Thermodynamics and The Universe

My point to Chiroptera was simply that most scientists outside of theoretical cosmology have little or no knowledge or appreciation of the real issues surrounding t=0 in the Big Bang model. It's easy quoting the usual blurb - going from phase transition to inflation to phase transition to recombination to galaxies to stars to us, all dull stuff - the party is at t=0 Of course we do not know what happens at t=0, but to the interested layman this should be irrelevant. Considering and understanding the various bizarre possibilities is key to appreciating what GR, quantum gravity, and by association string theory, loop gravity, etc. are really all about. T=0 is about stretching your understanding so you can appreciate what the issues really are.For example, there may well be a t<0. BUT until you can appreciate a universe for which there is no t

I wasn't suggesting mechanisms, Buz. I was attempting to stress the need for understanding and appreciation - something you are singularly determined to avoid. Please see RickJB's post above Message 73

Buz, imagine I walk into one of your superbowl stadia where the teams are warming up, and I annouce in my strongest British accent -

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I say chaps, this American Football is for nancy boys with all your effeminate shoulder pads and jock straps. You should try Rugga, a game for real men.

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How long do you think I'd last? Alternatively, I could walk in and at a quiet moment, say -

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hi guys, I really don't know anything about American Football, can you explain it to me? Us Brits have some preconceptions about the game but we're not exactly qualified to comment.

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Don't avoid the science fora, just use them as a place to learn. It's where you can get your misconceptions ironed out, but only if you admit upfront that most of what you know (given your layman sources) is going to be misconception. And it's no good caveating yourself upfront, declaring yourself a layman, then going on to speak as if you're anything but. What's that about STFUASTFD and cotton wool, ears and mouth?

That's making some very large (and probably incorrect) assumptions concerning compression techniques.

Huh? You need to think about this a bit more...Can you spell anthropocentric ABE: actually, sorry, I'll take some of that back because the inter-suite alignment is fairly clearly non-anthropocentric.Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

I must admit I've never seen Prigogine's work before - or not that I can recall. However, at first glance he is possibly talking about local maxima of entropy, stable points in entropy space that are far away from the true maximum. Relative to the true maximum, they are low entropy but are trapped by surrounding lower entropy states.We do have the physics of local minima of energy, which give rise to solitons and related entities. It sounds like he tried to do something similar with biological entities. I have no idea how useful such as idea would be, and this ties in with some of the comments I have read concerning his science, which suggest that it was all well and good but had little to no useful nor predictive value...

You're quite right, Nem... crystals do not make a good analogy to biological organisation. Instead, consider the evolution of stars. You will soon realise that self-organisation is very common in the Universe without anything more magical than gravitation and hydrogen. Not that gravitation is not magical