Peter Soderqvist

I have read in John Gribbin' s Book, Schrodinger 's Kittens and the Search For Reality, that David Bohm has said that; heat disturbs the quantum world! I think Bohm 's concept is as follow; entropy doesn’t have any meaning with one particle, because entropy is a collective property, which measures the atomistic disorder in a system, thus the entropy change of the system! Thus one electron has no component parts and for the same reason temperature doesn't apply! One electron is time-symmetrical (no heat), but a collection of particles in random jostling generates heat, since random jostling is heat!

We know that this time-symmetry begins to blur when one particle jostling with other particles! In example, random heat motion in a engine is converted into coherent motion by the piston, since the piston periodic motions reject atoms which are parallel to the piston, and admit only atoms with perpendicular direction, this "selection" is converted into ordered motion, " the car moves forwardly", this is the fundamental time asymmetry; all work can be converted into heat, say by friction, but all heat cannot be converted into work, because some is wasted in the process by the car's radiator!

The second law of thermodynamics governs every natural change!

Any thought about this?

Kat_Somm_Faen

Peter,

I feel I might have a very similar understanding of time. As you are talking about entropy time just as same has no meaning to a non observer. IMO time seems to be inherently connected to only interaction of particles and waves. Similar to to your entropy example I think of time not having meaning to a singular particle hanging completely isolated in space. Time in fact is change itself and experiencing change ie, the interaction of youself ( or particles and other particles ) is to experience time. That is the way I think of Zeno's paradox. In fact it is a paradox if one consideres just the turtle and Achiles. And in the same way Diogenes simply got up and walked as a response to hearing the argument I feel that the answer is exceedingly simple.

Thermo was one of the most intriguing stuff I took in school ( being of some technical background ). But I feel heat might be somewhat lacking and very specific. Heat is just a concept really. When I gave the classical explanation to a professor of mine at the University as heat being just the aggregate of kinetic motion of particles - he had quite a different explanation for me

Nevertheless work is just equivalen to heat. Similar to matter being equivalent to energy. Heat actually quite easily can be converted to work - believe you me Actually the point is a bit more subtle in that work can only be extracted between two heat reservoirs - an important concept in engineering and all of thermo because it really describes what is happening in reality. All you need to have for a thermal engine is two differences in heat - in a car it is combustion chamber ( high heat reservoir ) and the low temperature reservoir is atmosphere.

No work can be extracted between heat reservoirs of equal temperature. And entropy being only a measure of randomness or disorder of a system. And when it is transfered it only seeks to increase or remain the same. So therefore no interaction can occur.

Now as you say time is heat - I would only suggest it is a very narrow or a special kind of time definition and that time itself is change itself and no time is experienced by a completely isolated observer. Like there is no work in a single heat reservoir there can be no action no existence itself without interaction and change. Time itself is change itself and existence only arises from change and nothing static and unchanging can experience existence and actually be until it interacts.


Statistically there is no useful work one can extract form a system of equal entropy since statistically what one particle in motion giveth another taketh away But they are in motion themselves without question. Yet the sum of their motion is zero and if subjected to randomness another particle will eventually push you into opposite direction thereby dsetroying your trajectory. And if you by means of a trick are able to extract useful motion from entropic particles - all you did is reduced their entropy but increased your localy. So why two reservoirs? Because statistically you are only able to extract motion if you have two different entropies since then you can actually transfer motion that is not going to be statistically estroyed by the random particle motions. And then you have the reason why the entropy can only remain the same or decrease - inneficiency since no thermal engine can be 100% efficient on its transfer of motion. To be 100% efficient is not to use any entropy. Not to destroy it at all.

At least that is they way I explain entropy and its effect to myself. Entropy is nothing more than a "measure" of disorder in a system at its very basic level.

Just as a side note - law of entropy does not exclude one thing - do you know what it is?

Now this is lacking in the sense that it does not provide for the direction of time. Like the gravity of old - things just fall down and end of story. Time traveling in one direction is simply the way it has always been. Yet we are undertsanding gravity not as just "it was always so". Same with heat and entropy... they only go in one direction. And why not in the other? It is quite apparent from microcosmos that objects set in motion stay that way and why does temperature go only from hot to cold?

Yeah there is more heat and it travels to a region of lower heat but is it really so simply intrinsic and are we satisfied with "it is simply so and will always be". Why does time travel in only single direction?

Be assured you will hear more of my thinking on the subject including the lowest potential temperature, arrow of time and more

Peter Soderqvist

I think it is always good to pondering about how it can be in that way, and to invent hypothesis in order to explain things, but these hypotheses doesn't have any reality, or merit until they are testable, and thus can be falsified or verified! Quantum mechanics bear witness to how many hypotheses (various interpretations) can be created in a filed which is consistent with facts, and they all make the same prediction, but yet, they all cannot be right! I am emotionally attached to CI, namely; consciousness as the collapser of wave function, but on the other hand I don't like to believe things, which is not truth!

I am a Darwinian at heart, and I firmly believe that further experiments will remove our false hypotheses, btw, did you know that Boltzmann was first to se the connection between information and entropy, further developed by the Darwinian Claude Shannon, his ideas is picked up by biologists, and used by them! Informational entropy is a logarithmic measure of uncertainty in a system! Mutations increase informational entropy in the gene pool, because uncertainty rises in the pool about who shall survive? But natural selection decreases this uncertainty by removing the unfit, and let fit ones spread their genes! I have read three books by Richard Dawkins, and I must say that, I like Dawkins digital information technological approach! We can apply this as follows; the amount of different hypotheses in quantum mechanics is the amount informational entropy in this particular field, but further experiments decreases informational entropy by remove the unfit hypotheses, and so let the fit ones survive!

The Blind Watchmaker, Chapter 5 - The power and the archives!
If you want to understand life, don't think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.

The Information Challenge By Richard Dawkins!
http://www.skeptics.com.au/journal/dawkins1.htm

Ludwig Boltzmann: "Gain in information is loss in entropy"
http://www.wellesley.edu/Chemistry/c...mo1.html#boltz

Endnote by Stephen Hawking in his book, A Brief History of Time, chapter 9 Time-arrows! “If you remember every word in this book [A Brief History of Time, Hawkins 1988], your memory will have recorded about two million pieces of information: the order in your brain will have increased by about two million units. However, while you have been reading the book, you will have converted at least a thousand calories of ordered energy, in the form of food, into disordered energy, in the form of heat that you lose to the air around you by convection and sweat. This will increase the disorder of the universe by about twenty million, million, million, million, units – or about ten million, million, million times the increase in order in your brain – and that’s if you remember everything in this book.”

Sdoderqvist1: we have an cosmological time-arrow according to Hawking which increases in the same direction as the universe expands, since the expansion was close nothing at the moment of Big Bang, and expands forwardly in time, as far as we can see today, and there is an psychological time-arrow too, according to Hawking, because we remember the past, but not the future, the time develops in the same direction that our amount of memories increases, for instance, a newborn child have no memories, but the same person has the maximum amount of them at the deathbed! Thus the cosmological, the thermo-dynamical, and the psychological time-arrows pointing in the same direction, and so has given us the asymmetrical reality of time!

phil

Check out "Can the human mind comprehend higher dimensions?" in the Philosophy section, there have been some interesting comments about time there.

-phil

Origian

Gosh I cannot believe this has become so big... This was in a paper here in New Zealand a couple of months ago as front page news, and everybody sort of forgot about it after that thinking it must be just false or something.

Artemus

Do you remember when and where it said it was published at the time? I find it hard to believe that it could have said the August issue of Foundations of Physics Letters a couple months ago.