Tuesday, July 03, 2012

The entropic limitation.

We are preparing the last days of everything, and this requires to sort out the things we still need the next days, to strip the Interspatial Station's equipment to the bare minimum. I scan quickly the Introductory Notes of the book of the founder of the Human Purpose movement, Ilai Zedin, "On Entropy and the Human Purpose":

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Any method involving the notion of entropy, the very existence of which depends on the second law of thermodynamics, will doubtless seem to many far-fetched, and may repel beginners as obscure and difficult of comprehension.  
Willard Gibbs, Graphical Methods in the Thermodynamics of Fluids
     The words of Willard Gibbs, arrogant as they seem today, were quite sound at the time. However, they are no longer true, reader. If you are reading this, it means you are about to undergo a journey, a fundamental shift in your existence. These words are said under the assumption that you are ready, that you have faithfully followed your scientific catechism until now. You stayed course during school, or even after, and learned about thermodynamics, about entropy, about quantum dynamics, about string theory, about M theory, that you understood Peter Higgs' theories, and then, you found the discrepancies between our observations of nature and the current answers given by all this science to the primordial questions of life. All these theories made you realize the "imminent" heat death of the universe, which clashed with your internal willingness for purpose in life, and your self-preservation instincts.

     These statements, might, again, be interpreted as a sign of arrogance on my part, since they imply that you will be, through my words, communicated a theory that solves said discrepancies and offers you an irrefutable worldview that includes a clear sense of purpose in life. Your scientific mind is trained to bolt at the mention of new interpretations of the world that consider themselves immune to Gödel's incompleteness theorems. You believe that we cannot present a bulletproof theory. I, even though only able to imagine this supposed reaction of yours while writing this text, quite appreciate it.

     However, in science, where we need to question everything, we must at some point be adamant about our perception of the cosmos, given the observations available, in order to build our further understanding of the cosmos upon these. We will, therefore, proceed with the observations and theories you have already trained, in order to reach a theory that adequately explains our purpose in the world.

     I will assume, before going forwards, that you are familiar with the theories and partake in the beliefs written before. You also have the option to familiarize yourself with them in the Annex part of this book.

     If you are not familiar with these notions, my words are but writings on the sand, to be blown away by the wind. Only through active, living resistance, through an active mind and will, shall these words overcome our rival, Entropy, and for that I hope that this text, this plea to your intellect, this hurt at your pride, will succeed in making you read and re-transcribe and transmit my words, these words on the sand. In the following chapters of my work I shall expand on the following points:

1/Entropy

The Entropy of an isolated system is a number that is proportionate to number of internal permutations of the M/E parts that constitute the system, without affecting its fundamental physical characteristics.

An isolated system is one in which there is no input or output of M/E with from or towards external systems. The only one that actually exists is our Universe, yet many systems can behave, for a finite amount of time, as such.

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system always increases or remains constant. This leads to the conclusion that in an isolated system,  will tend to adjust to a single uniform temperature and thus produce equilibrium.

2/Space expansion

The metric expansion of space is the increase of distance with time between distant parts of the universe, that is due not to motion but rather is an intrinsic part of the nature of the Universe. This expansion means that the total volume of the universe is increasing.

3/Mass–energy equivalence and conservation thereof

Both the Mass-Energy equivalence and M/E conservation theories have already been quite vulgarized during the years following their introduction to the world. This is famously presented by the elegant formulation of E=mc² that Einstein graced humanity with. Mass can be translated into energy and vice-verse, yet there can be no generation of either out of thin air. This means that there is a limited amount of M/E in the universe that has remained constant since the Big Bang.

4/Combination and Implications

The total M/E of the universe being finite, and the total volume being in permanent expansion, we can conclude that the universe will in the end contain nothingness, each iota of energy frozen, motionless in a dead universe, due to the increase of entropy, trying to distribute all the available M/E evenly in the infinite cosmos. Even ultra dense matter, in black holes and white dwarfs will progressively decay into nothingness.

From our observations, life is the only somehow ordered machine part of the universe that actually has conscience of the rules of the universe. The total energy of the solar system (which is in no way isolated, but bare with me) is prone to dissipation and entropy. Even so, a percentage of whatever energy reaches living organisms is metabolised to create sustainable patterns, which will not completely immune to entropy, are, as stated, able to perceive it.

Humans, as a species, have a tendency to seek meaning as a result of an evolutionary-derived causality-driven thought-pattern. When facing the Universe we tend to wonder about our part in it, trying to come up with a world theory that makes sense of our existence. In the wake of the knowledge of the dissipation of energy in an ever expanding Universe, we could easily become depressed at the thought of a complete stagnant equilibrium.

In the last section of this book, I will describe my thesis about the purpose of the human species. It can be resumed to: "Preventing the expansion of the Universe, stop the increase of entropy, limit the dispersal of mass/energy in the cosmos to a restricted area, in order to assure the future convergence of all mass and energy, leading to a future Big Bang".

The philosophical implications of the thesis, as well as the scientific basis that sustain it, are detailed in...
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I stop reading and throw the digital book reader in the scrapping can. 

In the end, even reading the book that so-called justified everything we did; the wars, the famine, the injustice, the empire, the draining of the Sun and then the other stars, all of it, the aeons of life spent hunting and gathering all energy, limiting it, then hastening its convergence, the culling of our numbers until us 7 remain, preparing the death of our universe, preparing the birth of the next one; even reading the book of all books, that supposedly justified everything that was done, does not calm me.

So what if we will still get to live the same day again and again, countless times as Nietzsche unwittingly predicted through his metaphor? The Big Bang will resume, and the universe will have one more cycle, a revival worthy of the Ragnarok of the Norse mythologies of Earth.

Mere days of human time to go until we have reassembled all energy and mass into a single dot, THE single dot, outside the Interdimensional Station, and then stop our protection and get ourselves and the Station itself absorbed in the dot too.

With the all-encompassing emptiness surrounding us, while preparing ourselves to be absorbed into the point to create the next Big Bang, I quietly wonder if it would not have been better instead of going out with a bang, to go out in silence and elegant, frozen dignity.



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This short story was inspired by a a gift from my childhood friend Eva.

 The statement of Willard Gibbs, in the beginning of the text is not true, given our modern day criteria, and was proof of hubris. To quote Einstein: 
 “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself."

Even this statement does have a weak point* but this statement is not the point of this text. This is the exploration of the implications of a "proper-esque" understanding of entropy.

 

The above video, part of the BBC documentary series Wonders of the Universe, which I strongly recommend, explains quickly and adequately the concept of entropy. For those of you that did not spend any time viewing the video, I will not attempt a quick recap, since I believe I cannot explain it any better, nor can I infuse it with any more poetry.

* Said 6 year old might not be able to explain said idea to a coeval of his, therefore you have not explained it well enough. It would imply that correctly understood knowledge is a form of self-replicating Von Neumman machine, which -while very interesting as a thought- is neither an observed trend, nor the point of this text, as mentioned above.

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