Ok. But the more I think about this the more I think that the idea that "entropy increases" has less and less to do with any of the things we actually talk about in FRIAM.
Nick -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2010 1:16 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Please don't yell at me. 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 ============================================================ 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
