Thermodynamics and The Universe

Really? It only took two emails before he resorted to ad hominem accusations of dishonesty, necessitating the routing of his emails to my spam trap. Your mileage may vary, I guess. This is why I don't do these discussions over email. Creationists just won't stay honest.

Hrm. Then I'd suggest you read a little further, because the impression you should be getting is that the apparently-deterministic rules that apply at our scale of existence, like the laws of thermodynamics, are actually just the statistical, stochiastic outcomes of a large number of random processes.But, hey. Stick with your conspiracy theory about scientists purposefully trying to suborn reason and logic for unspecificed purposes if that's what it takes to come to terms with observing people who know more than you about something. And we're all on the edge of our seats waiting for your completely logical, deterministic explanation for the two-slit experiment.

By all means, apply them to the Two Slit experiment and show us how "elementary cause and effect logic" can explain how a single particle causes a wave-interference pattern with itself.Show us how it's done, Buz. Did it occur to you that, perhaps, the reason that quantum mechanics is so counterintuitive is because it has to explain a considerable number of counterintuitive observations? The universe isn't always a simple place, Buz, which means that sometimes, theory can't be simple, either.

And you're ignoring mine. When are you going to present the classical, non-quantum explanation for the Two Slit experiment?

I'm curious how you're measuring the entropy of the whole Earth. I'm not convinced that there's any less entropy on Earth than there is on Mars, for instance.For the third time, though, tell us how you would explain the Two Slit experiment in a "classical" (that means, non-QM-based) way.

Lately? It seems to be about watching you make hilarious science gaffes while telling us all how stupid we are.I'm gonna go make some popcorn.

It seems pretty obvious to me that the thermodynamic principle at work here is that an ordered state isn't inherently less entropic than a disordered state; it's just more likely, statistically, to represent a less entropic state.Obviously, biological self-organized states occur when those states represent more entropy than a disorganized state. Since a chemical system tends to wind up at the lowest local energy level (and I may not be putting this exactly right; I'm not a chemist - is "potential" the better word here?), such a system should, eventually, wind up in a self-organized, self-assembled state, if such a state represents a lower local energy level.That's how proteins assemble, for instance. Their quaternary structure represents a lower energy level than a straight-line polypeptide within the environment of the cell.It's like asking what gravitational principle is at work when a ball rolls down a hill. The question makes it sound much more mysterious than it really is. Is this like when you tried to correct my grammar? Maybe you should get your own ducks in a row, first.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Does it? I mean, I see how thermodynamics would apply to an organism, obviously an organism is a system that intakes, uses, and outputs energy and heat, but I don't see how thermodynamics would apply to changes in a population over time, which is what evolution is.If a way to model changes in species over time in a thermodynamic way has been put forward, I must have missed it. Evolution isn't a process powered by energy; it's a description of what happens to organisms that inherit characteristics from their ancestors and experience differential success at passing those characteristics on to their descendants.Evolution isn't solar powered; it happens under any physical conditions appropriate for life. Life and living things might very well be applicable to questions of thermodynamics, but I don't see how evolution, as a description of what happens to living things, would be.Where am I going wrong? Aside from not being a physicist?Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

I thought that entropy could be described as the energy unavailable for work, and under that description, it seems to me that a living creature represents a system where energy is being converted from a usable state to unusable states to do work. Simplistically, that's why animals have to eat. Maybe that's what I was trying to say. Agreed.