If all this rhetoric flows well, then an entropic force is a statement
about the difference between the degrees of freedom (wiggle room)
between two sets of configurations, _assuming_ some/any microscopic
force doing the wiggling (brownian motion, heat, diffusion,
particle-mediated fields, ... whatever). In particular, it shows up
when the space of configurations is not totally well-mixed. I.e. when
some regions of the configuration space have lots of well-connected
"points" and other regions are isolated in whatever sense that matters
to the hypothetical/unspecified microscopic force.
This would all make the conclusion that black holes are _not_
singularities perfectly reasonable. The death of a black hole would
just be the system walking that rare/difficult path away from the
well-connected region of configuration space out to the ill-connected
region of the configuration space of normal space-time. That rare path
could happen by a vanishingly rare chance (assuming the
hypothetical/unspecified microscopic force is stochastic at all) or due
to a bias in the microscopic force that makes the path more likely (e.g.
more heat, more mass, more energy, whatever).
All this would mean is that a mostly ill-connected universe, sparsely
populated by (dynamically evolving) gravity wells keeps the universe in
a dynamic equilibrium somewhere between heat death (chaos) and one big
lump of condensate (order). (Sorry... I've been brainwashed by Langton. ;-)
Lets really bend the rules here and speculate that all that we have defined
is a figment of our biological failures. We are always making assumptions
that we can think, when we might just be spinning old neurons that make us
feel good about ourselves. Kind of like a little too much beer and the girls
start looking better and better as the night proceeds. With Much regret in
the mornings. Perhaps our intelligence is much less than claimed and not
even an emergent phenomenon at all. While everything else is.
Heh, all I can say to that is "So what?" ;-) I already _know_ that all
my thoughts are flawed and, likely, mere self-gratification. And, being
the self-centered bastard that I am, I tend to think that other people
are like me and that all their thoughts are flawed and, likely, just
their own self-gratification. (That's why the myth of the free market
is so attractive to me.)
But you can choose to play the particular game. Or you can choose to
hang out on the balcony smoking cigars with the misfits while others
play the game at the kitchen table. I'm just making a small attempt to
play the game... or perhaps learn enough about the game to know I
wouldn't have any fun playing it. When I get tired, bored, or lazy,
I'll quit.
--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com
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