On Tuesday, August 26, 2025 at 1:12:13 PM UTC-6 John Clark wrote:
On Tue, Aug 26, 2025 at 12:27 PM Alan Grayson <[email protected]> wrote: *>>>> I know I'm being pedantic but it's actually "entropy for a closed system can *almost* never decrease".* *>>> I don't claim to be an expert in thermodynamics, but I did take a course in that very subject, and I recall quite clearly that your revision of the 2nd law is false.* *>>You're certainly correct in saying that you're not an expert in thermodynamics because what you say in the above is 100% wrong. The second law of thermodynamics is a statistical law and therefore can only provide probabilities not certainties, * O *> Classical Thermodynamics is NOT a statistical theory, and the 2nd Law is NOT a statistical law. Maybe you're thinking of Statistical Mechanics. AG* *Statistical Mechanics is able to give us an explanation of WHY the second law says entropy *almost* never decreases. There are astronomically more disorderly states than orderly states but they are not infinitely more, and that's what would be required to move from overwhelmingly unlikely to absolutely impossible. * *John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>* *Does E have a maximal value under statistical mechanics? If not, the initial state at the BB could have any E without posing a problem. On the other hand, if E has a maximal value, it could be so high that the universe would never reach that level in its lifetime. Again, no problem IMO. On another issue, since you're now interested in WHY answers, can you explain how a point particle, a photon, with zero width, can manifest a wave property with finite width? If not, then your stretching model for photon redshift makes no sense. AG* 4e7 -- 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 [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/1ef5bbf8-bce7-47d8-8cb5-73fd950a8b90n%40googlegroups.com.
