It's easy to comprehend entropy as things moving from orderly to disorderly, but this is coming from beings who can't truly understand the full meaning of why things operate the way they do. It really is our best guess at a comforting explanation, but continuing to analyze it is part of our battle to make sense of the unknown (best part of being a living being!)
Yes I have problems with the word as well. It just means we haven't mapped the microvectors that underlie the causes of what seems as "disorder". Disorder inherently is a subjective term, viewed from the perspective of those who try to establish order with imperfect frameworks of understanding.
I've been thinking for some years, since my father gave me that famous book of Hawking, A brief history of time, that life could be the only thing that challenges entropy in the universe. That thought had me hooked ever since.
The channel Veritasium has a great video on entropy and how life fits into those ideas. The theory that we are basically entropy generators is strangely beautiful
What a beautiful question! I think entropy is the reason why we see things the way we do. Let's suppose we saw things going backwards or in a different direction; maybe the meaning we previously gave to them would be completely different. We would have a different context or even other ways to explain our reality. Entropy is a law that points out our direction and our sense. Perhaps entropy is the law that makes us give value to our lives.
you said "I think entropy ... why we things the way we do. ..." No matter what direction natural laws obey, and whatever constants that created a universe that birthed life, we would be biased towards the universe that birthed us. We will see it as the best and most natural way it is supposed to be. Not backwards or sideways. So for a "backward" universe, if they observe our current universe, they will think we are the backward universe and their's is the correct direction.
@@pulsar22this is true but we cannot blame ourselves for thinking that. id rather appreciate our universe for what it is even if maybe there aremore beautiful universes out there that i still dont appreciate and are aware of today. if we dont appreciate the universe we live in ourselves, no one else will do that.
Sabine, I love your presentation style and the way you step back from the fine detail to get a broad overview. Have you read the book by Unger and Smolin? I believe it is the answer to so many big questions.
Yes if you break a glass cup it doesn’t un-break. But also if you glue a broken cup together and put it on a shelf it doesn’t spontaneously break. You broke and and you fixed it. If we just look at moments where something moved toward less order than we get a confused idea that things always move toward less order. We could just as easily only consider moments where things became more orderly, where energy concentrated. Then we’d think the universe only moves towards more order. The obvious view to me is that it does both and it isn’t obvious if it does one more than the other. I would assume it is in perfect balance.
Never knew until THIS video of the source material that was used to formulate HitchHiker's Guide to the galaxy had come from Issac Asimov. HitchHiker's guide answer was 42 whereas it was "let their be light" but the EXACT same question was posed to a computer in both stories. I see now that was simply a play on the original story so it now makes even more sense
Entropy is our understanding of universe in entirity,but entropy is complex because we have memory of past but not future 👍 that's why we feel that way, memory of humans was devised a survival mechanism,it has nothing to do with universe itself.
If we had memory of the future we would not consider it as "future", mainly because that scenario implies zero entropy and predictable way things will unravel. Not to start a religious debate, but religion in its basic form proposes low entropy or being satisfied with not knowing aka "believing", whether in higher plan or self. On the other hand, science proposes probing and questioning, but it also claims reducing entropy to its lower state will preserve the universal order ? So basically, they are proposing the same thing but with different methodology. Yikes, this is some Star Wars shit right here.
I believe we are currently way short of reaching a point in our understanding of the universe and how it works at a fundamental level ( Though our current advancement in physics is awesome). It would be easier to understand simple interactions such as a free falling object , light from a torch, water boiling off, etc.and question them from entropy's perspective. Can gravity be reversed ? Can a photon traverse a reverse path and get back inside the torch ? Can water vapour condense back into the pot at right condition? To reverse entropy at a grand scale , it is important to understand if we need the ability to reverse the direction of fundamental forces' direction and if it becomes an essential condition.
the most interesting thing about this whole theme is the awareness that due to the continuous increase of entropy things will change but we are smart enough to slow them down
@3_Pancakes i think i said we are smart enough to slow down entropy. Obviously, the examples are many like Old age natural disasters, etc although according to Boltzmann we can have a state with maximum entropy and no apparent change.
Something I find confusing about entropy is why do they say things go from order to disorder. If the end point of entropy is when there are no more interactions between particles and the universe is in complete equilibrium, surely that would mean entropy has taken things from disorderly to orderly. Can anyone explain.
Connor Wilkinson - "surely that would mean entropy has taken things from disorderly to orderly." Yes. In fact the 3rd law states that a perfectly ordered crystal at zero Kelvin will have zero entropy. Order and disorder is a non-issue with respect to entropy. Entropy only deals with going from a high potential energy to a lower potential energy. Or high energy gradient (low entropy) to a low energy gradient (high entropy).
I thought entropy was just like dispersion but I really don't care about any of this stuff so I learned a lot from this and now have been inspired to read more books besides the Bible.
Some species can not only slow down entropy, but can actually get younger. Like the immortal jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii), there are crocodiles that don't age (just grow bigger & hungrier and eventually die of starvation or stupidity like the russian previously oldest crocodile that ate some nylon ropes at the zoo and died from it). But humans (as practically all life forms) can do it too. Not in the scope of a single individ. Our bodies are still aging, but some processes ensure that the genetic material that makes the next generation doesn't degrade with time. So aging doesn't have to do with Entropy. Aging is specific to Biology.
Yeah so, I don't believe she was saying that aging is caused by entropy. Like she mentioned, there are species which in theory could live forever, except that eventually the total amount of entropy in the universe (via the heat death of the universe/atomic decay) will eventually destroy on a subatomic level everything that has any mass at all. Entropy in the form of the universe itself moving to the lowest energy state possible until the very fields that produce particles can't anymore.
Coming from a genomic background, to me aging seems like the inevitable failure to maintain the integrity of information in time. What is striking is that some cells (germline) are in a way protected by this loss, allowing for reproduction, generating "new youth"
GianMa you said "to me aging seems like the inevitable failure to maintain the integrity of information in time ..." This is a fallacy. Any plant or animal can create a system where they can perfectly make copies of their cells in perpetuity and correct the errors. The reason we age and die is so that a new generation takes our place. Without this generational turnover, evolution will almost completely stop. We all know that evolution is what has driven the progression of living things to progress. Aging and death are essential to this process and is programmed in our genes.
You are right, my perspective was definitely too human centric. I agree that such system can exist, but I can only think about either very simple organisms or the germline - but I guess you argue that such system in a full complex organism had no reason to evolve, or could even be detrimental, while I would argue that such conservation for a full organism (especially in functional tissues) is impossible. To be honest both seem plausible to me, but your explanation makes more sense!
"Entropy, little sweet, is just a word which means the amount of running-down of the universe. Everything runs down, you know, like your little walkie-talkie robot, remember?"
"There are certain creatures, like types of lobsters or maybe trees that can keep entropy increase very low for a certain amount of time on the expense of increasing entropy elsewhere." How do creatures increase entropy elsewhere when they keep their entropy increase low? In other words, if I decrease my entropy then somewhere else entropy is increased, right?
The CO2 you breath out has higher entropy than the food you eat. It's that simple. We are constantly increasing the entropy in our bodies, but we dispose of most of it.
There can a sharp rise in specific entropy when an alpha particle hits two or more molecules of nitrogen tri-iodide, as compared to when it hits nitrogen trifluoride. I would suggest that a tachyonic Wiener process is the culprit. We need something to destroy unitarity, and I am advocating the tripartite interaction of the wave function, the electromagnetic field and this TWP. Without the electromagnetic field, TWP is still present but ineffective, so the system is a superfluid.
Entropy - I understand why increasing entropy is described as lowering of useful energy. However I don't understand why increasing entropy is also defined as increasing disorder. For example at some smallish period after the big bang the universe is composed of lot of particles and waves moving with high energy but I would have thought of as a fair degree of disorder. Then the particles clumped together forming galaxies, solar systems and planet - which may well be a lower energy state. But I would have also thought that this arrangement is more ordered than separate particles moving with high energy. Similarly consider dust particles blown by wind (on Earth), suspended in air. Disordered in three dimensions. The dust then gets into a house, the wind stops and the dust settles on the floor. Less energy yes. But I would have thought still particles in a two dimensional plain was more ordered than dust particles moving in three dimensions. Perhaps order and disorder means something different in the world of physics compared to every day use?
And when the energy and matter will be dissipated at the end of the universe (thermal death) everything will be so separated and dissipated that there will be no energy useful but also a very ordered state because everything would be ideally at the same distance from each other
Isnt that the point of life to fight entropy and sure one organism will die but only so as it can continue decrease entropy by repackaging its antientropic code in its progeny... only leaving the comment cause sabina's content is well thought out and i enjoy it so hope it helps her get more views 👍
Quantum measurement (*) is not time reversible, so there is another possible cause for the psychological arrow of time. Some think that our brain functions can be explained classically, but we really do not know, and others (like Penrose) do not think so. (*) "Quantum measurements" or in general any quantum phenomena that causes a "macroscopic" consequence in a classical system. The interesting question is why the arrow of time related to "measurements" (when going from the superposition of alternatives to a single alternative) coincide with the arrow of time of increasing entropy.
Considering that time itself is the construct of consciousness and does not really exist or matter or apply to the universe, is entropy then also a mere psychological construct?
Time is real. There isn't really a single scientist worth his salt that says time isn't real. Time is the fourth dimension of our universe. I think you've gotten very confused.
Thats asimov story is very good , i think in that time , many people wants to beleve in a ciclical Universe that began with a big bang and contract again ..i think some kind of Budist Idieas , i think this Asimiv Story is somehow similar to Dr Penrose Ciclical Cosmology ,maybe Penrose read it and have some inspiration 😅
There's one thing in this Universe that has the opposite vector. _Life._ Well, it's not all living beings in general -- it's only _Life_ as a principle, or this collection of processes we call "life" -- to be precise. Pessimist will now say look at the end result. One side always wins. It's a temporary exception, a weird emergent phenomenon of the basic laws of physics. Optimist would say, no that is the whole point. You've got it all exactly backwards. The whole reason why the Universe exists is to create this exception.
@@nicksdinosforkids6001 I'm guessing he wants to insult you for some reason but just can't, possibly due to his disagreement with Sabine's interpretations of physics and the universe in general.
"Ordo ab Chao" means that "work" is required to reverse the flow of entropy to achieve "order". Such work requires life, which requires the sun's energy. Life itself is thus an attempt by the universe to finally solve the endless cycle of entropy increasing to a maximum, and all stars burning out, and then collapsing to a minimum once again.
It’s what we define as Forward. Technically just because something is deteriorating doesn’t mean it’s dying or aging. It’s what WEve defined as forward in time. Open your mind to things you’ve never even considered and you’ll move closer to answers
Thus to decrease the entropy in our bodies and slow down aging we need to somehow restrain the metabolic activities in us. Probably long fasts and detaching ourselves from every thing and everyone in a cyclic manner can do it
I think he meant it as humorous analogy. I give it a 5/10. Kinda reminds me of a joke a youth pastor or teacher might make. Wasn’t particularly funny but damn don’t act like the man’s a raving lunatic jeez. We all make dumb jokes now and then
@@michaelmilson7538 Kinda sucks when he tries to shove it in your face after the fact instead of admitting it was a bad joke yk? look at that reply! Fiesty!
I wonder if you can decrease the entropy within yourself, you may be able to live longer, slowing down the aging process. But this is just a virtual reality. I imagine there’s more to do outside of this reality frame.
if we view it from a highly abstract level, we think of the body as any other system. maybe one that reaches its peak equilibrium and has a finite though dynamic set of processes for staving off its rate of destabilization and decay, so to guarantee it's cyclical nature in some ways. increased life expectancy and the constrast of birth rates haa already highly disrupted many of the patterns created by our complex human systems.
Your body is a wonderful organic process of decreasing entropy within it. Every time your body creates a new cell it has less entropy than the ones that will be replaced. The problem is that the process isn’t perfect and multiplication of errors over time increases entropy in the overall process. The idea decreasing entropy in this process would depend on being able to manipulate every aspect of your body at a molecular level, which means understanding and mapping every molecular process in perfect detail. In other words, a pipe dream. What do you mean-what can you even mean-by ‘this reality frame’? I believe you’ve used an excess of words to mean what Penderyn below said: ‘outside this physical universe.’ This is of course, at best, a guess, and at worst, a fantasy. As far as anyone can prove, there isn’t anything outside this physical universe. Of course, it’s possible that this physical universe contains everything (that’s possible given physical principles, laws, and constants) somewhere within it. That doesn’t help much because you can’t get there. My view is that, philosophically speaking, there can’t be anything outside physical reality because when we discover it it will just become part of our newly described reality. Before about 400 years ago, ‘up above the sky’ was outside people’s reality; now we know it’s just the part of reality that is a long way away.
Not sure that we can say entropy is the sole reason for our aging. Organisms are able to combat entropy, but they don't necessarily have to do so after they have reproduced. Organisms can self-repair and decrease entropy until they cease. This process is called senescence. Is there any evolutionary advantage to keeping an old organism alive long after it was able to reproduce itself? So, entropy is probably a physical constraint that makes the cost of fighting senescence much harder as time passes. But if there were any evolutionary advantages to doing so, we should be able to live much longer. Since Earth's resources are limited, the worst thing for future generations is a discovery that allows us to stop aging.
Maybe I’m looking at it completely wrong but I’ve got a question and can’t seem to find an answer anywhere… Hopefully someone here can tell me how silly I am.. Does life not go against Entropy? And I don’t mean evolution or life itself or anything broad.. I mean a human growing from a nothing to an adult, an elephant to behemoth.. I understand we eventually grow old, shrivel up and go back to dust and the older we get the more chance of issues occurring, we degrade AFTER a certain point.. But from cell to a 27 year old peak human, what’s happening there? And I mean how we grow in size, not physical prowess or anything like that, just BIGGER.. Surely we don’t really “eat” enough for that to happen all while being active and burning the fuel we consume? I think I’m either looking at entropy wrong or I massively understate how much energy we actually take in from food?.. I understand that as a “closed stystem” the Earth actually gets a lot of energy from an outside source, the sun, obviously.. But on a smaller scale living, physical things growing from seemingly very little to whatever seems odd to me.. I’ve never been comfortable with applying the “laws” of inanimate objects to life, especially when we still have no idea what the hell life actually is on any level.
"In this one of many possible worlds. All for the best or some bizarre test? It is what it is and whatever. Time is still the infinite jest. The arrow flies when you dream. The hours tick away. The cells tick away." Neil Peart.
I get that aging and mortality is something we can feel more intuitively, but I don't think it's a good example for entropy, because it's not so universal. There are actually animals that are immortal - jellyfish that cycles thru its baby-adult phases, crocodiles whose telomers don't shorten and their cells & organs don't degenerate ... Sabine mentioned these possibilities briefly. It's really the environment that ultimately kills these animals. Yes we're not close yet, so the analogy works for us. But it's more accurate to say that we can't live outside an environment that we've evolved to (even if we adapt fast to changes) and the Entropy is eventually going to destroy our environment. However there are plenty of other things to destroy our environment before Entropy gets to us - like our Sun swelling to a red giant for example. Although the red-giant phase of stars is actually a direct product of Entropy - by losing their fuel, their fusion energy runs out... In any case I don't think that Entropy is that universal. I would say that all the heavy elements are points of higher order, and many of them are quite stable. For example if you put a piece of iron in the vacuum of space it'll first lose its heat until it reaches the temp of surrounding vacuum (which isn't exactly 0°K, but very close) and then it'll still stay together indefinitely. It won't suddenly decay back to the elements that formed the Iron (as far as we know). In my opinion - uneducated guess if you'd like :) - entropy is the effect we see of a cause we still have to properly describe (but is apparently strongly linked with the flow of time). And a thought I had some time ago is that most quantum particles aren't actually subject to entropy themselves. Unlike a wave in a pond which slowly dies when its energy is transferred to the environment, the waves of quantum particles are usually stable and would persist if not forever at least for billion of years. Actually a photon travelling thru expanding space loses its energy, but not to Entropy, but to the result of being stretched by the expansion of space (stretching its wavelength). But I wonder does that happen with massive particles? From our observations it seems expansion of space actually happens between galaxies, as the gravity inside galaxies is strong enough to overcome it. So does that scale down to lets say a hydrogen atom (or a piece of iron?) flying thru expanding space?
If the egg did "unbreak" how would you know? Because your memory of the egg having been broken would also be gone (assuming you go back in time with the egg). That does not seem as weird to me as "time going backwards for the egg" but continuing to go forwards for you. THAT would be weird.
What gets increased? Be specific. If you mean entropy you should have said decreased instead of increased. Entropy increases over time. Do you think that there is any reason to think that it would change. Science is specifically about ruling these things out (or in) based on evidence, and, barring that, rational arguments about the likelihood of something being true.
@@YourFurnace I mean what if the size of the universe is getting increased due to the bing bang but it goes 'till stopping and reverts to decreasing mode till re-bing-banging in an ongoing loop?
Maths and physics are the models we have developed to try best define and explain "why". They ultimately fail because they are human concepts. "we" are the only ones that ask "why". There is no why, no spoon dudes.
Entotropy exists and the universe in a constant state of ever growing entropy. Entropy shows us time moves in one direction and time only exists while there is change. When the universe finally goes into a state of complete entropy where there is no change of state, time will then too cease to exist. Without change there can be no time.
"keep entropy increase low by making entropy increase outside higher ..." No, many species that are long lived do not try to make entropy increase outside high to keep internal entropy low. They just keep their metabolism low making both internal and external entropy increase low. In other words, they make time (or change) slow down by choosing to relax and not run the rat race.
I really beggining to see Entropy (low entropy) as a kind of a fuel/credit to run the simulation (what we call life). If that is the case, we might not be able run from it but we can see if we can find new sources of it either at the edges of space/time or higher/lower dimensions to create maybe an infinite(oxymoron term since we wouldn't know if the source is finite or infinite forever (oxymoron term as well since forever is a relative term) existing bubble that is constantly introduced with fresh 'low' entropy. Nonetheless, so long as we cannot foresee the potential depletion of it and if it has been providing the bubble for trillions of trillions of eons then it is fine by me.
I was telling someone the other day, that if we could live up to 400 years; how would we store our memories, our brains would have to grow substantially larger or just forget everything that happened the previous 300 years, this would also have to be true for learning and experiences; there are probably many reasons we have evolved to die - including biological entropy.
There is no entropy in our youth when we're still growing. Instead of decay, there's only growth in our first 20 + years of our existence. How do physicists explain that? Sabine says that everything is cause - effect in our universe. Now she was talking about time going backwards. Then we would get an effect - cause chain. How could that work?
Decay starts happening as soon as you exist, forget about growth, that is simply the accumulation of more decaying matter. Ageing through DNA damage and mutations is already happening.
I am not convinced that time does move forward. We perceive it that way because that’s the only way we could perceive it. Even if time moved backwards, we would still perceive it as moving forwards. Only an outside observer could perceive anything different because they are free from its constraints.
If you're on a magnet to the future, - and you are - and space, time, and gravity are supposedly intrinsic - why can we choose any direction in space, free (unbound) from time and entropy to do so... maybe entropy and time is more intrinsic in a specific way to gravity, than it is to space..
Like also what am saying, what if the 'magnet' to the future was a straight line one direction of SPACE but we could go any direction in time/entropy and gravity ??? Would it be the same reality were in just perceiving it weird ?? Or different ??
It seems to me though that the magnet is gravity and entropy is intrinsic to what gravity is doing and time is a measurement frame of those, which space itself might be free of entropy, but not gravity. It would also imply independent gravities perform independent entropies and create independent time frameworks of space.
It also proves the Earth is a hill in a hole surrounded by independent gravities and therefore entropies - and those on it get to chose not just of independent spaces and directions but independent entropies and gravities. And call it a 'time'
I like how you think dimensionally. For a moment forget about everything you said and just think this: Time is an axis just like the x and y axis, but is distinct in that: For 3D distances, which I assume you are used to, you can find the absolute distance with pythagoreans theorem given coordinates like sqrt(x^2+y^2+z^2) For 4D distances, which no will ever have the privilege of getting an intuition for, it goes something like this:sqrt(x^2+y^2+z^2-ct^2), c being some constant related to the speed of light. Anyway just imagine time as like another axis just like the interchangeable xy&z except t violates your standard Pythagorean distances rule. Sabine actually has a video about it, which I can't quite remember the name of. The minus is NOT a typo btw.
"why do we age?" This is a purely biological question that physicist should avoid altogether. There are immortal cells that do not age but just keep on multiplying. So, aging is not an entropy problem. Aging is part of the survival mechanism that keeps a multicellular organism adapt with environmental changes. Without aging and death there would be no evolution and without evolution the species will most likely go extinct.
All it means is that the current laws are time invariant. In that there is no cost to moving through time, so it could be processed forward or backwards.
I wonder what opinion you have about Aguirre & Gratton's 2002 model of "Steady-State Eternal Inflation", which has twin universes passing thru time in opposite directions, on opposite sides of a Cauchy surface. Too simple?
The lost dream of every physicist is to provide answers to the eternal philosophical questions. If that's not why you went into physics you're just a clerk doing some fancy book keeping.
Second Law of Thermodynamics As we speak of Entropy, we also need to touch the “Second Law of Thermodynamics”. Likewise, most people upon Earth, likewise the writer himself some 20 years ago, we are sincerely persuaded that the “Second Law of Thermodynamics” is a fundamental law of nature, undeniably one of the most valuable discoveries of mankind. Howbeit, this law is steadily confusing for most engineers or students. The main reason for this is that it contains so many ‘complex terms’ and there are so many ways to phrase this law, but - most importantly - the majority does not even have the foggiest what the actual applications of this law are. Even big scientific research workers’ brains had and still have to stumble herewith… Moreover, usual reports on the topic do demonstrate the meanwhile widespread Operationalism (i.e., sheer unwillingness even just to touch, not to speak of going in for, important details) easily muddled-up by the audience/readership with the ‘Engineering Rigor’… Hence, a kind of clarification ought to be urgently necessary! So, captain, AHOY!
A. There should be ONLY ONE BASIC, fundamental Energy Conservation and Transformation Law. It is definitely unique - in delivering two logically joint concepts, which are conceptually indivisible - these are Energy Conservation$ - and Energy Transformation¢¢. Still, a more-then-100-years-old conceptual failure has brought us to two separate thermodynamic laws - but this has nothing in common with the actual physics. To come back, they have coined two more fake thermodynamic laws, employed the Probability Theory + Mathematical Statistics, and this has helped formulate the Quantum Mechanics, which did become a Valid and Seminal Physical Theory, a worthy result of immense international efforts, in remaining a basically metaphysical conceptual construction - so, Quantum Mechanics, methodologically, ought to be only restrictedly fruitful. --- $ Quantitative feature of the Energy notion ¢¢ Qualitative feature of this same (!!!) Energy notion --- B. By dividing the basically indivisible law, we are touching Combinatorics, we are touching Probability Theory, we are even stepping back to Thermodynamics for a while, but... We are but still NOT correctly answering the poser: WHAT IS ENTROPY? Sorry! 1. In the formula S = kB * ln (Ω) we do imply, Ω means not a “Huge Number of Microstates”, and not “Probability” of God knows what scilicet, which numerically ranges between [0,1] by the way, not even “Wavefunction”, which ought to be just a purely metaphysical notion, as it is... In effect, Ω ought to be just a simplistic algebraic function of Lord Kelvin’s Absolute Temperature. Dr. George Augustus Linhart has published this result 100 years ago in JACS. By the way, Prof. Gibbs had learned What ENTROPY Exactly IS while attending chemical thermodynamics lectures by Prof. Horstmann in Heidelberg, whereas Prof. Horstmann was one of the very students of Prof. Clausius. Prof. Gibbs was duly heading for the proper embodiment of the Clausius-Horstmann ideas (in fact, Carnot-Clausius-Horstmann ideas, to be fully correct!), but he had not enough time for accomplishing this, to our sincere regret… Dr. George Augustus Linhart was one of the very rare true followers to Prof. Gibbs, but he had a very bad luck… 2. …It’s a truly long, interesting and instructive story… 3. WHAT-ENTROPY-IS-poser has been answered not by Clausius, not by Boltzmann, etc., but by Goethe, who has introduced Mephistopheles, the perfect philosophical embodiment of the ENTROPY notion. 4. Newton did basically know WHAT ENTROPY IS - A Counteraction. 5. That Counteractions do never grow to Infinity with the growing Actions, but MUST reach their MAXIMUM values, is the result by Nicky Carnot, which has been formalized by Rudolf Clausius... Thus, the main poser, not answered by the conventional 'Equilibrium' Statistical Thermodynamics ought to be: WHAT IS ENTROPY???
It is but Carnot’s Energetics that suggests the proper answer - based upon the classical Newtonian Mechanics. For our Chinese colleagues this ought to be (太極圖, tàijítú), representing (太极; tàijí; 'utmost extreme') in both its monist (無極, wújí; literally: 'without ridgepole', meaning 'without limit') and its dualist (陰陽, yīnyáng, just a Chinese philosophical concept describing opposite but interconnected forces) aspects. In the academic and engineering parlance we may speak here of the basic, fundamental Action-Counteraction couplings obeying Hon. Isaac Newton's Third Basic Law of Mechanics. Furthermore, for our international colleagues this ought to be Mephistopheles, who represents the brightest possible ‘personalized’ embodiment to the 太極圖: Faust: „Nun gut, wer bist du denn?“ Mephistopheles: „Ein Teil von jener Kraft, Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft“. [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe] Faust: „Howbeit, who are you then?” Mephistopheles: „A Part of Power, which would The Evil ever do, and ever does the Good.” [Transl. by G. M. Priest, taken from Internet] This is how to start discussing the poser: 'What the sense of ENTROPY notion in fact is'. Therefore, the sense of the 太極圖 in the academic and engineering parlance ought to be the Enthalpy-Entropy Compensation/Equilibration notion: Isaac Newton: Zero Action, Zero Reaction; The more Action, the more Reaction; Good news (by Carnot, Clausius, etc.): Reaction must always reach its Maximum. Does Action compensate/equilibrate Reaction - the Process does reach its Aim. This is how to start discussing the poser: 'What the Second Law of Thermodynamics in fact is'. How general is this phenomenon at all?
The Core Phenomenon of the ‘Second Law’ ought to be long known to our Chinese colleagues via the易經 (I Ching/Yi Jing) - usually translated as the “Book of Changes” or “Classic of Changes”. Here, 易 = easy, 經 = through, i.e., 易經 = “A recipes collection as for how to Come Through with Ease”. The main philosophy behind this ought to be (無極, wújí, i.e., ‘Without Limits’), i.e., the 易經 should be a recipes collection for ensuring how to always come through with ease, irrespective of any kind of limitation/interference. To sum up, the above is about the “Entropy” in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc., etc., etc. Entropy in other fields: Beware of a powerful trend to build up misnomers in many other fields, because Entropy is the term solely for the “Energy Transformation”, whatever nature/origin this energy and its transformation might be of. The Arrow of Time: This is not due solely to Entropy, it is owing to Eternal Entropy-Enthalpy Compensation. This is just why the ‘Universal Heat Death’ morons are stubbornly proclaiming over and over again ought to be just a useless historical legacy. The origins of randomness: Howbeit, the actual origins of randomness lie solely in our ignorance and in our unwillingness/incapability to lift the latter, so, there are absolutely no other explanations to furthering some ‘deepest intrinsic senses of randomness’ than just the marketers’ strive for showing their skills in mathematically dealing with ubiquitous random processes.
If we don't really know, let's make up the coolest fitting ideas that all work and then everyone can have their own belief system that works the same, in parallel if you like so we don't step on each other and hurt each other. That way we can look each other at detail. And not offend each other. This way I think we can be equal and individual simultaneously. If we do it as a planet. Wow! Maybe that would be a singularity. I would like to have a singularity to music. We are the world. Sounds like a good one. I think it needs an edit though. I've been listening to it a few times and I'm not sure what it is yet. I'll get it though.
Time has speed limits that goes from zero to approaching the speed of light. That means that TIME AND THE SPEED OF LIGHT ARE TWO DIFFERENT AND SEPARATE ENTITIES, which in turn opens up a modern door into physics. TWO UNIVERSES! But that's just the first step. The above suggests TWO UNIVERSES. The one of time , matter, etc. And the other a universe of speed of light photons. Next the eternal photon universe was the first singularity that created all, through photons create electron positron pairs... next ...
Of course this view of entropy is ignoring the fact a vast amount of structure exists in the universe, due to the effects of gravity and dynamics. The assertion that the fundamental laws of nature are time symmetric is a mathematical view that need not need not have any physical basis. Bear in mind not even fundamental particles are observed to 'travel' backwards in time. It strikes me there is potentially a lot of bad metaphysical assumptions underlying the views expressed here. Fortunately, we have Lee Smolin to help us understand the subject more deeply.
Anyone thought that in order to see something move backwards in time, one must still be moving forward in time to see the relation....therefor what time is actually going backwards?
Yes. If time do go backwards we would be in it and also going backwards so we won’t be able to perceive it. That’s why it’s also impossible for a time traveler to go back in time. He will have to first remove himself from the universe, let it go backwards, then reinsert himself back into the past universe.
I disagree that time parity does not exist. If you set time as movement of the wave function rather than change, then time parity is preserved despite the change being different forwards and backwards
Don't understand you, parity is a characteristic of space, not time. And in QM time isn't observable. The Schrödinger equation doesn't tell you anything about a measurement, just the propability
There is indeed a way to decrease entropy. It is enough that we arrange a process (similar to the production of a singularity) that provides us with an infinite amount of information (negative entropy). In common parlance it would be the «Elixir of Long Life». Repeated amounts of teleologically applied information would guarantee our eternity and that of the Universe, as this information can expand using Superior Consciousness.
A different time is a different place. Get back to an identified place and it would be the intended time, but, of course all other celestial bodies would need to cooperate as well. Unless it is not really space-time. Don’t talk to me about entropy, until there is an understanding of gravity. Is a sun in a process of entropy or refinement? Does a body simply degrade, or gain the opportunity for wisdom? Are you sure the end is not a beginning? "Let there be light."
I am not a physicist but how does everything go from less entropy to more entropy? A glass might break but if you melt the pieces down and make a new glass it has decreased in entropy. So it would seem that matter could go through many different states of entropy.
Entropy increase is simply the transition from a less likely state of a system to a more likely one. When you decrease entropy locally, it has to increase somewhere else - the net entropy always increases. Read about statistical mechanics if you want to dive deeper into the physics!
It takes energy for heat, and energy will be spent at a greater rate to re animate the object. Technically, this is no longer the same object structure arrangement but a new arrangement.
I really love that Sabine is here. She is amazing and deserves more recognition.
I think she already has a too good life to just doing random talking, doing morals and never doing some tough math to fill with some meat the bag.
Completely agree!
(With the original comment, not the hater with the previous comment)
@@mahnamahna3252 recommend her new book to read, hopefully human and easy to understand
@@leojack1225 sure she did more math than you are writing lame comments
@@Thomas-gk42 Amazing , she can make videos on UA-cam all day and doing great Math everyday. Neither Gauss could have done better .
It's easy to comprehend entropy as things moving from orderly to disorderly, but this is coming from beings who can't truly understand the full meaning of why things operate the way they do. It really is our best guess at a comforting explanation, but continuing to analyze it is part of our battle to make sense of the unknown (best part of being a living being!)
Jesus is the way.
Yes I have problems with the word as well. It just means we haven't mapped the microvectors that underlie the causes of what seems as "disorder". Disorder inherently is a subjective term, viewed from the perspective of those who try to establish order with imperfect frameworks of understanding.
I would say nature is the way, but we’re sooo far gone that maybe Jesus is the way😅😂
I've been thinking for some years, since my father gave me that famous book of Hawking, A brief history of time, that life could be the only thing that challenges entropy in the universe. That thought had me hooked ever since.
The channel Veritasium has a great video on entropy and how life fits into those ideas. The theory that we are basically entropy generators is strangely beautiful
What a beautiful question! I think entropy is the reason why we see things the way we do. Let's suppose we saw things going backwards or in a different direction; maybe the meaning we previously gave to them would be completely different. We would have a different context or even other ways to explain our reality. Entropy is a law that points out our direction and our sense. Perhaps entropy is the law that makes us give value to our lives.
you said "I think entropy ... why we things the way we do. ..."
No matter what direction natural laws obey, and whatever constants that created a universe that birthed life, we would be biased towards the universe that birthed us. We will see it as the best and most natural way it is supposed to be. Not backwards or sideways. So for a "backward" universe, if they observe our current universe, they will think we are the backward universe and their's is the correct direction.
@@pulsar22this is true but we cannot blame ourselves for thinking that. id rather appreciate our universe for what it is even if maybe there aremore beautiful universes out there that i still dont appreciate and are aware of today. if we dont appreciate the universe we live in ourselves, no one else will do that.
Entropy is the word we have given to describe the sensation of life we feel. I love the fact this beautiful person says 'i am only a physicist'
That’s not what entropy is at all. She even explained it in the video
You're just a physicist and a beautiful singer and musician and whatever it takes to make this stuff happen for me. Thank you!
Sabine, I love your presentation style and the way you step back from the fine detail to get a broad overview. Have you read the book by Unger and Smolin? I believe it is the answer to so many big questions.
Yes if you break a glass cup it doesn’t un-break. But also if you glue a broken cup together and put it on a shelf it doesn’t spontaneously break. You broke and and you fixed it. If we just look at moments where something moved toward less order than we get a confused idea that things always move toward less order. We could just as easily only consider moments where things became more orderly, where energy concentrated. Then we’d think the universe only moves towards more order. The obvious view to me is that it does both and it isn’t obvious if it does one more than the other. I would assume it is in perfect balance.
Never knew until THIS video of the source material that was used to formulate HitchHiker's Guide to the galaxy had come from Issac Asimov. HitchHiker's guide answer was 42 whereas it was "let their be light" but the EXACT same question was posed to a computer in both stories. I see now that was simply a play on the original story so it now makes even more sense
Philosophically - for me this lecture has been quite interesting and helpful 🤔🙂
Entropy is our understanding of universe in entirity,but entropy is complex because we have memory of past but not future 👍 that's why we feel that way, memory of humans was devised a survival mechanism,it has nothing to do with universe itself.
If we had memory of the future we would not consider it as "future", mainly because that scenario implies zero entropy and predictable way things will unravel.
Not to start a religious debate, but religion in its basic form proposes low entropy or being satisfied with not knowing aka "believing", whether in higher plan or self. On the other hand, science proposes probing and questioning, but it also claims reducing entropy to its lower state will preserve the universal order ?
So basically, they are proposing the same thing but with different methodology. Yikes, this is some Star Wars shit right here.
I believe we are currently way short of reaching a point in our understanding of the universe and how it works at a fundamental level ( Though our current advancement in physics is awesome). It would be easier to understand simple interactions such as a free falling object , light from a torch, water boiling off, etc.and question them from entropy's perspective. Can gravity be reversed ? Can a photon traverse a reverse path and get back inside the torch ? Can water vapour condense back into the pot at right condition? To reverse entropy at a grand scale , it is important to understand if we need the ability to reverse the direction of fundamental forces' direction and if it becomes an essential condition.
Sabine is one of my favorite people.
the most interesting thing about this whole theme is the awareness that due to the continuous increase of entropy things will change but we are smart enough to slow them down
We're smart enough to try. And when we succeed, it is at the expense of additional enthropy in some other system.
So, beware.
Our smartness only helps in driving entropy away, not decreasing it.
@3_Pancakes i think i said we are smart enough to slow down entropy. Obviously, the examples are many like Old age natural disasters, etc although according to Boltzmann we can have a state with maximum entropy and no apparent change.
Amazing knowledge incapsulated in 5 minutes video.
I read that Asimov short story in junior high and it blew my mind! 🤯
Something I find confusing about entropy is why do they say things go from order to disorder. If the end point of entropy is when there are no more interactions between particles and the universe is in complete equilibrium, surely that would mean entropy has taken things from disorderly to orderly.
Can anyone explain.
Connor Wilkinson - "surely that would mean entropy has taken things from disorderly to orderly." Yes. In fact the 3rd law states that a perfectly ordered crystal at zero Kelvin will have zero entropy. Order and disorder is a non-issue with respect to entropy. Entropy only deals with going from a high potential energy to a lower potential energy. Or high energy gradient (low entropy) to a low energy gradient (high entropy).
Exactly. Strangely enough few people comprehend this 👍
I thought entropy was just like dispersion but I really don't care about any of this stuff so I learned a lot from this and now have been inspired to read more books besides the Bible.
I just discovered Sabine Hossenfelder today, twice accidentally in two different videos. I'm in love with her... I love Germans
more great information by Professor Hossenfelder! thanks for putting the things together!
Some species can not only slow down entropy, but can actually get younger.
Like the immortal jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii), there are crocodiles that don't age (just grow bigger & hungrier and eventually die of starvation or stupidity like the russian previously oldest crocodile that ate some nylon ropes at the zoo and died from it).
But humans (as practically all life forms) can do it too. Not in the scope of a single individ. Our bodies are still aging, but some processes ensure that the genetic material that makes the next generation doesn't degrade with time.
So aging doesn't have to do with Entropy. Aging is specific to Biology.
But those animals are still affected by our 'version' of physics. They dont move backwards and their interaction with the environment is linear.
Yeah so, I don't believe she was saying that aging is caused by entropy. Like she mentioned, there are species which in theory could live forever, except that eventually the total amount of entropy in the universe (via the heat death of the universe/atomic decay) will eventually destroy on a subatomic level everything that has any mass at all. Entropy in the form of the universe itself moving to the lowest energy state possible until the very fields that produce particles can't anymore.
Well done, Madam ... you make me think (not an easy task for anybody~!). Thank you.
Psychedelics are just an amazing discovery, it's quite fascinating how effective they're for depression and stress disorders. Saved my life
My first shroom trip was really awesome, it felt like I was deep into the sea
Tripping is not a bad idea but having a
Mycologist who will recommend you the dosage is the best option
/JAI_HEALS/
Got psych's**
Reach him on insta…
Shroooms microdosing help me overcome my life long addiction to cigarettes and alcohol
Coming from a genomic background, to me aging seems like the inevitable failure to maintain the integrity of information in time. What is striking is that some cells (germline) are in a way protected by this loss, allowing for reproduction, generating "new youth"
GianMa you said "to me aging seems like the inevitable failure to maintain the integrity of information in time ..."
This is a fallacy. Any plant or animal can create a system where they can perfectly make copies of their cells in perpetuity and correct the errors. The reason we age and die is so that a new generation takes our place. Without this generational turnover, evolution will almost completely stop. We all know that evolution is what has driven the progression of living things to progress. Aging and death are essential to this process and is programmed in our genes.
You are right, my perspective was definitely too human centric. I agree that such system can exist, but I can only think about either very simple organisms or the germline - but I guess you argue that such system in a full complex organism had no reason to evolve, or could even be detrimental, while I would argue that such conservation for a full organism (especially in functional tissues) is impossible. To be honest both seem plausible to me, but your explanation makes more sense!
@@pulsar22 It is funny to see the things that people come up with. the real truth is in Jesus.
¡Alguien que le diga a Sabine que la amo!, gracias ❤
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
--Isaac Asimov
One of the greatest lines in science fiction history.
"Entropy, little sweet, is just a word which means the amount of running-down of the
universe. Everything runs down, you know, like your little walkie-talkie robot,
remember?"
Excellent...❤ thanks 🙏.
"There are certain creatures, like types of lobsters or maybe trees that can keep entropy increase very low for a certain amount of time on the expense of increasing entropy elsewhere."
How do creatures increase entropy elsewhere when they keep their entropy increase low? In other words, if I decrease my entropy then somewhere else entropy is increased, right?
The CO2 you breath out has higher entropy than the food you eat. It's that simple. We are constantly increasing the entropy in our bodies, but we dispose of most of it.
There can a sharp rise in specific entropy when an alpha particle hits two or more molecules of nitrogen tri-iodide, as compared to when it hits nitrogen trifluoride. I would suggest that a tachyonic Wiener process is the culprit. We need something to destroy unitarity, and I am advocating the tripartite interaction of the wave function, the electromagnetic field and this TWP. Without the electromagnetic field, TWP is still present but ineffective, so the system is a superfluid.
Everything mean to be cycle and changes. Rock do reduce into dust. Unbreak egg in fridge turn bad, turn back into dust, minerals into soils.
Entropy - I understand why increasing entropy is described as lowering of useful energy. However I don't understand why increasing entropy is also defined as increasing disorder. For example at some smallish period after the big bang the universe is composed of lot of particles and waves moving with high energy but I would have thought of as a fair degree of disorder. Then the particles clumped together forming galaxies, solar systems and planet - which may well be a lower energy state. But I would have also thought that this arrangement is more ordered than separate particles moving with high energy.
Similarly consider dust particles blown by wind (on Earth), suspended in air. Disordered in three dimensions. The dust then gets into a house, the wind stops and the dust settles on the floor. Less energy yes. But I would have thought still particles in a two dimensional plain was more ordered than dust particles moving in three dimensions.
Perhaps order and disorder means something different in the world of physics compared to every day use?
And when the energy and matter will be dissipated at the end of the universe (thermal death) everything will be so separated and dissipated that there will be no energy useful but also a very ordered state because everything would be ideally at the same distance from each other
Isnt that the point of life to fight entropy and sure one organism will die but only so as it can continue decrease entropy by repackaging its antientropic code in its progeny... only leaving the comment cause sabina's content is well thought out and i enjoy it so hope it helps her get more views 👍
Quantum measurement (*) is not time reversible, so there is another possible cause for the psychological arrow of time. Some think that our brain functions can be explained classically, but we really do not know, and others (like Penrose) do not think so. (*) "Quantum measurements" or in general any quantum phenomena that causes a "macroscopic" consequence in a classical system.
The interesting question is why the arrow of time related to "measurements" (when going from the superposition of alternatives to a single alternative) coincide with the arrow of time of increasing entropy.
Considering that time itself is the construct of consciousness and does not really exist or matter or apply to the universe, is entropy then also a mere psychological construct?
Time is real. There isn't really a single scientist worth his salt that says time isn't real. Time is the fourth dimension of our universe. I think you've gotten very confused.
Thats asimov story is very good , i think in that time , many people wants to beleve in a ciclical Universe that began with a big bang and contract again ..i think some kind of Budist Idieas , i think this Asimiv Story is somehow similar to Dr Penrose Ciclical Cosmology ,maybe Penrose read it and have some inspiration 😅
Wow, well put 👍🏻👏🏻
There's one thing in this Universe that has the opposite vector. _Life._
Well, it's not all living beings in general -- it's only _Life_ as a principle, or this collection of processes we call "life" -- to be precise.
Pessimist will now say look at the end result. One side always wins. It's a temporary exception, a weird emergent phenomenon of the basic laws of physics.
Optimist would say, no that is the whole point. You've got it all exactly backwards. The whole reason why the Universe exists is to create this exception.
Love Sabine's logical explanations of deep topics.
Kind of a joke but i'm happy for you to find this logical 😅
@@paatrick90 How so?
@@nicksdinosforkids6001 I'm guessing he wants to insult you for some reason but just can't, possibly due to his disagreement with Sabine's interpretations of physics and the universe in general.
@@3_pancakes767 Thanks, just thought I was missing something.
"Ordo ab Chao" means that "work" is required to reverse the flow of entropy to achieve "order". Such work requires life, which requires the sun's energy. Life itself is thus an attempt by the universe to finally solve the endless cycle of entropy increasing to a maximum, and all stars burning out, and then collapsing to a minimum once again.
It’s what we define as Forward. Technically just because something is deteriorating doesn’t mean it’s dying or aging. It’s what WEve defined as forward in time. Open your mind to things you’ve never even considered and you’ll move closer to answers
poop
@@cadcncengineeringfabricati3497 yes poop
@@fishcheeks971 If you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out. See Tim Minchin's animated movie: "Storm".
@@cadcncengineeringfabricati3497 No, poop.
Thus to decrease the entropy in our bodies and slow down aging we need to somehow restrain the metabolic activities in us. Probably long fasts and detaching ourselves from every thing and everyone in a cyclic manner can do it
I can think of few reasons this just wouldn’t help, so it’s wishful thinking .
True entropy is watching a toddler take everything organized and thoroughly disorganize it. It's up to the adults to stave off entropy
Huh? What u smoking?
The “adult” being complexity?
@JohnnyCalifornia don't understand me? Try watching the video again maybe you'll understand it better the second time around
I think he meant it as humorous analogy. I give it a 5/10. Kinda reminds me of a joke a youth pastor or teacher might make. Wasn’t particularly funny but damn don’t act like the man’s a raving lunatic jeez. We all make dumb jokes now and then
@@michaelmilson7538 Kinda sucks when he tries to shove it in your face after the fact instead of admitting it was a bad joke yk? look at that reply! Fiesty!
I wonder if you can decrease the entropy within yourself, you may be able to live longer, slowing down the aging process. But this is just a virtual reality. I imagine there’s more to do outside of this reality frame.
if we view it from a highly abstract level, we think of the body as any other system. maybe one that reaches its peak equilibrium and has a finite though dynamic set of processes for staving off its rate of destabilization and decay, so to guarantee it's cyclical nature in some ways. increased life expectancy and the constrast of birth rates haa already highly disrupted many of the patterns created by our complex human systems.
@Penderyn pics or it didnt happen
Your body is a wonderful organic process of decreasing entropy within it. Every time your body creates a new cell it has less entropy than the ones that will be replaced. The problem is that the process isn’t perfect and multiplication of errors over time increases entropy in the overall process. The idea decreasing entropy in this process would depend on being able to manipulate every aspect of your body at a molecular level, which means understanding and mapping every molecular process in perfect detail. In other words, a pipe dream. What do you mean-what can you even mean-by ‘this reality frame’? I believe you’ve used an excess of words to mean what Penderyn below said: ‘outside this physical universe.’ This is of course, at best, a guess, and at worst, a fantasy. As far as anyone can prove, there isn’t anything outside this physical universe. Of course, it’s possible that this physical universe contains everything (that’s possible given physical principles, laws, and constants) somewhere within it. That doesn’t help much because you can’t get there. My view is that, philosophically speaking, there can’t be anything outside physical reality because when we discover it it will just become part of our newly described reality. Before about 400 years ago, ‘up above the sky’ was outside people’s reality; now we know it’s just the part of reality that is a long way away.
You defeat entropy by giving children a new life
Not sure that we can say entropy is the sole reason for our aging. Organisms are able to combat entropy, but they don't necessarily have to do so after they have reproduced.
Organisms can self-repair and decrease entropy until they cease. This process is called senescence. Is there any evolutionary advantage to keeping an old organism alive long after it was able to reproduce itself?
So, entropy is probably a physical constraint that makes the cost of fighting senescence much harder as time passes. But if there were any evolutionary advantages to doing so, we should be able to live much longer.
Since Earth's resources are limited, the worst thing for future generations is a discovery that allows us to stop aging.
Great video!
Maybe I’m looking at it completely wrong but I’ve got a question and can’t seem to find an answer anywhere… Hopefully someone here can tell me how silly I am..
Does life not go against Entropy? And I don’t mean evolution or life itself or anything broad.. I mean a human growing from a nothing to an adult, an elephant to behemoth.. I understand we eventually grow old, shrivel up and go back to dust and the older we get the more chance of issues occurring, we degrade AFTER a certain point.. But from cell to a 27 year old peak human, what’s happening there? And I mean how we grow in size, not physical prowess or anything like that, just BIGGER.. Surely we don’t really “eat” enough for that to happen all while being active and burning the fuel we consume?
I think I’m either looking at entropy wrong or I massively understate how much energy we actually take in from food?..
I understand that as a “closed stystem” the Earth actually gets a lot of energy from an outside source, the sun, obviously.. But on a smaller scale living, physical things growing from seemingly very little to whatever seems odd to me.. I’ve never been comfortable with applying the “laws” of inanimate objects to life, especially when we still have no idea what the hell life actually is on any level.
"In this one of many possible worlds. All for the best or some bizarre test? It is what it is and whatever. Time is still the infinite jest. The arrow flies when you dream. The hours tick away. The cells tick away." Neil Peart.
I get that aging and mortality is something we can feel more intuitively, but I don't think it's a good example for entropy, because it's not so universal.
There are actually animals that are immortal - jellyfish that cycles thru its baby-adult phases, crocodiles whose telomers don't shorten and their cells & organs don't degenerate ... Sabine mentioned these possibilities briefly.
It's really the environment that ultimately kills these animals.
Yes we're not close yet, so the analogy works for us. But it's more accurate to say that we can't live outside an environment that we've evolved to (even if we adapt fast to changes) and the Entropy is eventually going to destroy our environment. However there are plenty of other things to destroy our environment before Entropy gets to us - like our Sun swelling to a red giant for example.
Although the red-giant phase of stars is actually a direct product of Entropy - by losing their fuel, their fusion energy runs out...
In any case I don't think that Entropy is that universal. I would say that all the heavy elements are points of higher order, and many of them are quite stable.
For example if you put a piece of iron in the vacuum of space it'll first lose its heat until it reaches the temp of surrounding vacuum (which isn't exactly 0°K, but very close) and then it'll still stay together indefinitely. It won't suddenly decay back to the elements that formed the Iron (as far as we know).
In my opinion - uneducated guess if you'd like :) - entropy is the effect we see of a cause we still have to properly describe (but is apparently strongly linked with the flow of time).
And a thought I had some time ago is that most quantum particles aren't actually subject to entropy themselves.
Unlike a wave in a pond which slowly dies when its energy is transferred to the environment, the waves of quantum particles are usually stable and would persist if not forever at least for billion of years. Actually a photon travelling thru expanding space loses its energy, but not to Entropy, but to the result of being stretched by the expansion of space (stretching its wavelength).
But I wonder does that happen with massive particles? From our observations it seems expansion of space actually happens between galaxies, as the gravity inside galaxies is strong enough to overcome it. So does that scale down to lets say a hydrogen atom (or a piece of iron?) flying thru expanding space?
And this „Let there be light“ fits perfectly to the Conformal Cyclic Cosmology / CCC theory from Roger Penrose
nobody knows until somebody knows. But knowing just is a addiction sometimes
If the egg did "unbreak" how would you know? Because your memory of the egg having been broken would also be gone (assuming you go back in time with the egg). That does not seem as weird to me as "time going backwards for the egg" but continuing to go forwards for you. THAT would be weird.
Entropy may can be repeated again on different things with same state of patterns in different time and we know them as cycles.
If I watched this clip back in school, I would've been a physicist
What about if in the end, universe gets increased instead of decreased? What if we are on a loop?
What gets increased? Be specific. If you mean entropy you should have said decreased instead of increased. Entropy increases over time. Do you think that there is any reason to think that it would change. Science is specifically about ruling these things out (or in) based on evidence, and, barring that, rational arguments about the likelihood of something being true.
@@YourFurnace I mean what if the size of the universe is getting increased due to the bing bang but it goes 'till stopping and reverts to decreasing mode till re-bing-banging in an ongoing loop?
Maths and physics are the models we have developed to try best define and explain "why". They ultimately fail because they are human concepts. "we" are the only ones that ask "why". There is no why, no spoon dudes.
Entotropy exists and the universe in a constant state of ever growing entropy. Entropy shows us time moves in one direction and time only exists while there is change. When the universe finally goes into a state of complete entropy where there is no change of state, time will then too cease to exist. Without change there can be no time.
"keep entropy increase low by making entropy increase outside higher ..."
No, many species that are long lived do not try to make entropy increase outside high to keep internal entropy low. They just keep their metabolism low making both internal and external entropy increase low. In other words, they make time (or change) slow down by choosing to relax and not run the rat race.
I love the way Sabine explains things 💙
She could have just said that the second law of thermodynamics has a ‘preferred’ direction of time. And hence…
@@smjarvis1234 Reasonable conclusion to draw, but the beauty lies in you drawing the conclusion, not her saying it.
How do we actually know that time exists? and how do we know that entropy is not proving the exact opposite (time going backwards)?
Time exists like a dimension , perpendicular to the 3 spatial dimensions and sometimes in physics is said that antimatter is going backwards
Make a vídeo about entropic forces
Better is to read her new book, she explains very well there
I really beggining to see Entropy (low entropy) as a kind of a fuel/credit to run the simulation (what we call life). If that is the case, we might not be able run from it but we can see if we can find new sources of it either at the edges of space/time or higher/lower dimensions to create maybe an infinite(oxymoron term since we wouldn't know if the source is finite or infinite forever (oxymoron term as well since forever is a relative term) existing bubble that is constantly introduced with fresh 'low' entropy. Nonetheless, so long as we cannot foresee the potential depletion of it and if it has been providing the bubble for trillions of trillions of eons then it is fine by me.
The
'Asymmetry'
'Problem'
CreatedBy
The'Acceptance'Of . . .
a
'Finite'
'Beginning'
to
'TheUniverse'
The 'Story' of BigDarkBang Cosmology
🙏
I was telling someone the other day, that if we could live up to 400 years; how would we store our memories, our brains would have to grow substantially larger or just forget everything that happened the previous 300 years, this would also have to be true for learning and experiences; there are probably many reasons we have evolved to die - including biological entropy.
Have u read the case of James Leininger? If u haven't, u should. There r also several cases like his.
your brain already does this for past memories and forgets them to make room for more relevant tasks
We appreciate your effort and hard work. God bless you.
Existential physics is a great book!
you have 8 subscribers now, and you're profile picture is familiar 🤔
There is no entropy in our youth when we're still growing. Instead of decay, there's only growth in our first 20 + years of our existence. How do physicists explain that?
Sabine says that everything is cause - effect in our universe. Now she was talking about time going backwards. Then we would get an effect - cause chain. How could that work?
Decay starts happening as soon as you exist, forget about growth, that is simply the accumulation of more decaying matter. Ageing through DNA damage and mutations is already happening.
Has anyone investigated the entropy lowering anomaly that apparently goes on inside a chicken:
🍳➡️🐔➡️🥚
They can even unscramble an egg. It's amazing.
I am not convinced that time does move forward. We perceive it that way because that’s the only way we could perceive it. Even if time moved backwards, we would still perceive it as moving forwards. Only an outside observer could perceive anything different because they are free from its constraints.
If you're on a magnet to the future, - and you are - and space, time, and gravity are supposedly intrinsic - why can we choose any direction in space, free (unbound) from time and entropy to do so... maybe entropy and time is more intrinsic in a specific way to gravity, than it is to space..
Like also what am saying, what if the 'magnet' to the future was a straight line one direction of SPACE but we could go any direction in time/entropy and gravity ??? Would it be the same reality were in just perceiving it weird ?? Or different ??
Somehow it's just not all connected right.. lol
It seems to me though that the magnet is gravity and entropy is intrinsic to what gravity is doing and time is a measurement frame of those, which space itself might be free of entropy, but not gravity. It would also imply independent gravities perform independent entropies and create independent time frameworks of space.
It also proves the Earth is a hill in a hole surrounded by independent gravities and therefore entropies - and those on it get to chose not just of independent spaces and directions but independent entropies and gravities.
And call it a 'time'
I like how you think dimensionally. For a moment forget about everything you said and just think this:
Time is an axis just like the x and y axis, but is distinct in that:
For 3D distances, which I assume you are used to, you can find the absolute distance with pythagoreans theorem given coordinates like sqrt(x^2+y^2+z^2)
For 4D distances, which no will ever have the privilege of getting an intuition for, it goes something like this:sqrt(x^2+y^2+z^2-ct^2), c being some constant related to the speed of light. Anyway just imagine time as like another axis just like the interchangeable xy&z except t violates your standard Pythagorean distances rule. Sabine actually has a video about it, which I can't quite remember the name of.
The minus is NOT a typo btw.
I just wonder who is going to be the one out there when entropy has brought the universe to a standstill to utter: "Let there be light."
Doesn't it look as if entropy can be lowered in one part of a system at the expense of increasing it somewhere else, for example, in sorting?
I would love to see an animated version of The Last Question.
"why do we age?"
This is a purely biological question that physicist should avoid altogether. There are immortal cells that do not age but just keep on multiplying. So, aging is not an entropy problem. Aging is part of the survival mechanism that keeps a multicellular organism adapt with environmental changes. Without aging and death there would be no evolution and without evolution the species will most likely go extinct.
Indeed
Where do we observe particles going backwards in time?!?! Is it only a mathematical model? Or have we actually observed this from particles?
All it means is that the current laws are time invariant. In that there is no cost to moving through time, so it could be processed forward or backwards.
I wonder what opinion you have about Aguirre & Gratton's 2002 model of "Steady-State Eternal Inflation", which has twin universes passing thru time in opposite directions, on opposite sides of a Cauchy surface. Too simple?
She talks about in her book
The lost dream of every physicist is to provide answers to the eternal philosophical questions. If that's not why you went into physics you're just a clerk doing some fancy book keeping.
mathematically ~ Time is 0 ~ Timing is 1.
A conjugation of 1 in 0 creating that we missed ~~ Baby Bangs.
entropy is a good concept
Second Law of Thermodynamics
As we speak of Entropy, we also need to touch the “Second Law of Thermodynamics”.
Likewise, most people upon Earth, likewise the writer himself some 20 years ago, we are sincerely persuaded that the “Second Law of Thermodynamics” is a fundamental law of nature, undeniably one of the most valuable discoveries of mankind.
Howbeit, this law is steadily confusing for most engineers or students. The main reason for this is that it contains so many ‘complex terms’ and there are so many ways to phrase this law, but - most importantly - the majority does not even have the foggiest what the actual applications of this law are.
Even big scientific research workers’ brains had and still have to stumble herewith…
Moreover, usual reports on the topic do demonstrate the meanwhile widespread Operationalism (i.e., sheer unwillingness even just to touch, not to speak of going in for, important details) easily muddled-up by the audience/readership with the ‘Engineering Rigor’…
Hence, a kind of clarification ought to be urgently necessary! So, captain, AHOY!
A. There should be ONLY ONE BASIC, fundamental Energy Conservation and Transformation Law. It is definitely unique - in delivering two logically joint concepts, which are conceptually indivisible - these are Energy Conservation$ - and Energy Transformation¢¢. Still, a more-then-100-years-old conceptual failure has brought us to two separate thermodynamic laws - but this has nothing in common with the actual physics. To come back, they have coined two more fake thermodynamic laws, employed the Probability Theory + Mathematical Statistics, and this has helped formulate the Quantum Mechanics, which did become a Valid and Seminal Physical Theory, a worthy result of immense international efforts, in remaining a basically metaphysical conceptual construction - so, Quantum Mechanics, methodologically, ought to be only restrictedly fruitful.
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$ Quantitative feature of the Energy notion
¢¢ Qualitative feature of this same (!!!) Energy notion
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B. By dividing the basically indivisible law, we are touching Combinatorics, we are touching Probability Theory, we are even stepping back to Thermodynamics for a while, but...
We are but still NOT correctly answering the poser: WHAT IS ENTROPY? Sorry!
1. In the formula S = kB * ln (Ω) we do imply, Ω means not a “Huge Number of Microstates”, and not “Probability” of God knows what scilicet, which numerically ranges between [0,1] by the way, not even “Wavefunction”, which ought to be just a purely metaphysical notion, as it is... In effect, Ω ought to be just a simplistic algebraic function of Lord Kelvin’s Absolute Temperature. Dr. George Augustus Linhart has published this result 100 years ago in JACS. By the way, Prof. Gibbs had learned What ENTROPY Exactly IS while attending chemical thermodynamics lectures by Prof. Horstmann in Heidelberg, whereas Prof. Horstmann was one of the very students of Prof. Clausius. Prof. Gibbs was duly heading for the proper embodiment of the Clausius-Horstmann ideas (in fact, Carnot-Clausius-Horstmann ideas, to be fully correct!), but he had not enough time for accomplishing this, to our sincere regret… Dr. George Augustus Linhart was one of the very rare true followers to Prof. Gibbs, but he had a very bad luck…
2. …It’s a truly long, interesting and instructive story…
3. WHAT-ENTROPY-IS-poser has been answered not by Clausius, not by Boltzmann, etc., but by Goethe, who has introduced Mephistopheles, the perfect philosophical embodiment of the ENTROPY notion.
4. Newton did basically know WHAT ENTROPY IS - A Counteraction.
5. That Counteractions do never grow to Infinity with the growing Actions, but MUST reach their MAXIMUM values, is the result by Nicky Carnot, which has been formalized by Rudolf Clausius...
Thus, the main poser, not answered by the conventional 'Equilibrium' Statistical
Thermodynamics ought to be:
WHAT IS ENTROPY???
It is but Carnot’s Energetics that suggests the proper answer - based upon the classical Newtonian Mechanics.
For our Chinese colleagues this ought to be (太極圖, tàijítú), representing (太极; tàijí; 'utmost extreme') in both its monist (無極, wújí; literally: 'without ridgepole', meaning 'without limit') and its dualist (陰陽, yīnyáng, just a Chinese philosophical concept describing opposite but interconnected forces) aspects. In the academic and engineering parlance we may speak here of the basic, fundamental Action-Counteraction couplings obeying Hon. Isaac Newton's Third Basic Law of Mechanics.
Furthermore, for our international colleagues this ought to be Mephistopheles, who represents the brightest possible ‘personalized’ embodiment to the 太極圖:
Faust: „Nun gut, wer bist du denn?“
Mephistopheles: „Ein Teil von jener Kraft,
Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft“.
[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]
Faust: „Howbeit, who are you then?”
Mephistopheles: „A Part of Power, which would
The Evil ever do, and ever does the Good.”
[Transl. by G. M. Priest, taken from Internet]
This is how to start discussing the poser: 'What the sense of ENTROPY notion in fact is'.
Therefore, the sense of the 太極圖 in the academic and engineering parlance ought to be the Enthalpy-Entropy Compensation/Equilibration notion:
Isaac Newton: Zero Action, Zero Reaction; The more Action, the more Reaction;
Good news (by Carnot, Clausius, etc.): Reaction must always reach its Maximum.
Does Action compensate/equilibrate Reaction - the Process does reach its Aim.
This is how to start discussing the poser: 'What the Second Law of Thermodynamics in fact is'.
How general is this phenomenon at all?
The Core Phenomenon of the ‘Second Law’ ought to be long known to our Chinese colleagues via the易經 (I Ching/Yi Jing) - usually translated as the “Book of Changes” or “Classic of Changes”.
Here, 易 = easy, 經 = through, i.e., 易經 = “A recipes collection as for how to Come Through with Ease”. The main philosophy behind this ought to be (無極, wújí, i.e., ‘Without Limits’), i.e., the 易經 should be a recipes collection for ensuring how to always come through with ease, irrespective of any kind of limitation/interference.
To sum up, the above is about the “Entropy” in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc., etc., etc.
Entropy in other fields:
Beware of a powerful trend to build up misnomers in many other fields, because Entropy is the term solely for the “Energy Transformation”, whatever nature/origin this energy and its transformation might be of.
The Arrow of Time:
This is not due solely to Entropy, it is owing to Eternal Entropy-Enthalpy Compensation. This is just why the ‘Universal Heat Death’ morons are stubbornly proclaiming over and over again ought to be just a useless historical legacy.
The origins of randomness:
Howbeit, the actual origins of randomness lie solely in our ignorance and in our unwillingness/incapability to lift the latter, so, there are absolutely no other explanations to furthering some ‘deepest intrinsic senses of randomness’ than just the marketers’ strive for showing their skills in mathematically dealing with ubiquitous random processes.
Time is just an increase in entropy. Lunchtime doubly so.
Entropy is a matter of perspective and somewhat illusion
Time must exist, for why don't we know everything there is to know, now ...unless we are adhering to Time?
Entropy is a partial mathematical modelisation of time
I have question! Is this entropy only applies to big particles or systems? How do explain entropy for virtual particles?
The answer is yes, elementary particles, virtual or not aren't aging, and entropy doesn't exist in quantum mechanics
we don't really know is a correct answer. because it is opening the possibility of knowing.
The question posed presumes that the Universe will, in fact, "end." Seems like circular logic to me?
Omg it's Sabine!
If we don't really know, let's make up the coolest fitting ideas that all work and then everyone can have their own belief system that works the same, in parallel if you like so we don't step on each other and hurt each other. That way we can look each other at detail. And not offend each other. This way I think we can be equal and individual simultaneously. If we do it as a planet. Wow! Maybe that would be a singularity. I would like to have a singularity to music. We are the world. Sounds like a good one. I think it needs an edit though. I've been listening to it a few times and I'm not sure what it is yet. I'll get it though.
Very good video and I have loved Asimov since his first book and I will continue loving him until I die. 5:24
Time has speed limits that goes from zero to approaching the speed of light. That means that TIME AND THE SPEED OF LIGHT ARE TWO DIFFERENT AND SEPARATE ENTITIES, which in turn opens up a modern door into physics. TWO UNIVERSES!
But that's just the first step. The above suggests TWO UNIVERSES. The one of time , matter, etc. And the other a universe of speed of light photons.
Next the eternal photon universe was the first singularity that created all, through photons create electron positron pairs... next ...
Causality is only apparent
Entropy keeps increasing just the same way as gravity does on the other direction… it is just a matter of Density.
Of course this view of entropy is ignoring the fact a vast amount of structure exists in the universe, due to the effects of gravity and dynamics.
The assertion that the fundamental laws of nature are time symmetric is a mathematical view that need not need not have any physical basis. Bear in mind not even fundamental particles are observed to 'travel' backwards in time.
It strikes me there is potentially a lot of bad metaphysical assumptions underlying the views expressed here.
Fortunately, we have Lee Smolin to help us understand the subject more deeply.
I've had a near-death experience when I was there time did not not matter so I 100% agree with you
Yes, "Let there be Light!"
Anyone thought that in order to see something move backwards in time, one must still be moving forward in time to see the relation....therefor what time is actually going backwards?
Yes. If time do go backwards we would be in it and also going backwards so we won’t be able to perceive it. That’s why it’s also impossible for a time traveler to go back in time. He will have to first remove himself from the universe, let it go backwards, then reinsert himself back into the past universe.
I disagree that time parity does not exist. If you set time as movement of the wave function rather than change, then time parity is preserved despite the change being different forwards and backwards
Don't understand you, parity is a characteristic of space, not time. And in QM time isn't observable. The Schrödinger equation doesn't tell you anything about a measurement, just the propability
There is indeed a way to decrease entropy. It is enough that we arrange a process (similar to the production of a singularity) that provides us with an infinite amount of information (negative entropy). In common parlance it would be the «Elixir of Long Life». Repeated amounts of teleologically applied information would guarantee our eternity and that of the Universe, as this information can expand using Superior Consciousness.
A different time is a different place.
Get back to an identified place and it would be the intended time, but, of course all other celestial bodies would need to cooperate as well. Unless it is not really space-time.
Don’t talk to me about entropy, until there is an understanding of gravity.
Is a sun in a process of entropy or refinement?
Does a body simply degrade, or gain the opportunity for wisdom?
Are you sure the end is not a beginning?
"Let there be light."
I am not a physicist but how does everything go from less entropy to more entropy? A glass might break but if you melt the pieces down and make a new glass it has decreased in entropy. So it would seem that matter could go through many different states of entropy.
Entropy increase is simply the transition from a less likely state of a system to a more likely one. When you decrease entropy locally, it has to increase somewhere else - the net entropy always increases. Read about statistical mechanics if you want to dive deeper into the physics!
It takes energy for heat, and energy will be spent at a greater rate to re animate the object. Technically, this is no longer the same object structure arrangement but a new arrangement.
Thank both of you for answering.
In her new book she explains it very well.
I like her videos about limited physics questions much better, because here nothing gets explained or answered at all.