Schrodinger's Cat First, he didn't say procreation is the _best_ way to increase entropy - that would be reaching thermodynamical equilibrium, no matter how. Second, the 2nd Law is not a goal, it's merely a description. Third, we don't fuck because we want to perpetuate our species, we fuck because we're programmed to think it's good and the reproduction thing is mostly a side effect of that
2:30 "Your cells contain 6 billion base pairs of DNA" There are hundreds of types of cells with DNA and you showed the one type (red blood cell) that doesn't have it.
Can I just say how lucky I feel to be alive at a time when this channel is possible, and wonderful people like everyone involved in this have taken the time to educate and inspire us all? Thank you PBS!
for real!! this past month ive been on a serious learning kick. binging this channel, Be Smart and Eons, as well as a handful of other incredible educational channels. earlier today, i was considering how much more difficult it would have been to gain the amount of knowledge i have lately before the internet.
This reminds me of a joke that I read online once: A creationist was arguing that the evolution of species from simpler to more complex violated the second law of thermodynamics. They claimed that such a transformation would require a colossal input of outside energy. I stayed up all night trying to think of what sort of energy source that could be. ...then it _dawned_ on me. ;)
I get the joke, but still dont understand how we increase entropy. We are part of the universe that takes in energy and makes something more complex. Not in our form but in the form of birth.
@@bsauce787 Rewatch the part where he is talking about fluid flows and watch the animation behind him. We are a local highly complex vortex in a much greater disturbed flow of fluid.
10:35 Finally an answer to the age old question about the purpose of life. "In service of the spread of disorder and dullness." "An agent in the inexorable trend to maximise the entropy of spacetime." These will make two brilliant t-shirts!Please PBS Spacetime!
I find it a fantastic closure to an excellent video. Granted, it is surely more fulfilling for an atheist than a theist. The meaning of our existence captured in a few sentences, without resort to deities guiding our destinies.
All this time, i've been creating internal order instead of speeding up entropy, i guess that's why my doctor keeps telling me to exercise more. I'm not radiating my fair share of infrared.
stiimuli mmm ... i don't think humans can ever reach critical mass. Life can only take so much order before it gives up. What would be the most amount of order a single life form can hold?
It's a bit more than that our purpose is not simply dissipating energy, but cooperation, we cooperate to dissipate/balance energy/satisfy physics & that's why we're talking, right now, as social beings working in a society that does a moderate job at feeding us all. From the birth of the atom to the largest civilization cooperation is the strongest trend in the universe. From atoms to molecules to Cells to multicellular organisms to multi-multicellular organism societies that can incorporate others & work with other forces through technology. And who knows, as our cooperation with the laws of physics increases we may be able to control entropy. If we manipulate the space-time fabric of quantum, we may well become maxwell's demon.
@@fandomguy8025 As far as we know, we can’t escape entropy, but our civilization may be able to survive and grow in complexity forever despite that fact if we can endlessly extract energy from outside the system of our social organism. This depends on whether useable energy is infinite in supply and whether we have the productive capacity to access it, but I’d like to think these conditions turn out to be true, so I prefer to be optimistic about this until proven otherwise.
My favorite video of the series so far, and I've seen many. It addresses one of the biggest existential questions by integrating the other sciences into a holistic view, keeping it understandable all along. Really grand.
I guess it is also one of the few videos that ppl can follow more than the others because it doesn't require as much basic knowledge as the other videos.
@@jollyjokress3852 10:28 "We're little eddies of order. A momentary fluctuation of interesting, but ultimately, in service of the spread of disorder and dullness. An agent in the inexorable trend to maximize the entropy of space-time". Humbling, but loaded with meaning. Our existence summarized in a few sentences.
2:36 Talking about how many base pairs of DNA there are in cells and you show an active red blood cell, i.e. THE ONLY HUMAN CELL WITH NO DNA IN IT! The iron-y. (Get it? Because red blood cells are red because of iron? I'll leave now.)
“We are something the whole universe is doing in the same way a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing” - Alan Watts. We are a process the universe does that allows the universe to experience itself
yes, our mind is the most complex function we know today, a function that with some of the billions subfunctions we're made of allows itself to be aware of itself and its surroundings. The uncountable emergences of complexity that took place between us and a rock allow us to say that as a rock isn't processing anything, barely responding to the Universe's effects on it, and thus can't be a complex enough function to be aware of itself, even if we're the same nature of inputs/outputs system than this rock or anything else.
Louis-gabriel Calix A rock is as good at being a rock as we are at being human. Therefore, it is as conscious as we are. If you can’t go there, what about a plant? Defining consciousness is so difficult!
@@tpstrat14 yeah but what we often regard as consciousness is our own human consciousness. And we can't say a rock has any sort of vision on itself contrarily to us, or even any vision at all because it doesn't process structured causal data, nor does it has senses.
For other fellow layman, I recommend this order of view: PBS Space Time -> It's Okay To Be Smart -> PBS Eons. Because in PBS Space Time they first explain the physics possibilities of life that underlay everything. In It's Okay To Be Smart they explain the abiogenesis origin of life from primordial soup. And finally, in PBS Eons they explain LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) that hypothesised as the first living thing on earth. I applaud this collaborative work between It's Okay To Be Smart, PBS Eons, and PBS Space Time. I also hope for another collaborative works in the future.
Once a long time ago when I was an innocent kid and didn't understand how the world worked I said to a chemistry accademic "isn't chemistry in some way a branch of physics?". Never seen someone get so quickly riled up from a casual comment (Except when I was younger, around 10 and made a joke about the Virgin Mary in front of a catholic kid). Of course that was a different world before Social Media. Now you just say like 3 words and you inevitably offend at least 10 "communities"
Three *blind scientist* are each touching an elephant in different places. The blind *chemist* touches the elephant’s trunk and says, “An elephant is like a snake.” The blind *biologist,* while touching the elephant’s leg, says, “You’re wrong. An elephant is like a great trunk of a tree.” The blind *physicist,* touching the side of the massive animal, says, “You both are wrong. An elephant is like a brick wall.
I mean it is though, it doesn't take away from the fields. Most of chemistry is just a way in which atoms interact with each other via(mostly) electromagnetism.
I always thought we were just big molecules of energy carriers/converters, highly structured because of the multi-structure potential of C, H and O, but never thought about the entropy side. This goes so so much deeper, just amazing. PBS never cease to amaze me. So congratulations, you people are some of the true heroes of our world, no exaggeration, education is everything; thank you for your work.
Yes amazing, but he does not mention consciousness, observational ability - life itself. He has a "free will" video-lecture, but in that he makes a joke out of consciousness. A more difficult question because language (and physics) can not explain what is is to be consciously observing things; effect of light rays in the eye-nerves and brain isn't consciousness.
@@donaldaxel They are part of it, yes. "Conscience" is just the software of the brain, coded by the combination of electrical and chemical potentials and impulses, that happens by environmental input such as the senses. We may not understand the code (we're trying), but we know how the hardware works.
@@mrhoustonn :: no consciousness is not in spacetime, it is not "combination of electrical + other things" -- it is reflected in the brain, but the brain is not consciousness. Consciousness is what makes the universe, not the other way around.
@@donaldaxel Try to move your chair using only the power of your "consciousness". Or transform it into something else. No...? Can't...? That's because your mind, "consciousness", can't make reality, "the universe". It can only discover it, assembling an inferred representation of it; information; by environmental input, in your brain, using electrical and chemical potentials like a hard drive uses magnetic polarization and a chip uses transistor state. Bits and bytes. States of something, not something else. Information. Then it recombines it; "processes it"; and outputs a response/ other information, that's used in the rest of the body or in other parts of the brain that do the same thing. That's it. Our universe had a set of laws that resulted in our "consciousness", just like it did with everything else. Like the brains of other animals like us; like a rock and everything else. We're not special in any way.
@@mrhoustonn :: It is not that I believe that "mind creates moving chairs", that is truly naive. But consciousness is not something which is "inside the brain", it is outside spacetime. Is that easier to grasp? And please note that Matt O'Dowd pokes fun because the question of "what consciousness is" can't be answered any cosmological / physical way.
While mammalian red blood cells lose their nucleus during maturation to make more room for oxygen storage, they started with a nucleus originally. Also, non-mammalian red blood cells do maintain their nucleus and thus their DNA.
Here's a little physics joke, maybe. A neutron walked into a bar and asked, "How much for the gin and tonic?" The bartender smiled wryly and replyed, "For you, no charge." Well have a good day or evening everyone.
Sadly the drink was low quality, 15 minutes later he threw up an electron. 'Aah' says the barman. 'You'll have to pay for THAT.' The ex-neutron disputes this, saying the electron made the mess, but the barman is resolute. 'I'm sorry but that's the rule, protons are charged." "You sure?" "Positive."
If we are agents in the inexorable trend to maximize entropy, this makes the awareness of our existence so much the more awe-inspiring and opens the questions of why do we believe in right and wrong, good and bad in the first place? Why are we so attracted to beauty, liberty and love if they would all be an illusion and no one is free to escape death and annihilation? Why are we called to and orient ourselves to complexity and perfection if that means we’re disobeying the deepest and most important laws of nature? Why do we seek to rebel against the laws of the Universe?
Tbh this is my favorite quote now “I guess that makes you a little eddy of order, a momentary fluctuation of interesting, but ultimately in service of the spread of disorder and dullness.”
Ohhh.... ::looks around apartment:: You know, for someone with so much entropy in her surroundings, I'm remarkably chaotic and anxious inside. I don't think this principle applies to me.
i was making a video for school and i had to edit the video for like 2 days. i have gained so much respect for the editors of this video cause i now know how long making a script filming and escpecialy editing takes. amazing video
Making content is fairly easy. It just takes time. Try dealing with YT comments and negativity, especially when you've worked hard on something for days and it either goes unnoticed or people complain about stupid stuff... ...don't even talk about the monotized part. I don't care to try that myself but I hear that's quite the nightmare to deal with. -Jake
As an editor myself, it takes so much time to make a video. Preparing, Getting the raw footage, watching the footage, cutting out unnecessary footage, adding transitions, text, animations, etc... Then it can take sometimes hours to render the final video and my internet is slow so about 5 minutes upload time per minute of HD video. So 10 minute vid takes 50 minutes
Empire Empire you understand that all this is based off theory, mathematics, and pseudoscience, yes? None of what we see from nasa is actually a real phone. All are artist renderings or concepts. If you don’t believe me look it up, then get a telescope or go to a local observatory and see for yourself. Don’t believe what you cannot observe for yourself. All this is theory, spoken as though it is fact.
Seekingtruth of course it's theories it's a science channel. The assumption is you know what a scientific theory is and they don't preface every statement with "this is our current best model and explaination supported by experimentaton and observation but may be be revised or replaced if new evidence comes to light". Sounds like the only theories you understand are conspiracy theories.
This specific topic has been on my mind since I learned about entropy. Thanks for finally explaining things in a way that allowed me a better sense of entropy.
I cannot stress enough just how cool this episode is! I have never thought about this in this way before... So simple an idea, and yet impossible to deny. What a revelation!
Eli I have a vague memory of Ford thinking he was a martini olive at one point and was jumping in and out of a martini that was really a pond. Not sure if that’s what actually happened though. Been a number of years since I read it.
Eli I think you’re right. Sounds familiar. I don’t trust my memory that much. Sometimes I’ve remembered episodes of Doctor Who then realized I was recalling the wrong Doctor in that scene.
You misunderstood, you're not destroying anything, you're just helping the universe along. The invention of ever more powerful bombs, that can spread enormous quantities of energy very fast, is humanity's greatest contribution to entropy.
Ireallyreally Hategoogle, it follows that while it's good to detonate bombs, you better make sure nobody dies as a result. More people can construct more bombs.
Michael Petrov Hard to detonate the biggest bombs on earth without killing anyone. There's space detonation, but that seems like a waste of a good bomb. I guess we should target planets, moons and asteroids that don't emit any meaningful quantities of radiations.
6 років тому+38
Ireallyreally Hategoogle That's it gentlemen, we're building the Death Star
I wonder which order you should watch this collaboration. I watched PBS -> Okay To Be Smart -> This one. It seemed to mesh well in this order, but I think they did a great job and that any order would probably be okay. They blended very well together. Good job guys.
Entropy goes up regardless. Where there's an object/region with sustained low entropy, surrounding regions compensate by going higher. Globally, the effect is the same with or without these fluctuations. Also, high entropy = death, do you really wanna be responsible for cosmic suicide?
On the contrary: children in general are excellent at decreasing entropy and increasing order in their own selves: they take dead stuff from their surroundings (i.e. food, water and air) and make it into a complex biological machine that work increasingly well. It all ends but youth and childhood particularly is precisely the period of life in which we decrease our entropy at the highest rates. It's old people who increase entropy again by turning all that effort into waste (death) but not their fault, just biology's fault.
Does anyone else fully comprehend how bloody amazing this proposition is? All the things we can associate with life over the past ~4.1 billion years is just one example of attempting to increase entropy in very specific conditions which is something that likely happens all over the universe. How thought provoking.
.....this is the best video I've ever seen. I'm.... mainly about the looks; not much going on upstairs, if you know what I mean. I dip in and out of various 'sciencey' things that interest me, trying to increase my knowledge and understanding and satisfy my curiosity. This video came to me at a time when I was simultaneously interested in the origins of life, the natural history of the earth, and trying to finally understand what the heck entropy is. This video has essentially answered all those questions. 'Eddies in entropy'. That's incredibly profound. I'm going to have to watch this video, and its companion videos, a few more times to really get it. But, goodness gracious, some of this 'existence stuff' is starting to make sense! Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you.
Except that NDT was not part of your picture willingly. I am saying this was an editing mistake and should have been run by all parties concerned. PBS ST has made goofs in the past, they are after all, humans. :)
When 3 channels that I already follow do a collaboration: aww it's a shame that I don't get to meet anyone new or check out a channel I've never heard of. But on the bright side, the concentration of awesomeness in the video is at an all-time high!
I don't see anything wrong with that characterisation. It certainly doesn't detract from the richness of either field. After all, you could say that physics is just applied Mathematics.
Sujai Gorai I'm sorry but you are completely wrong. There is an entire body of Maths known as Pure Mathematics that is not based around any physics. This is not to say that Physicists won't find a use for some of the ideas coming from pure maths and this has happened in the past.
@@sujaigorai7752 Again wrong. We "learn" mathematics by choosing a set of first principles called axioms which we then use to build proofs from, which in turn can be used to build more proofs.
What is life: "it's a little Eddy of order, a momentary fluctuation of intersting. But is ultimately in the service of disorder and dullness. An agent of a neverending trend to maximize the entropy of spacetime!"
F*** me, right! I mean, not that I didn't have it all along but... nothing like a physics video explaining how the very existence/goal/purpose of life merely is to better enable the inevitable, all encompassing return of the Universe to one "big" nothing... yeah... cheers, mate!
+oceanman ehm going from a heat death universe (max entropy) to a big bang state (min entropy) means going from a state of maximum entropy to minimum entropy ... The 2nd law of Thermodynamics doesn't like that kind of thinking too much. We'll it's a statistical thing of course but still not trivial ... Trying to conserve the 1st law by maximally violating the second is not a good idea. BTW both the 1st and the 2nd law are not absolutely hard laws, but just observations that have a law like status under certain conditions. E.g the first law is only absolutely valid, if the closed system is static (not expanding, like e.g. the universe), while the second is only true for short times of observation (with short = just a few billion or trillion years)
Thank you for this video. For nearly two years now I've struggled to answer the question "What fundamental pressure drives the creation of life". And now I have a sufficient answer. So once again, thank you.
Hang on. So from the response to Fernando Franco Felix at 11:52, constant acceleration isn't stable and quantum drag will eventually bring the particle's acceleration to zero. But if so then from the equivalence principle, gravity is the same as constant acceleration and hence should be subject to the same quantum drag which will eventually cause the acceleration to stop, or in this case gravity to become nonexistent. Does that actually happen?
Wha.. wait. Thats a good question. Near any normal body you probably wouldn't notice anything because you'd hit the ground long before the effect became noticable, but with black holes... Matt? We need You here Matt. We need You to dive under the horizon Matt.
The accelerating body, in free space, is increasing in speed and thus sees velocity associated effects like length contraction and time dilation. From the inertial frame acceleration can constantly decrease towards zero (As the object reaches light speed) but from the accelerated frame that lesser acceleration is occurring over slower time and can seem constant. Assuming the body had infinite energy at its disposal there would be a point in time in the inertial frame where it would reach light speed. The accelerated body, through relativity, would see the outside universe slow in time and never pass that point. This applies gravitationally too, but the difference is that while the free space object's speed is constantly increasing, that of a gravitationally bound one is (usually) not. In the case of an orbiting body the acceleration changes direction (and I believe the resulting Unruh effect can give rise to gravitational waves and orbital decay but am not certain about this.) In the case of one at Earth's surface an opposing force accelerates you upwards. (Same for hovering.) I'm not sure what this does to horizons, whether it causes two to form or not, but the end result is that speed does not increase, the 'drag' is in two opposite directions and balances out, and so the energy involved and its form does not change. (Unruh radiation is not emitted from a gravitating body.) You can easily see this when you combine the two. An object falling towards a black hole experiences unbalanced gravitational acceleration. In fact its acceleration is constantly increasing as the strength of gravity rises; when it hits the horizon it is moving at light speed. But from an external perspective it neither reaches light speed nor does its acceleration increase without bound. (It rises initially until relativistic effects cause it to slow to zero at the horizon.)
That is wrong "Must increase over time". There is no force driving disorder, it is just "extremely unlikely" for a state to become more organised. So "must" should be replaced by "almost certainly will".
It's funny because creationists have argued for years that thermodynamics makes evolution impossible. The truth is that self-replication, organized complexity, and evolution are all inevitable consequences of thermodynamics.
This is one of the most elegant and beautiful explanations of this I’ve ever seen. Funny how one of the unanswered millennium questions is about finding equations describing turbulent motion. I assume at least by the year 3000 someone will have answered this, possibly one of the biggest and most fundamentally misunderstood concepts out there. How does chaos lead to organisms that can manipulate/understand that chaos that maybe produced themselves in the first place?
A very interesting video! I try my best to understand. To some degree are you saying that the purpose of life is to 'destroy'? Till I saw this video, I always thought that life took an unordered world and made it ordered. Now, it seems we do that, but as a byproduct we actually aid the universe in increasing its entropy. (I could be confused; I'm no scientist.) Just, part of me sillily thought that, in being creative, I was helping humbly fight back a bit against heat-death, even though it's inevitable. --- I suppose science (and thus, this video) is more focused on what life does and how it does so, and less focused on why it does so. Still, I imagine the philosophical implications of all this are thought-provoking. --- Maybe it is one thing to determine what life does, and another thing to actually assign that as its 'purpose'.
Even the DNA is wrong, there is no major and minor groove (getting the symmetry right is important in physics! ;) ), so no double helix. And the protein is quite sad as well (see protein database - rcsb.org - motm)
For the love of Darwin... Please do not use a mature mammalian erythrocyte as your example cell when discussing DNA. I am hoping the biologist didn't screen the video before you posted it. Otherwise, I did enjoy the presentation.
This video is the best thing I have ever seen on the internet. I say that completely honestly. If I have seen anything better - that is more interesting or enlightening or enriching - I cannot think of it.
I was just commenting that the beauty of biology is knowing [bio]-chemistry, which is easier to understand if you know physics. And I was not disappointed by how these three teamed up together. Such a good episode. And of course - I watched them all in order: Physics --> Biochem --> Biology; because that's how everything is ordered (biology being all encompassing!)
It's interesting to think that in Conway's game of life while the system tends towards more entropy, it very often ends in a cycle. And the things like the glider can move in a direction indefinitely provided it doesn't hit anything. Thus it's conceivable that the universe may end with life having created a truly closed loop with a massive period. I suppose that depends on whether or not the fundamental forces break down in some way that life can work around.
docopoper: in a purely abstract "game of life" your remark holds but not in any conceivable implementation of it I think. After all a software running it is not truly a closed system! Whatever computer or mechanism one would use to run it still depends on energy and thus even permanent cyclic patterns of the "game of life" do not escape the law of globally ever increasing entropy.
Well sure, that's a valid argument. But you're basically saying to assume the universe is a simulation and that if the simulation is halted then any cycles would stop. That's true, but I more meant that using just the laws of physics it seems conceivable for life to leave the universe in a cycle. In this case entropy is one of the laws of physics (in the game of life example that would be to say it's one of the rules of the game), if the universe is simulated then that's not to say that it follows that law. Just like universe doesn't follow the rules of Conway's game of life. I'm inclined to say it's impossible to create an endless cycle in the universe since by doing so I suppose you'd be creating a horizon and would lose your energy to hawking radiation. But it's interesting to think of and it's hard to say what life that lasted that long would be capable of.
+docopoper What Igor Keller wanted to say is that you arbitrarily compared the universe with an abstract game with arbitrarily define rules and want to seek deep knowledge from accidental parallels from that. I could do the same with the universe and a huge pile of shit. The result is exactly the same ... totally irrelevant. That's exactly how science and rational thinking does NOT work.
Despite some criticism here your point is valid in principle. It's correct to look at a 'game of life' as a closed system. That it's being run by a underlying software is completely irrelevant to the simulation of entropy; our universe is also being run by the laws of physics yet still we look at it as a closed system. The laws of physics won't run out of gas (and if they did that would be unrelated to entropy) so neither should the laws of 'game of life' do when simulating. It's hard to say whether the laws of the game will map on to the laws of physics as it relates to entropy in regards to your point. But it's definitely an interesting hypothesis that entropy has some inherent cycle to it that we haven't discovered yet.
GepardenK: As I said valid "in principle" yes. However to hope gain insight of anything as fondamental as entropy, laws of physics or destiny of our universe from the endless cyclic nature of some emerging patterns in the game of life is closer from drawing conclusions from the observation of a go-to loop than anything remotely meaningful. The game of life is interesting (and definitely more so than a go-to loop .. ;-) but people tend to get all hooked up because of its fancy name. A fact that never ceases to anger Conway himself..
These 3 videos, by Eons, Space Time and It's OK to be Smart have to be one of the most fascinating samples of condensed knowledge I've ever encountered! The subject of Life, and how it relates to physics (in particular thermodynamics), is really a subject that sparks my most intense curiosity! Keep up the good work guys, and thanks for this jewel of a video series!
Super cool episode! ^__^ I particularly enjoyed hearing your As to our Qs. But there is more to life than Physics, so I'm off to the Eons to get smart-er.
Yes, because we can catalyse reactions that otherwise have a very low probability of occurrence, and once technological life develops, it is even more efficient at raising global entropy.
Matthew Ducker So once we create an optimizer AI that begins making more of itself, and eventually destroys us while consuming the galaxy, will that be the ultimate increase in entropy?
erictko85 What is a more low level definition of purpose that to execute an basic law of physics? True there are much better “reasons” to be alive, however, they all eventually tie back to this.
@@ThingEngineer Yes I think you are right. If we take purpose to be "the reason for which something exists". I am caught up on "reason" and its teleological connotations, but when discussing the 2nd law, that does seem to be the one place we find a clear direction.
When evolution is taught, the drive to greater complexity is almost always either completely omitted or glossed over. But it is a clear drive that evolution optimizes alongside the drive toward greater reproduction. Any organism which lives has a metabolism. It takes in something from the environment and produces something different. This inherently changes the environment of the organism into one which is less optimal for its survival. It also immediately creates a niche opportunity for a more complex organism, one which can consume both the food and the waste, or survive in an environment dominated by the waste, to exist. It's a good thing this drive toward greater complexity is around. Because we certainly wouldn't be otherwise. By every single other possible measure, bacteria are radically more evolutionarily fit than humans (and most all higher life). They reproduce exponentially, adapt faster, can survive is far more diverse environments, can go dormant for thousands of years if necessary for the environment to return to an amenable state, etc. Without a drive to greater complexity, evolution would stop with them.
I definitely agree - However! We are the only species that could consciously take our genetic makeup to another planet, and possibly to other star systems. I’d usually say that humans are the scourge of the planet, until I consider that in impending doom situations (life-ending comets, volcanos, etc), we’d probably be the only way that life could leave Earth to live on in the universe. Something should be said for that.
@@jamesdeininger3759 I'll be looking at humanity - and Life - completely differently from now on. Many thanks for the time you took to post that comment.
no it's easier to mess up than to clean up, you use less energy messing up and thus low entropy, and you use more energy when cleaning up thus higher net entropy. the higher entropy thing you can do that every one does is get a job and marry and reproduce. even better if you become successful business owner like an owner of a oil rig where your job would literately be extracting low entropy oil and selling it to be used/burned by machines etc.. thus being converted to higher entropy... so yeah the net high entropy thing you can do is actually be successful in life...
Okay, that's interesting. Doesn't it seem there are two definitions of entropy? Yes, that is what I meant, by organising you would be expelling more energy. Now, what confuses me is that there seem to be two definitions. 1st definition is what we're talking about now, energy transfer but then we have another one where people explain that if your room is messy then it has high entropy because it is more disordered.
Karl Friston - Free Energy Principle is the theory that attempts to unify that the searching for "negative entropy" is shared in the cellular level and cognitive level. Quite interesting stuff.
Entropy is just the way matter 'shows' all the possible configurations it will have over a designated time-period; life just happened to be one of the configurations; so is me writing this comment.
But it doesn't have TIME to explore all possible configurations before some become near irrevocably lost. Why the unusual state of life than the more boring random thermal motion leading to slow cooling?
We're ONE configuration, but where are the dragons? The intelligent dinosaurs, unicorns or giant enemy crabs? All of those are possible configurations of Earth's matter that have not formed and are unlikely to form via natural processes now that life as we know it exists. We are just a tiny, almost zero speck of what's possible. An interesting speck, but a speck none the same. The universe that we see has neither the time nor the mass to realize all possible permutations.
This is the best video of all I saw in your channel!!! But do not understand me wrong, until today I was amazed by all the other Space Time Videos. This is just the best of them all!!!!!!!!!!!! Great Job!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Deus Almighty My bad, thermodynamics. But not to sure how much a physicist would say my description there was wrong. See this. www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731720-400-im-building-a-machine-that-breaks-the-rules-of-reality/
I can't read the article cause I'm not subscribed. The guy seems a little out there though in terms of ideas. I would have to read some of his articles but I guess I would not understand much...
It seems to involve entangling two molecules, when light is emitted, QM mean you can't tell what entangled particle emitted the Photon. So both molecules must lower their energy level. So they radiate energy faster than a non Quantum engine. That's how it's described, I did not get that from myself, and don't understand it properly anyway.
Entropy increases only continuously in a closed system, so decreasing it in an open system is no big deal. So you can easily decrease entropy within a subsystem. Best example is the excitation of an electron into a higher valence shell by absorbing a photon. Actually are all elementary physical processes at least in principle reversible, so entropy just appears as side effect on the macroscopic level as a statistical effect. So saying "entropy will increase" is not much different from saying "if you flip a non-faked coin, you'll never always just have heads" And yes entropy will also decrease all by itself in the universe. It's just statistically (especially as we are that far from away equilibrium (heat death)) extremely unlikely ... but just wait a while and it while happen ... although it might some 10^Googol years or so.
Arne Van Royen you understand that all this is based off theory, mathematics, and pseudoscience, yes? None of what we see from nasa is actually a real phone. All are artist renderings or concepts. If you don’t believe me look it up, then get a telescope or go to a local observatory and see for yourself. Don’t believe what you cannot observe for yourself. All this is theory, spoken as though it is fact.
Yugenthusiast2.0 do you understand what you just said? You can’t see it. So out of thin air it just appears? Come on. This is all THEORY, none of it has passed the scientific method. How can one believe in something that is only a belief, backed by numbers?
7:20 Another thing to note, don't forget Water's "universal solvent" property that allows these things to never reach a thermal equilibrium. Molecules can break apart, come back together, etc.
"What is my purpose?"
"You are an agent in the inexorable trend to maximize entropy."
"Oh my god..."
Don't worry, that's just bullshit - just like saying the meaning of life is to "procreate"...
"......and also to pass me butter"
Schrodinger's Cat First, he didn't say procreation is the _best_ way to increase entropy - that would be reaching thermodynamical equilibrium, no matter how. Second, the 2nd Law is not a goal, it's merely a description. Third, we don't fuck because we want to perpetuate our species, we fuck because we're programmed to think it's good and the reproduction thing is mostly a side effect of that
The meaning of life is to find out which is the meaning of life.
Or die trying...
"Yeah, welcome to the club pal."
Marvel: "Avengers: Infinity War is the most ambitious crossover event in history?"
PBS Space Time, Eons, It's Okay To Be Smart: "GOGGLE UP!"
It's Okay To Be Smart you just need some PBS infinity to make it complete.
/r FellowKids
ZA GOGGLES!!!! THEY DO NOTHING!!!!!!!
r/incels
It's Okay To Be Smart This makes me very happy.
2:30
"Your cells contain 6 billion base pairs of DNA"
There are hundreds of types of cells with DNA and you showed the one type (red blood cell) that doesn't have it.
I'm glad that I'm not the first one to notice it!
Surely not the only type. Thrombocytes and cornified skin cells have no DNA, either.
@@ZheerH thrombocytes are fragments of cells called megakaryocytes and cornified skin cells are dead.
This upset me irrationally ngl 😂
Damn, I never knew that.
Can I just say how lucky I feel to be alive at a time when this channel is possible, and wonderful people like everyone involved in this have taken the time to educate and inspire us all? Thank you PBS!
for real!! this past month ive been on a serious learning kick. binging this channel, Be Smart and Eons, as well as a handful of other incredible educational channels. earlier today, i was considering how much more difficult it would have been to gain the amount of knowledge i have lately before the internet.
This reminds me of a joke that I read online once:
A creationist was arguing that the evolution of species from simpler to more complex violated the second law of thermodynamics. They claimed that such a transformation would require a colossal input of outside energy.
I stayed up all night trying to think of what sort of energy source that could be.
...then it _dawned_ on me. ;)
I get the joke, but still dont understand how we increase entropy. We are part of the universe that takes in energy and makes something more complex. Not in our form but in the form of birth.
I'm more surprised that the creationist knows the laws of thermodynamics
@@bsauce787 we make more poop than babies
@@Kaizer-pt5vk they don't, that's why they wrongfully quote it :p
@@bsauce787 Rewatch the part where he is talking about fluid flows and watch the animation behind him. We are a local highly complex vortex in a much greater disturbed flow of fluid.
I keep telling my mom that my room WAS clean but then that dang entropy came in and messed it all up
Every time you organize your room the universe gets more disorderly. Tell your mom to pick the lesser evil.
Wrong definition
EditioCastigata That’s actually true because you need energy to move items around but much that energy is lost in entropy!
the cat in the hat is negative entropy?
10:35
Finally an answer to the age old question about the purpose of life.
"In service of the spread of disorder and dullness."
"An agent in the inexorable trend to maximise the entropy of spacetime."
These will make two brilliant t-shirts!Please PBS Spacetime!
I find it a fantastic closure to an excellent video. Granted, it is surely more fulfilling for an atheist than a theist. The meaning of our existence captured in a few sentences, without resort to deities guiding our destinies.
Eons could get these into the DFTBA store much quicker!
(It stands for Don't Forget To Be Awesome!)
Couldn’t he have said “an agent of Chaos!” Instead?
@@kintamas4425 He's scared of the regimental Commisar.
Sup my fellow localized eddies of order
Hey! How's that whole speeding up entropy thing goin'?
Goin great! Been radiating lots of infrared heat energy while trying to reproduce. How bout yaself?
All this time, i've been creating internal order instead of speeding up entropy, i guess that's why my doctor keeps telling me to exercise more. I'm not radiating my fair share of infrared.
On the bright side, if you create enough internal order you could reach critical mass and ignite. imagine all the infrared energy you'll emit then!
stiimuli
mmm ... i don't think humans can ever reach critical mass.
Life can only take so much order before it gives up.
What would be the most amount of order a single life form can hold?
"What is my purpose?"
"You dissipate energy."
... "Oh my god."
It's a bit more than that our purpose is not simply dissipating energy, but cooperation, we cooperate to dissipate/balance energy/satisfy physics & that's why we're talking, right now, as social beings working in a society that does a moderate job at feeding us all. From the birth of the atom to the largest civilization cooperation is the strongest trend in the universe.
From atoms to molecules to Cells to multicellular organisms to multi-multicellular organism societies that can incorporate others & work with other forces through technology.
And who knows, as our cooperation with the laws of physics increases we may be able to control entropy. If we manipulate the space-time fabric of quantum, we may well become maxwell's demon.
@@fandomguy8025 As far as we know, we can’t escape entropy, but our civilization may be able to survive and grow in complexity forever despite that fact if we can endlessly extract energy from outside the system of our social organism. This depends on whether useable energy is infinite in supply and whether we have the productive capacity to access it, but I’d like to think these conditions turn out to be true, so I prefer to be optimistic about this until proven otherwise.
@@adammartinez8794 Great, thanks!
you also help other life forms dissipate it
The Selfish Gene, book by Richard Dawkins answers this question from the genetic point of view, although I haven't read it yet.
My favorite video of the series so far, and I've seen many. It addresses one of the biggest existential questions by integrating the other sciences into a holistic view, keeping it understandable all along. Really grand.
I guess it is also one of the few videos that ppl can follow more than the others because it doesn't require as much basic knowledge as the other videos.
@@jollyjokress3852 10:28 "We're little eddies of order. A momentary fluctuation of interesting, but ultimately, in service of the spread of disorder and dullness. An agent in the inexorable trend to maximize the entropy of space-time". Humbling, but loaded with meaning. Our existence summarized in a few sentences.
2:36 Talking about how many base pairs of DNA there are in cells and you show an active red blood cell, i.e. THE ONLY HUMAN CELL WITH NO DNA IN IT!
The iron-y. (Get it? Because red blood cells are red because of iron? I'll leave now.)
Teth47 And why do we hear nothing about the midrange and treble pairs? I smell a conspiracy....
Teth47 Im not a biologist, but a red cell with DNA just sounds weird
Avian ones have DNA :p though they look nothin'like the mammalian ones (the one showed in the video)
Teth47 but they do have mitochondrial DNA right?
Teth47 in
“We are something the whole universe is doing in the same way a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing” - Alan Watts.
We are a process the universe does that allows the universe to experience itself
yes, our mind is the most complex function we know today, a function that with some of the billions subfunctions we're made of allows itself to be aware of itself and its surroundings. The uncountable emergences of complexity that took place between us and a rock allow us to say that as a rock isn't processing anything, barely responding to the Universe's effects on it, and thus can't be a complex enough function to be aware of itself, even if we're the same nature of inputs/outputs system than this rock or anything else.
Louis-gabriel Calix A rock is as good at being a rock as we are at being human. Therefore, it is as conscious as we are. If you can’t go there, what about a plant? Defining consciousness is so difficult!
@@tpstrat14 yeah but what we often regard as consciousness is our own human consciousness. And we can't say a rock has any sort of vision on itself contrarily to us, or even any vision at all because it doesn't process structured causal data, nor does it has senses.
@@tpstrat14 actually the answer lies in the "degrees of consciousness"
Alan Watts was a genius
For other fellow layman, I recommend this order of view: PBS Space Time -> It's Okay To Be Smart -> PBS Eons. Because in PBS Space Time they first explain the physics possibilities of life that underlay everything. In It's Okay To Be Smart they explain the abiogenesis origin of life from primordial soup. And finally, in PBS Eons they explain LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) that hypothesised as the first living thing on earth. I applaud this collaborative work between It's Okay To Be Smart, PBS Eons, and PBS Space Time. I also hope for another collaborative works in the future.
Just a precision. LUCA is not the first ever organism that existed, it's just the one with still living descendants.
"We all know chemistry and biology are just applied physics." :D You tell em.
Me and the mathematicians sitting quietly in the corner for 2 years
Once a long time ago when I was an innocent kid and didn't understand how the world worked I said to a chemistry accademic "isn't chemistry in some way a branch of physics?". Never seen someone get so quickly riled up from a casual comment (Except when I was younger, around 10 and made a joke about the Virgin Mary in front of a catholic kid). Of course that was a different world before Social Media. Now you just say like 3 words and you inevitably offend at least 10 "communities"
Wow!!! perfect!
Three *blind scientist* are each touching an elephant in different places. The blind *chemist* touches the elephant’s trunk and says, “An elephant is like a snake.” The blind *biologist,* while touching the elephant’s leg, says, “You’re wrong. An elephant is like a great trunk of a tree.” The blind *physicist,* touching the side of the massive animal, says, “You both are wrong. An elephant is like a brick wall.
I mean it is though, it doesn't take away from the fields. Most of chemistry is just a way in which atoms interact with each other via(mostly) electromagnetism.
I always thought we were just big molecules of energy carriers/converters, highly structured because of the multi-structure potential of C, H and O, but never thought about the entropy side. This goes so so much deeper, just amazing. PBS never cease to amaze me. So congratulations, you people are some of the true heroes of our world, no exaggeration, education is everything; thank you for your work.
Yes amazing, but he does not mention consciousness, observational ability - life itself. He has a "free will" video-lecture, but in that he makes a joke out of consciousness. A more difficult question because language (and physics) can not explain what is is to be consciously observing things; effect of light rays in the eye-nerves and brain isn't consciousness.
@@donaldaxel They are part of it, yes. "Conscience" is just the software of the brain, coded by the combination of electrical and chemical potentials and impulses, that happens by environmental input such as the senses.
We may not understand the code (we're trying), but we know how the hardware works.
@@mrhoustonn :: no consciousness is not in spacetime, it is not "combination of electrical + other things" -- it is reflected in the brain, but the brain is not consciousness. Consciousness is what makes the universe, not the other way around.
@@donaldaxel Try to move your chair using only the power of your "consciousness". Or transform it into something else. No...? Can't...?
That's because your mind, "consciousness", can't make reality, "the universe". It can only discover it, assembling an inferred representation of it; information; by environmental input, in your brain, using electrical and chemical potentials like a hard drive uses magnetic polarization and a chip uses transistor state. Bits and bytes.
States of something, not something else. Information.
Then it recombines it; "processes it"; and outputs a response/ other information, that's used in the rest of the body or in other parts of the brain that do the same thing. That's it.
Our universe had a set of laws that resulted in our "consciousness", just like it did with everything else. Like the brains of other animals like us; like a rock and everything else. We're not special in any way.
@@mrhoustonn :: It is not that I believe that "mind creates moving chairs", that is truly naive. But consciousness is not something which is "inside the brain", it is outside spacetime. Is that easier to grasp?
And please note that Matt O'Dowd pokes fun because the question of "what consciousness is" can't be answered any cosmological / physical way.
of all the cells you could have chosen you picked the one that doesn't have a nucleus...
While mammalian red blood cells lose their nucleus during maturation to make more room for oxygen storage, they started with a nucleus originally. Also, non-mammalian red blood cells do maintain their nucleus and thus their DNA.
Ian Neufeld but they used a human nucleusless cell
Geo Mit true
Ian Neufeld they used the image of a mature RBC with biconcave feature not a reticulocyte therefore no DNA.
Ahaha gross error
Here's a little physics joke, maybe. A neutron walked into a bar and asked, "How much for the gin and tonic?" The bartender smiled wryly and replyed, "For you, no charge." Well have a good day or evening everyone.
Sorry, I couldn't read past "A neutron walked"; everyone knows that neutrons only gallop.
Sadly the drink was low quality, 15 minutes later he threw up an electron. 'Aah' says the barman. 'You'll have to pay for THAT.' The ex-neutron disputes this, saying the electron made the mess, but the barman is resolute. 'I'm sorry but that's the rule, protons are charged." "You sure?" "Positive."
lol, good one. :-)
Soooo original.
But this bar was on one floor so there was no going between up and down.
So.. in the end... I really am an energy sink.
Dad was right.
And radiator ;)
If we are agents in the inexorable trend to maximize entropy, this makes the awareness of our existence so much the more awe-inspiring and opens the questions of why do we believe in right and wrong, good and bad in the first place?
Why are we so attracted to beauty, liberty and love if they would all be an illusion and no one is free to escape death and annihilation?
Why are we called to and orient ourselves to complexity and perfection if that means we’re disobeying the deepest and most important laws of nature? Why do we seek to rebel against the laws of the Universe?
Tbh this is my favorite quote now
“I guess that makes you a little eddy of order, a momentary fluctuation of interesting, but ultimately in service of the spread of disorder and dullness.”
"Life acts to reduce its own internal entropy by increasing the entropy of its surroundings"
Ohhh.... ::looks around apartment::
You know, for someone with so much entropy in her surroundings, I'm remarkably chaotic and anxious inside. I don't think this principle applies to me.
i was making a video for school and i had to edit the video for like 2 days. i have gained so much respect for the editors of this video cause i now know how long making a script filming and escpecialy editing takes.
amazing video
You should try rotoscoping.
Making content is fairly easy. It just takes time. Try dealing with YT comments and negativity, especially when you've worked hard on something for days and it either goes unnoticed or people complain about stupid stuff...
...don't even talk about the monotized part. I don't care to try that myself but I hear that's quite the nightmare to deal with.
-Jake
Anyone who says that youtubing is easy, has never done any editing.
As an editor myself, it takes so much time to make a video. Preparing, Getting the raw footage, watching the footage, cutting out unnecessary footage, adding transitions, text, animations, etc... Then it can take sometimes hours to render the final video and my internet is slow so about 5 minutes upload time per minute of HD video. So 10 minute vid takes 50 minutes
Simpletons whine about bullshit.
As a biologist, i highly approve of this episode. I've never thought that you will actually tackle this!
Empire Empire you understand that all this is based off theory, mathematics, and pseudoscience, yes?
None of what we see from nasa is actually a real phone. All are artist renderings or concepts. If you don’t believe me look it up, then get a telescope or go to a local observatory and see for yourself. Don’t believe what you cannot observe for yourself. All this is theory, spoken as though it is fact.
What i understand is that you like to copy-paste the same block of text all over the place, increasing it's entropy.
I understand... God isn't real hahaha I know your kind and you will disprove all of this science then fight tooth and nail to explain God.
Seekingtruth of course it's theories it's a science channel. The assumption is you know what a scientific theory is and they don't preface every statement with "this is our current best model and explaination supported by experimentaton and observation but may be be revised or replaced if new evidence comes to light".
Sounds like the only theories you understand are conspiracy theories.
perfect comeback
This specific topic has been on my mind since I learned about entropy. Thanks for finally explaining things in a way that allowed me a better sense of entropy.
I cannot stress enough just how cool this episode is!
I have never thought about this in this way before...
So simple an idea, and yet impossible to deny. What a revelation!
A mega-collab between my three favourite UA-camrs! THAT's life!
Ford: "Eddies, in the space-time continuum."
Arthur: "Ah, is he. Is he."
-- Douglas Adams
David Beaumont I’ve forgotten which book that was. Was that when they were trapped on prehistoric Earth? Like before the sofa appeared?
"Er, who is Eddy, then, exactly?"
Eli
I have a vague memory of Ford thinking he was a martini olive at one point and was jumping in and out of a martini that was really a pond. Not sure if that’s what actually happened though. Been a number of years since I read it.
Eli I think you’re right. Sounds familiar. I don’t trust my memory that much. Sometimes I’ve remembered episodes of Doctor Who then realized I was recalling the wrong Doctor in that scene.
Cool! Just by being alive, I'm helping to destroy the Universe! Thanks! This knowledge is so liberating!
You misunderstood, you're not destroying anything, you're just helping the universe along.
The invention of ever more powerful bombs, that can spread enormous quantities of energy very fast, is humanity's greatest contribution to entropy.
Ireallyreally Hategoogle, it follows that while it's good to detonate bombs, you better make sure nobody dies as a result. More people can construct more bombs.
Michael Petrov
Hard to detonate the biggest bombs on earth without killing anyone. There's space detonation, but that seems like a waste of a good bomb. I guess we should target planets, moons and asteroids that don't emit any meaningful quantities of radiations.
Ireallyreally Hategoogle That's it gentlemen, we're building the Death Star
Exactly why Thanos is coming!
I wonder which order you should watch this collaboration. I watched PBS -> Okay To Be Smart -> This one.
It seemed to mesh well in this order, but I think they did a great job and that any order would probably be okay. They blended very well together. Good job guys.
The universe created me so I'd raise its entropy for it?
Mind BLOWN! 😵
Entropy goes up regardless. Where there's an object/region with sustained low entropy, surrounding regions compensate by going higher. Globally, the effect is the same with or without these fluctuations. Also, high entropy = death, do you really wanna be responsible for cosmic suicide?
Ignoblape I have no choice.
And now we've gone straight into philosophy.
yes you have! start to extract energy from the emptiness of a perfect void That would do the trick
Maybe the universe created us to stop entropy increasing as it can't do it without life, as matter is bound by the laws of physics?
I always knew i was an agent of chaos.
Small children specialize in increasing entropy...
On the contrary: children in general are excellent at decreasing entropy and increasing order in their own selves: they take dead stuff from their surroundings (i.e. food, water and air) and make it into a complex biological machine that work increasingly well. It all ends but youth and childhood particularly is precisely the period of life in which we decrease our entropy at the highest rates. It's old people who increase entropy again by turning all that effort into waste (death) but not their fault, just biology's fault.
He forgot to mention the entrophy is generated in the house
as are small minded adults
Luis Aldamiz but some creatures dont die unless killed 🤔
And they will be. Even if it takes the sun boiling the earth.
Abseiled into a Kugelblitz with a Geiger counter yesty arvo.
Was so high.
-Australia
Does anyone else fully comprehend how bloody amazing this proposition is? All the things we can associate with life over the past ~4.1 billion years is just one example of attempting to increase entropy in very specific conditions which is something that likely happens all over the universe. How thought provoking.
.....this is the best video I've ever seen. I'm.... mainly about the looks; not much going on upstairs, if you know what I mean. I dip in and out of various 'sciencey' things that interest me, trying to increase my knowledge and understanding and satisfy my curiosity. This video came to me at a time when I was simultaneously interested in the origins of life, the natural history of the earth, and trying to finally understand what the heck entropy is. This video has essentially answered all those questions. 'Eddies in entropy'. That's incredibly profound. I'm going to have to watch this video, and its companion videos, a few more times to really get it. But, goodness gracious, some of this 'existence stuff' is starting to make sense! Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you.
2:38 You show a mature RED BLOOD CELL with DNA coming out of it, which technically contain no DNA only hemoglobin.
Phys channel; if you want biologists to bitch about it, go to the companion vids XD
Iago Silva I am not a biologist lol
It is on the screen with the biologist. So it is a goof either way. Can't just say "it's a physics channel..."
So? I can photoshop a pic of N d Tyson in a Flat-Earther vid and call it "Tyson's goof" XD
Except that NDT was not part of your picture willingly. I am saying this was an editing mistake and should have been run by all parties concerned. PBS ST has made goofs in the past, they are after all, humans. :)
"Entropy is the measure of the boringness of the system". First time I've ever understood Entropy!
2:30
Talks about a cell's DNA
Shows a cell that has no DNA
Oh well at least the DNA is the right handedness XD
#notbaddna
GiggitySam Entz
So Z-DNA doesn't exist ?
hahaha cool that someone notice it
I thought the same. Luckily he did not show a platelet
This happens more often than I expected.
I come back to this video every year to remember the meaning of Life - We’re all little eddies of order, helping to service entropy. I love it.
When 3 channels that I already follow do a collaboration: aww it's a shame that I don't get to meet anyone new or check out a channel I've never heard of. But on the bright side, the concentration of awesomeness in the video is at an all-time high!
08:55 shitting heat? 💩🔥
Watch until the very end! LOL Matt goes in #SAVAGE mode.
00:35 ...Wow way to sound *JUST* like my real life physicist dad, Space Time. Yes, my Marine Ecology master's thesis *IS* real science, Dad!
Nikolas Floros Was just expecting someone to comment that line.
Nikolas Floros haha it's kind of a joke for physicists to consider other science as 'not real science'. We don't really think that.
Lol I'm well aware Ricossa1, I'm just joking back. Like I said, my father is a physicist so I've grown up with that well-worn joke.
Nikolas Floros inb4 "xkcd: fields sorted by purity"
Kuratius YAS it's so good!
I appreciate this collaboration so much! It made me google the most boring stuff with great interest!
This channel is one of the few channels that makes me smile when a new video is uploaded. I love this channel!
"Chemistry and Biology are just Applied Physics."
Ooooooooohhhhhhhh... BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRNNN
I don't see anything wrong with that characterisation. It certainly doesn't detract from the richness of either field. After all, you could say that physics is just applied Mathematics.
@@clearz3600 Mathematics is just observable and experimental physics
@@clearz3600 we learn mathematics form observing the universe and its laws
Sujai Gorai I'm sorry but you are completely wrong. There is an entire body of Maths known as Pure Mathematics that is not based around any physics. This is not to say that Physicists won't find a use for some of the ideas coming from pure maths and this has happened in the past.
@@sujaigorai7752 Again wrong. We "learn" mathematics by choosing a set of first principles called axioms which we then use to build proofs from, which in turn can be used to build more proofs.
What is life: "it's a little Eddy of order, a momentary fluctuation of intersting. But is ultimately in the service of disorder and dullness. An agent of a neverending trend to maximize the entropy of spacetime!"
Incoming existential crisis.
F*** me, right! I mean, not that I didn't have it all along but... nothing like a physics video explaining how the very existence/goal/purpose of life merely is to better enable the inevitable, all encompassing return of the Universe to one "big" nothing... yeah... cheers, mate!
Halp
Pls don't stop increasing entropy because of this.
+oceanman
ehm going from a heat death universe (max entropy) to a big bang state (min entropy) means going from a state of maximum entropy to minimum entropy ... The 2nd law of Thermodynamics doesn't like that kind of thinking too much. We'll it's a statistical thing of course but still not trivial ...
Trying to conserve the 1st law by maximally violating the second is not a good idea.
BTW both the 1st and the 2nd law are not absolutely hard laws, but just observations that have a law like status under certain conditions. E.g the first law is only absolutely valid, if the closed system is static (not expanding, like e.g. the universe), while the second is only true for short times of observation (with short = just a few billion or trillion years)
@Frank Schneider - Hi Frank. I invite You to have a look at my comment I've posted in the main thread today ;-) Regards.
By far the greatest compliment ever! "A momentary fluctuation of... Interesting."
Thank you for this video. For nearly two years now I've struggled to answer the question "What fundamental pressure drives the creation of life". And now I have a sufficient answer. So once again, thank you.
Hang on. So from the response to Fernando Franco Felix at 11:52, constant acceleration isn't stable and quantum drag will eventually bring the particle's acceleration to zero. But if so then from the equivalence principle, gravity is the same as constant acceleration and hence should be subject to the same quantum drag which will eventually cause the acceleration to stop, or in this case gravity to become nonexistent. Does that actually happen?
Wha.. wait. Thats a good question. Near any normal body you probably wouldn't notice anything because you'd hit the ground long before the effect became noticable, but with black holes... Matt? We need You here Matt. We need You to dive under the horizon Matt.
The accelerating body, in free space, is increasing in speed and thus sees velocity associated effects like length contraction and time dilation. From the inertial frame acceleration can constantly decrease towards zero (As the object reaches light speed) but from the accelerated frame that lesser acceleration is occurring over slower time and can seem constant.
Assuming the body had infinite energy at its disposal there would be a point in time in the inertial frame where it would reach light speed. The accelerated body, through relativity, would see the outside universe slow in time and never pass that point.
This applies gravitationally too, but the difference is that while the free space object's speed is constantly increasing, that of a gravitationally bound one is (usually) not. In the case of an orbiting body the acceleration changes direction (and I believe the resulting Unruh effect can give rise to gravitational waves and orbital decay but am not certain about this.) In the case of one at Earth's surface an opposing force accelerates you upwards. (Same for hovering.) I'm not sure what this does to horizons, whether it causes two to form or not, but the end result is that speed does not increase, the 'drag' is in two opposite directions and balances out, and so the energy involved and its form does not change. (Unruh radiation is not emitted from a gravitating body.)
You can easily see this when you combine the two. An object falling towards a black hole experiences unbalanced gravitational acceleration. In fact its acceleration is constantly increasing as the strength of gravity rises; when it hits the horizon it is moving at light speed. But from an external perspective it neither reaches light speed nor does its acceleration increase without bound. (It rises initially until relativistic effects cause it to slow to zero at the horizon.)
+Gareth Dean Hmm that would suggest that linear acceleration behaves differently from rotational acceleration. Is that the case?
I dont think that answers his question.
+Empire Empire I think it does. It was an elaborate way of saying no :)
Still waiting for Schrödinger to release a sequal called What is love? I'm eager to find out whether baby hurt me or not.
Suvi-Tuuli Allan Schrödinger's baby simultaneously hurts and doesn't hurt you.
At 4:29, where's Schrödinger's umlaut?
It was in a box with his cat and unfortunately the sensor detected radioactivity.
Who knew Wii U gamepads were also Geiger counters?
I've read Jeremy England's paper before but never understood it with such clarity! Thank you!
Great choice of pictures. Using a RBC as a cell example and then showing DNA.
at 2:36 you could have chosen a type of cell that actually *has* DNA in it :D
other than that, great video as always
8:56. I had to listen a couple of times before I realized he actually said SHEDDING heat! It really sounded like a different word.💩
shitting is just shedding entropy.
That is wrong "Must increase over time".
There is no force driving disorder, it is just "extremely unlikely" for a state to become
more organised. So "must" should be replaced by "almost certainly will".
vinm300 “almost certainly”
I agree. There are no absolutes. Almost.
Yes the second law it is just randomness. I really need to check the definition of "random" to get to the source of life...
It's funny because creationists have argued for years that thermodynamics makes evolution impossible. The truth is that self-replication, organized complexity, and evolution are all inevitable consequences of thermodynamics.
I'm back here 2 years later, a really good video diving in really cool deep vision of what is life, arguably top 3 of your videos.
This should have been the ending of Mass Effect 3
MisterPaulch That the Reapers were trying to delay the heat death?
Matthew Ducker exactly. Because they were given the instruction to extend their existence as long as possible.
Someone should create Mod, where instead of the spacechild, a Hologram of Matt appears ;)
Actually it was the edding of it.
XD
I call the band name: low entropy eddie and the turbulent flow.
😂😂
that ending statement though holy crap
Its always great to see some of my favourite UA-cam channels colab. Thanks guys!
This is one of the most elegant and beautiful explanations of this I’ve ever seen. Funny how one of the unanswered millennium questions is about finding equations describing turbulent motion. I assume at least by the year 3000 someone will have answered this, possibly one of the biggest and most fundamentally misunderstood concepts out there. How does chaos lead to organisms that can manipulate/understand that chaos that maybe produced themselves in the first place?
A very interesting video!
I try my best to understand. To some degree are you saying that the purpose of life is to 'destroy'? Till I saw this video, I always thought that life took an unordered world and made it ordered. Now, it seems we do that, but as a byproduct we actually aid the universe in increasing its entropy.
(I could be confused; I'm no scientist.)
Just, part of me sillily thought that, in being creative, I was helping humbly fight back a bit against heat-death, even though it's inevitable.
---
I suppose science (and thus, this video) is more focused on what life does and how it does so, and less focused on why it does so. Still, I imagine the philosophical implications of all this are thought-provoking.
---
Maybe it is one thing to determine what life does, and another thing to actually assign that as its 'purpose'.
Just nitpicking but the carbon atom is larger than an oxygen atom 6:55
Due to it bonding with hydrogen you mean?
In general the size of the carbon atom by itself, regardless of whether it's bonded or not, is still larger than an oxygen atom.
More positively charged nucleus can pull the electrons in closer, even if there's two more of them.
Even the DNA is wrong, there is no major and minor groove (getting the symmetry right is important in physics! ;) ), so no double helix. And the protein is quite sad as well (see protein database - rcsb.org - motm)
Who cares? Or more actually, why care?
For the love of Darwin... Please do not use a mature mammalian erythrocyte as your example cell when discussing DNA. I am hoping the biologist didn't screen the video before you posted it.
Otherwise, I did enjoy the presentation.
They don't have a nucleus.
Avian ones do have nucleus.
Or it's not mature cell.
Yes, avian RBC's have a nucleus, but avian RBC's don't look at all like mammalian RBC's:
They are ovoid, not round
They are not biconcave
Jonathan Odude If it was from an animal that retains its nucleus, it wouldn’t have the familiar biconcaval shape shown.
This video is the best thing I have ever seen on the internet. I say that completely honestly. If I have seen anything better - that is more interesting or enlightening or enriching - I cannot think of it.
I was just commenting that the beauty of biology is knowing [bio]-chemistry, which is easier to understand if you know physics. And I was not disappointed by how these three teamed up together. Such a good episode. And of course - I watched them all in order: Physics --> Biochem --> Biology; because that's how everything is ordered (biology being all encompassing!)
2:50 facepalm - discusses DNA - shows red blood cell.
So I can commit a crime, leave my blood cells behind and not get caught?
Yes in a mature red blood corpuscle nucleus ceases to exist
No he discuss the complexity of a single cell
Assaf Wodeslavsky He was talking about the cells in our body before that, so that's why the red blood cell show up
KtkC The issue is that the animation drags the DNA out of the RBC, insinuating that there is DNA in the RBC.
Life is common throughout the expanse, trust me,... I am an Alien, after all.
ayy lmao
Sadly this statement is more likely than aliens NOT exisitng
How do you come to the believe that life is common ?
Hey buddy, what's with all the butt stuff? We really wanna know.
It's interesting to think that in Conway's game of life while the system tends towards more entropy, it very often ends in a cycle. And the things like the glider can move in a direction indefinitely provided it doesn't hit anything. Thus it's conceivable that the universe may end with life having created a truly closed loop with a massive period.
I suppose that depends on whether or not the fundamental forces break down in some way that life can work around.
docopoper: in a purely abstract "game of life" your remark holds but not in any conceivable implementation of it I think.
After all a software running it is not truly a closed system!
Whatever computer or mechanism one would use to run it still depends on energy and thus even permanent cyclic patterns of the "game of life" do not escape the law of globally ever increasing entropy.
Well sure, that's a valid argument. But you're basically saying to assume the universe is a simulation and that if the simulation is halted then any cycles would stop. That's true, but I more meant that using just the laws of physics it seems conceivable for life to leave the universe in a cycle. In this case entropy is one of the laws of physics (in the game of life example that would be to say it's one of the rules of the game), if the universe is simulated then that's not to say that it follows that law. Just like universe doesn't follow the rules of Conway's game of life.
I'm inclined to say it's impossible to create an endless cycle in the universe since by doing so I suppose you'd be creating a horizon and would lose your energy to hawking radiation. But it's interesting to think of and it's hard to say what life that lasted that long would be capable of.
+docopoper
What Igor Keller wanted to say is that you arbitrarily compared the universe with an abstract game with arbitrarily define rules and want to seek deep knowledge from accidental parallels from that. I could do the same with the universe and a huge pile of shit. The result is exactly the same ... totally irrelevant.
That's exactly how science and rational thinking does NOT work.
Despite some criticism here your point is valid in principle. It's correct to look at a 'game of life' as a closed system. That it's being run by a underlying software is completely irrelevant to the simulation of entropy; our universe is also being run by the laws of physics yet still we look at it as a closed system. The laws of physics won't run out of gas (and if they did that would be unrelated to entropy) so neither should the laws of 'game of life' do when simulating.
It's hard to say whether the laws of the game will map on to the laws of physics as it relates to entropy in regards to your point. But it's definitely an interesting hypothesis that entropy has some inherent cycle to it that we haven't discovered yet.
GepardenK: As I said valid "in principle" yes.
However to hope gain insight of anything as fondamental as entropy, laws of physics or destiny of our universe from the endless cyclic nature of some emerging patterns in the game of life is closer from drawing conclusions from the observation of a go-to loop than anything remotely meaningful.
The game of life is interesting (and definitely more so than a go-to loop .. ;-) but people tend to get all hooked up because of its fancy name. A fact that never ceases to anger Conway himself..
Matt, Joe, and Blake, OH MY!
Love all three of you guys!
Finally a video that makes sense of entropy and living systems.
Fluid dynamics is scary. Can we stick to spacetime?
2:30 y’all used a picture of one of the few cells that don’t contain DNA
I'm an agent of chaos🔫
- joker, the dark knight
These 3 videos, by Eons, Space Time and It's OK to be Smart have to be one of the most fascinating samples of condensed knowledge I've ever encountered! The subject of Life, and how it relates to physics (in particular thermodynamics), is really a subject that sparks my most intense curiosity! Keep up the good work guys, and thanks for this jewel of a video series!
Mind blowing!!
Super cool episode! ^__^
I particularly enjoyed hearing your As to our Qs.
But there is more to life than Physics, so I'm off to the Eons to get smart-er.
Hey Matt, I love your videos. Can you do a video or playlist on Entropy and Boltzmann's Equation, Exergy, Enthalpy etc.
So, is life causing the universe to reach high entropy faster than if life didn't exist?
Bose-Einstein Phew good question!
So it would seem
Since we are currently doing a rather decent job of breaking up things like coal, Oil, and even Uranium, I'd say yes.
Yes, because we can catalyse reactions that otherwise have a very low probability of occurrence, and once technological life develops, it is even more efficient at raising global entropy.
Matthew Ducker
So once we create an optimizer AI that begins making more of itself, and eventually destroys us while consuming the galaxy, will that be the ultimate increase in entropy?
So,
The purpose of life is to dissipate energy. We are all tiny entropy serving machines, harbingers of heat death.
That seems to be something that life does, as Jeremy England's research suggests, but I dont believe that defines its "purpose".
it's poetic in a way, beautiful
erictko85 What is a more low level definition of purpose that to execute an basic law of physics? True there are much better “reasons” to be alive, however, they all eventually tie back to this.
翻生鯉魚王 exactly
@@ThingEngineer Yes I think you are right. If we take purpose to be "the reason for which something exists". I am caught up on "reason" and its teleological connotations, but when discussing the 2nd law, that does seem to be the one place we find a clear direction.
This blew my mind a little in that I've never thought about the order of life in such a way
Thanks for the new thoughts. Videos like these are the only ones I never regret giving time to watch, even years later.
So the purpose of life is to create more chaos (Entropy) ?
When evolution is taught, the drive to greater complexity is almost always either completely omitted or glossed over. But it is a clear drive that evolution optimizes alongside the drive toward greater reproduction. Any organism which lives has a metabolism. It takes in something from the environment and produces something different. This inherently changes the environment of the organism into one which is less optimal for its survival. It also immediately creates a niche opportunity for a more complex organism, one which can consume both the food and the waste, or survive in an environment dominated by the waste, to exist. It's a good thing this drive toward greater complexity is around. Because we certainly wouldn't be otherwise. By every single other possible measure, bacteria are radically more evolutionarily fit than humans (and most all higher life). They reproduce exponentially, adapt faster, can survive is far more diverse environments, can go dormant for thousands of years if necessary for the environment to return to an amenable state, etc. Without a drive to greater complexity, evolution would stop with them.
Dustin Rodriguez maybe the problem is with the definition of complexity
I definitely agree - However! We are the only species that could consciously take our genetic makeup to another planet, and possibly to other star systems.
I’d usually say that humans are the scourge of the planet, until I consider that in impending doom situations (life-ending comets, volcanos, etc), we’d probably be the only way that life could leave Earth to live on in the universe. Something should be said for that.
@@jamesdeininger3759 I'll be looking at humanity - and Life - completely differently from now on. Many thanks for the time you took to post that comment.
So the meaning of life is to just live and ruin anything you come into contact with? Sweet! I'm right on track :D
not really that's not maximizing entropy, not in the long run anyway.
Don't think that's what it means
Ruin everything would mean you are messing it up, right? That would be high entropy. Low entropy would be organising your ruined life.
no it's easier to mess up than to clean up, you use less energy messing up and thus low entropy, and you use more energy when cleaning up thus higher net entropy.
the higher entropy thing you can do that every one does is get a job and marry and reproduce.
even better if you become successful business owner like an owner of a oil rig where your job would literately be extracting low entropy oil and selling it to be used/burned by machines etc.. thus being converted to higher entropy...
so yeah the net high entropy thing you can do is actually be successful in life...
Okay, that's interesting. Doesn't it seem there are two definitions of entropy? Yes, that is what I meant, by organising you would be expelling more energy. Now, what confuses me is that there seem to be two definitions. 1st definition is what we're talking about now, energy transfer but then we have another one where people explain that if your room is messy then it has high entropy because it is more disordered.
its amazing to see all the information we get around life in science now condensed in a 10 minute UA-cam video
Karl Friston - Free Energy Principle is the theory that attempts to unify that the searching for "negative entropy" is shared in the cellular level and cognitive level. Quite interesting stuff.
the German word "bewegung" has the emphasis on the second e not the first. that sounded odd but many German learners make that mistake at some point
Danke, schön!
Entropy is just the way matter 'shows' all the possible configurations it will have over a designated time-period; life just happened to be one of the configurations; so is me writing this comment.
But it doesn't have TIME to explore all possible configurations before some become near irrevocably lost. Why the unusual state of life than the more boring random thermal motion leading to slow cooling?
Gareth Dean well apparently it did, we're the 'living' proof
We're ONE configuration, but where are the dragons? The intelligent dinosaurs, unicorns or giant enemy crabs? All of those are possible configurations of Earth's matter that have not formed and are unlikely to form via natural processes now that life as we know it exists. We are just a tiny, almost zero speck of what's possible. An interesting speck, but a speck none the same. The universe that we see has neither the time nor the mass to realize all possible permutations.
The question then becomes - why did the universe start in a state of low entropy?
Yep, the anthropic principle pretty much.
The question then becomes - why did the universe start?
Because Zlatan wished it so.
Deus Almighty: shouldn't YOU know??
;-)
Deus Almighty some things are better left unsaid. Google the truth contest and live everyone moment of your life.
These collabs really do work. I had never heard of PBS won, and it's also how I discovered infinite series
This is the best video of all I saw in your channel!!! But do not understand me wrong, until today I was amazed by all the other Space Time Videos. This is just the best of them all!!!!!!!!!!!! Great Job!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*Are you going to do an episode on that experiment where they changed the direction of entropy*
You mean they went back in time!
Deus Almighty My bad, thermodynamics. But not to sure how much a physicist would say my description there was wrong.
See this. www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731720-400-im-building-a-machine-that-breaks-the-rules-of-reality/
I can't read the article cause I'm not subscribed. The guy seems a little out there though in terms of ideas. I would have to read some of his articles but I guess I would not understand much...
It seems to involve entangling two molecules, when light is emitted, QM mean you can't tell what entangled particle emitted the Photon. So both molecules must lower their energy level. So they radiate energy faster than a non Quantum engine.
That's how it's described, I did not get that from myself, and don't understand it properly anyway.
Entropy increases only continuously in a closed system, so decreasing it in an open system is no big deal. So you can easily decrease entropy within a subsystem. Best example is the excitation of an electron into a higher valence shell by absorbing a photon. Actually are all elementary physical processes at least in principle reversible, so entropy just appears as side effect on the macroscopic level as a statistical effect. So saying "entropy will increase" is not much different from saying "if you flip a non-faked coin, you'll never always just have heads"
And yes entropy will also decrease all by itself in the universe. It's just statistically (especially as we are that far from away equilibrium (heat death)) extremely unlikely ... but just wait a while and it while happen ... although it might some 10^Googol years or so.
I'd like to call in a homicide. Because PBS just blew my mind
Brainicide. You can probably still live without such a sensitive mind.
Love the show
Arne Van Royen you understand that all this is based off theory, mathematics, and pseudoscience, yes?
None of what we see from nasa is actually a real phone. All are artist renderings or concepts. If you don’t believe me look it up, then get a telescope or go to a local observatory and see for yourself. Don’t believe what you cannot observe for yourself. All this is theory, spoken as though it is fact.
Seekingtruth photos are edited so that what we cannot see with the naked eye is revealed
Seekingtruth and i don't think you understand what a SCIENTIFIC theory is. It demands copious evidence.
Seekingtruth stay off the smelly grass for a while
Yugenthusiast2.0 do you understand what you just said?
You can’t see it. So out of thin air it just appears? Come on. This is all THEORY, none of it has passed the scientific method.
How can one believe in something that is only a belief, backed by numbers?
This collab is t.d.f, you guys really smashed it this time.
7:20 Another thing to note, don't forget Water's "universal solvent" property that allows these things to never reach a thermal equilibrium. Molecules can break apart, come back together, etc.