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2nd law of thermodynamics
please explain the creationist attack in detail

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2nd law of thermodynamics

Makarismos
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Posted 07/14/08 - 11:13 AM:	#31
Ok I will attempt to outline an argument to show that the second Law somehow contradicts evolution. Here it goes:- 1) Order tends toward chaos (as per second law) 2) The proposed process of evolution creates order from chaos. C) Therefore evolution must be false. However as has been pointed out, there is a difference between net order/chaos and local order/chaos. If we are to have a successful argument, it seems we must show that the overall amount of chaos is reduced by the process of evolution:- 1) At all local points of the universe, as well as overall, order tends to become more chaotic as time progresses. 2) The process of evolution would cause a local drop in the increase of entropy. c) Therefore the process of evolution must be false. Still, this does not quite add up unless we contend that the second law must hold all over the universe at all times, with complete and strict uniformity. This would be a suppressed premise of this argument, and one I find wanting. If this were the case, we would see order decreasing at exactly the same rate everywhere, and this process would be unalterable. It would not be possible to increase or decrease the rate at which order is lost from a system: this does not match with experiment, and so we must charitably assume that no one who seriously studies science/advocates ID would make this claim. Let us again reformulate the argument with this in mind:- 1) When the universe is taken as a whole, matter tends to become more chaotic as time progresses. 2) An increase of chaos is equal to entropy (best to be clear I thought). 3) The process of evolution would cause a total drop in the entropy of the universe. c) Therefore the process of evolution must be false. Notice how this is no longer about any local drop in entropy, but about the total net entropy of the universe over time. This argument is valid (as in its conclusion follows logically from its premises), but the question remains as to how sound it is. I have done my best to come to a charitable version of what could be proposed by a proponent of ID who wished to say that the second law of thermodynamics invalidates the theory of evolution – I shall leave it up to you fine people to qualify it, argue against or for it, and judge its soundness.

simwaves1
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Posted 07/14/08 - 05:14 PM:	#32
swstephe wrote: In heat theory, you can think of entropy as following along with heat flowing from hot objects to cold objects. When ice melts at room temperature, the heat in the room is flowing into the water, until the water is the same temperature as the room. Calsius restates the 2nd law of thermodynamics as "heat can not flow from a cold object to a warmer object without work being applied". We experience ice melting because we live at room temperature. If, instead, you place a glass of water in a freezer, the second law of thermodynamics says that the heat in the water will flow into the cold air of the freezer. The temperature of the air in the freezer will raise very slightly, but the temperature of the water will cool off until the water reaches its phase-transition temperature/pressure and freezes. I like the freezing part, because people who misunderstand the usage of "order" in the 2nd law would expect either water or ice to be more "ordered". The 2nd law of thermodynamics can be expressed as dS = dQ/T. The change in entropy is equal to the change in heat divided by the temperature of the system. Water will freeze if T is low enough and boil if it is high enough. All entropy says is that heat will flow between different objects until the whole system equalizes. What you described above is correct; however, this is not what I got from your previous post. It seems that your understanding of a "truly closed system," described in your previous post, is a system that can lose heat to its surroundings but not receive heat transfer. This is a misunderstanding of what a closed system is. The water in a closed system will only freeze if its surroundings are at a low enough temperature to accept enough of a heat transfer to reach fusion of water. It seems that your explanation ignores the fact that our planet has a constant heat transfer from the sun.

swstephe
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Posted 07/14/08 - 05:40 PM:	#33
If I put gas in my car and drive it until I run out of gas, is the total entropy of the Universe greater or less? Since my car isn't 100% efficient, there has been heat loss and the "order", (that energy was stored in my gas), was reduced, (by producing work, the energy flowed into other forms), and entropy increased. Evolution, like my car, does work and produces some local "order", but the total entropy is always lost because nothing is 100% efficient. In a closed system, evolution would eventually run out of energy and stop. Maybe a better example, (which I'm "borrowing"), is that when a rabbit reproduces, it increases "order" and decreases entropy for its local environment and appears to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Therefore, reproduction is impossible, right? But since rabbits aren't 100% efficient, the entropy of the solar system has increased slightly as the sunlight that produced carrots that made rabbits was a net loss that will never be regained. If we say that we observe rabbits reproducing, and having variations which are better or worse for their environment, then evolution necessarily follows, while obeying the 2nd law to the letter.
Ethics is the measuring of morality. Morality is the measuring of good. Good is the measuring of benefit. Benefit is the measure of values.

Death Monkey
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Posted 07/15/08 - 12:55 AM:	#34
Simple Occam, This incompleteness first arises with Newton's 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, the entropy law. It stands apart in a very significant way from his laws of motion in that the increase of entropy is observed only in a closed system. That is, it is a physical regularity that has a temporal and a spatial factor. The regulariries of the 2nd Law are not reversable in time as the laws of motion are. When the cue ball hits the rack the billiard balls are propelled around the table in a way that is completely predictable from the laws of motion and the angular momentum of the cueball striking the rack. If you reversed all those forces in time you would get back to the balls all racked up before the break. But even if you could reverse time, the water will not turn back into ice and the coffee will not get hot again...unless energy is introduced from outside the system. The 2nd Law cannot be reduced to the laws of motion or any more basic law. That's why its a target for creationists like Duane Gish. It's truly an empirical law since it is built up out of a series of observations that always turn out to be true but it is not derived from any more basic laws that explain WHY it always holds. This isn't really accurate. First of all, the laws of thermodynamics are statistical mechanics laws. That is, they are laws about what happens on average, not rigid deterministic laws, like Newton's laws of motion. For example, the 2nd law is violated, even for closed systems, all the time. But this is nearly indetectable for anything other than extremely small systems being observed on very short time scales. Otherwise the probability of making such an observation becomes vanishingly small. Second, it is incorrect to say that we do not know why the 2nd law works, or that it cannot be derived from more basic laws. Quite the contrary, the 2nd law directly follows from Newton's laws, when applied to any complex system which, due to its complexity, involves approximately random exchanges of energy from one degree of freedom to another, via interactions. For example, if one takes a closed and perfectly insulated container of some ideal gas (individual perfectly spherical particles, with no adhesion or cohesion), an works out what Newton's laws say should happen, all the laws of thermodynamics immediately pop out. Given almost any set of initial conditions, the gas will go to state of approximately uniform temperature, which is also a state of maximal entropy for the amount of energy present. In principle, the laws of thermodynamics are nothing more than the application of basic principles of statistics to complex mechanical systems that behave randomly (or approximately randomly). There is nothing mysterious about it. DM
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Kurt_Godel
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Posted 07/15/08 - 07:16 AM:	#35
Makarismos wrote: 1) When the universe is taken as a whole, matter tends to become more chaotic as time progresses. Not matter, but the universe as a whole. 2) An increase of chaos is equal to entropy (best to be clear I thought). Entropy is the measure of chaos, not the increase in chaos. 3) The process of evolution would cause a total drop in the entropy of the universe. No. Instead it increases it. If you take a handful of clay, mix it with water, and play with it until you have a vase, you have decreased the entropy local to the clay and water mixture. But the energy you used in mixing the clay/water and modeling the vase increase the total entropy of the universe. c) Therefore the process of evolution must be false. Neyope!

LauLuna
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Posted 07/15/08 - 11:03 AM:	#36
philosopher8293 wrote: If a glass, an ordered object with low entropy is dropped and smashes, it's entropy increases because it is left as many shattered pieces. If you melt it down and reform it as a glass, it's entropy decreases again because it becomes a more ordered shape. However the energy transformed to do this spreads out through space, increasing the net entropy. The energy taken to create the first life will have spread out through space increasing the entropy. The universe started as an infinitely small point with all of the energy in the universe concentrated in it - infinite order and 0 entropy. Time started and space expanded and energy spread out to fill it, increasing the entropy of the universe. Everything that is ordered actually creates more disorder than the order that it is in. I don't see why the entropy in the initial singularity is 0. How can it be so if there is absolute uniformity? I tend to think that entropy has decreased as the universe expanded. Paul Davies explained somewhere how the expansion of the universe can make entropy decrease by creating differences in temperature. A friend of mine, physics and mathematics professor, told me once that the universe is not an isolated system because, by definition, there is no system without environment. The latter has never convinced me. As for Davies' opinion, I'd say that if he is right, it would only show that an expanding universe must be an open system. Regards

Kurt_Godel
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Posted 07/15/08 - 12:01 PM:	#37
LauLuna wrote: I don't see why the entropy in the initial singularity is 0. How can it be so if there is absolute uniformity? I tend to think that entropy has decreased as the universe expanded. Paul Davies explained somewhere how the expansion of the universe can make entropy decrease by creating differences in temperature. A friend of mine, physics and mathematics professor, told me once that the universe is not an isolated system because, by definition, there is no system without environment. The latter has never convinced me. As for Davies' opinion, I'd say that if he is right, it would only show that an expanding universe must be an open system. Regards It is precisely because there was absolute unifority that entropy was 0, or unity. Absolute uniformity as a result of 0 dissociation implies 0 chaos. What Davies explained was a (one of several) hypothesis which attempts to account for the seemingly 'un-chaotic' clumping observed in the universe, in the form of relatively dense clumps of matter (galaxies) with huge spaces between them in a seemingly non-uniform distribution. This hypothesis (I forget the source) attempts to explain the conundrum that although one would expect the big bang to distribute matter more or less uniformly throughout the universe, in reality it's completely the opposite. Even so, that is still a case of local decrese in entropy. Overall entropy always increases. Discussions regarding the immutable direction of entropy always brings to mind Asimov's classic The Last Question.

swstephe
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Posted 07/15/08 - 09:58 PM:	#38
I don't think "chaos" is a good way to think of entropy. When a hurricane/typhoon/monsoon dissapates into the surrounding atmosphere, it becomes less "chaotic", but the entropy increases because the usable heat or energy got transferred into the surroundings. If the sun disappeared, (no outside energy), the atmosphere would lose its energy and become uniformly distributed while cooling, (losing heat as radiation). But uniformity isn't always the best indicator of an increase in entropy either. Look at planets -- they form as entropy transfers the energy from gravity into a lower state by being clumped together. The fate of the universe sometimes falls into 2 ultimate entropy scenarios -- where matter expands until it is beyond the reach of gravity or where it all collapses into the maximum entropy of the "big crunch". Either scenario is maximum entropy, but with very different results. Planets are also interesting when someone thinks of "order" implying low entropy. People look at planets and think they are perfectly ordered spheres, (or close enough an approximation). They think that because the human brain mistakes the aesthetic pleasure of looking at something symmetric as "ordered", when it is simply the lowest entropy for the energy and forces available. Gravity is the one force that always keeps us from having a nice simple Universe, but without it, we probably wouldn't have all the rest or be here to appreciate it.
Ethics is the measuring of morality. Morality is the measuring of good. Good is the measuring of benefit. Benefit is the measure of values.

Kurt_Godel
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Posted 07/16/08 - 07:05 AM:	#39
Its true that the translation of entropy as chaos is orthodox, but accurate nonetheless. wikipedia wrote: Entropy, historically, has often been associated with the amount of order, disorder, and/or chaos in a thermodynamic system. The traditional definition of entropy is that it refers to changes in the status quo of the system and is a measure of "molecular disorder" and the amount of wasted energy in a dynamical energy transformation from one state or form to another.[31] In this direction, a number of authors, in recent years, have derived exact entropy formulas to account for and measure disorder and order in atomic and molecular assemblies. An interesting point you brought up with the case of the big crunch. I'm not entirely sure whether the big crunch would imply an increase, decrease, or no change in entropy. This would be wort looking into. Finally, swstephe wrote: People look at planets and think they are perfectly ordered spheres, (or close enough an approximation). They think that because the human brain mistakes the aesthetic pleasure of looking at something symmetric as "ordered", when it is simply the lowest entropy for the energy and forces available. That is pretty straghtforward and rational, yet profound at the same time, since it touches on the meaning of the phenomenon of beauty. Edited by Kurt_Godel on 07/16/08 - 07:11 AM

Makarismos
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Posted 07/16/08 - 07:17 AM:	#40
We need a working definition of "entropy" in this discussion, as well as some consensus on what the second law entails. It seems that these things are known, and are in the public domain - but that we don’t collectively understand them from the discussion so far on this thread. Surely entropy is simply the decrease of order? and the second law states that this order within the universe will decrease uniformly as time progresses? Are these the important implications of these ideas for the present debate, or are there others?

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