On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 9:18 AM, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]> wrote:
> He is humming along talking about the universe since the Big Bang, when he > reminds me that the planets in the solar system are in a higher entropy > state than the gas cloud from which they formed. (“The Solar system…evolved > out of a protostellar cloud that had an even lower entropy; … [FETH, p. > 45]”) Really? There are more ways to be a few rocks circulating around a sun > than there are to be a cloud? How does that work? How I thought that was > going to work was that the constraints of gravity somehow allowed the solar > system to export entropy elsewhere while the solar system itself was a > temporary non-entropic structure. But now we are back to that question I > asked a couple of months ago about how that structure-making force gravity > gets to be outside of the entropy calculation. But it is, as always, the entropy of the universe that increases. The collapse of a cloud into a planet, or into a star for that matter, releases a lot of heat. There are more ways to be a cloud than a rock, but becoming a rock liberates a lot of radiation and there are lots and lots of ways to be a cloud of photons radiating into space. -- rec -- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
