<And eventually entropy will cause the heat death of the universe>
CB, that's the scientific way of saying "The end of the world is night". Just like all the gloomsters and doomsters, they are wrong. In their narrow little world of steam engines, enthalpy, entropy and chemistry in their laboratories and observations, yes that's true.
It's like Newtonian mechanics = good for figuring out Kepler's laws and how big the photovoltaics need to be on a satellite to keep it flying in the weak atmosphere of low earth orbits, but no good when accelerating protons up to high speed to smash into some innocent lumps at the end of the racetrack.
In the cauldron beyond the event horizon, entropy doesn't have quite the same meaning. Neither does time. Neither does anything.
We can see that entropy does NOT cause the heat death of the universe because as we can clearly see, here we are. If it did cause the end of it all, we would already not be here.
You don't really believe that the universe began the size of a pea 15 billion years ago do you? For a start, to measure it as being the size of a pea, we'd actually need a pea to use as a measuring stick. Since the measuring sticks would all be inside the singularity, they aren't going to be able to be used as the measuring stick to measure themselves. Goedel's self-referential stuff comes in there [if I understand it correctly]. Then, we'd have to have a British Standard billion year measure so we'd know if it was 15 billion years. Since time is defined as a function of distance [another of the Goedelian problems] and distance is defined as a function of time, we go around in circles, which is presumably why galaxies, and I suppose the universe itself, are busy rotating.
So, since time and distance are mutually-defined [a bit like two children comparing their heights as they both grow would say that they are the same height always unless they get something else which isn't growing to do the measuring] and both are inside the pea-sized singularity, we are stuck inside the event horizon going around and around in self-defining circles.
We also know it's nonsense because inside the event horizon, nobody is coming out, [though now they say that's not quite right] and the pea-sized singularity of the universe was one big mother of a black hole. So NOBODY was getting away from that, but hey presto, here we are. Right here, right now! And bigger than a pea. And not running out of energy any time soon.
Which is not to say that things will stay hunky dory where we are living. I suspect that nearby black holes are pumping out entropy somehow or other while sucking in stuff which ventures too close [a bit like Enron, Global Crossing and other economic black holes]. Something is certainly acting as a perpetual engine to keep it all ticking along.
In the same way, there isn't going to be any economic bust unless governments create one by doing things [such as stopping trade, destroying trust in money, attacking somebody, raising tariffs, etc].
Mq |
