Physicists rewrite the fundamental law that leads to disorder

Re:Physicists rewrite the fundamental law that leads to diso... by dekhn on Thursday May 26, 2022 @02:04PM (#31521541)

They mean there was only one possible configuration of matter, like a die that could only ever roll to "1".

I like to think of entropy as "the universe prefers to have the greatest degrees of freedom available to it and there is a cost to reducing degrees of freedom". For example, to make a perfect crystal you have to cool to absolute zero (and even then there can be residual entropy!). Effectively, entropy = the logarithm of the number of ways a thing can be ordered.

If a thing can only be ordered in one way, then its entropy is minimized.

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Re:Physicists rewrite the fundamental law that leads to diso... by zmgsabst on Thursday May 26, 2022 @03:18PM (#31522324)

Well, there isn’t matter at that time — and your analogy to dice is exactly my point.

That instant could roll to anything from its current position (and according to many worlds, did) — the phase space of that object is huge, far beyond anything we normally see. That single object has all the complexity of every possible universe stacked into an infinitesimal region!

We’re in a colder universe than it was at that compacted moment, which I’m having trouble aligning with your explanation about crystals: we’re seeing the cooling towards absolute zero as a superheated droplet spreads out and freezes.

Defects forming in the crystallization of iron doesn’t imply the cold, defect laden iron has more entropy than the liquid drop it cooled from.

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