
Solution to the Major Asymmetry Problem of Thermodynamics
Date: Sunday, July 11, 2004 @ 23:13:19 UTC Topic: Science
Tony Craddock writes: A substantially updated and expanded version of Tom Bearden's Fact Sheet -
Leyton's Hierarchies of Symmetry: Solution to the Major Asymmetry Problem of Thermodynamics - has now been uploaded to the Website at:
http://www.cheniere.org/techpapers/Fact_Sheets/index.html
THE PROBLEM: THERMODYNAMICS HAS A TEMPORAL ASYMMETRY PROBLEM, RECOGNIZED FOR A CENTURY, BECAUSE THE SECOND LAW EXCLUDES NEGATIVE ENTROPY PROCESSES AND NATURE DOES NOT.
· Assuming some controlled available system energy to start with, the second law provides that, in subsequent interactions, the entropy S of a system can only remain the same or increase. Or, S ³ 0, once the subsequent interactions start.
· This says nothing at all about how the initial available excess system energy got there.
· The recognized major problem in thermodynamics arises from the present Second Law. As Price states {1}:
"A century or so ago, Ludwig Boltzmann and other physicists attempted to explain the temporal asymmetry of the second law of thermodynamics. …the hard-won lesson of that endeavor—a lesson still commonly misunderstood—was that the real puzzle of thermodynamics is not why entropy increases with time, but why it was ever so low in the first place."
· The real problem is: “Given the Second Law’s prohibition of negative entropy operations, how did the initial order (energy) get there in the first place, in any system?” This is simply the same “Problem with the Second Law”. As far as the present form of the Second Law is concerned, acquisition of the original energy could only have been “created from nothing”. Of course that violates the First Law, which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
· This means that thermodynamics is presently self-inconsistent—which causes the “greatest problem in thermodynamics itself.”
· The problem particularly arises in prevailing notions of the origin of the universe, whether “big bang” or “steady whimper”. A great deal of organization and energy came from somewhere or somehow, in a relatively short time cosmologically, to initially generate enormous negative entropy {2} shortly after the beginning.
· If the energy of our observable universe somehow came from “outside” (thus saving energy conservation), then it represented “loss” of available energy (positive entropy) to that outside source, and “gain” of available energy (negative entropy) to our universe...
[The paper is also archived in our Downloads/ZPE_related section]
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