Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Famous atheist changes his mind

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Spurling, Shannon wrote:
> " You wrote, "In a system things tend toward disorder."  Which is only
> true 
> in a system with no energy input from outside the system.  The Earth is 
> not such a system."
> 
> Where I did not say that the system was limited to the earth. That was
> your assumed frame of reference. I would presume that the Universe is a
> closed system unless you can find holes and prove that there is free
> exchange of matter and energy from another universe. Another interesting
> thing to note is that our current understanding of thermodynamics is
> based on observations made on the earth. This means that even though the
> sun provides a lot of energy, there is still a great chemical and atomic
> tendency towards disorder, making it even more unlikely that chemicals
> could conceivably achieve an order high enough to "Spark" the creation
> of life with out some sort of outside influence.
> 

I'm going to go with Mike here.  In some ways the two of you are 
refering to slightly different things.  You (Shannon) are talking about 
some intuitive sense that generally things get more disordered, and 
order does not come out of chaos.  Mike is talking about the 
mathematical version of that statement - they measure disorder with a 
quanitity called entropy, and the second law of thermodynamics says that 
in a closed system that the total amount of disorder is increasing. 
(Just to note that one of the scientists who developed this study is 
called Shannon!)

What Mike is saying is that in the sun is a tremendous amount of order 
turning to chaos - this is basically what the burning fusion reaction in 
the sun is all about.  There is such an increase in disorder in the sun 
that this can easily account for any decrease in disorder upon the 
earth.  Indeed we see this all the time - for example plants use the 
energy of the sun to convert carbon dioxide to sugar, and surely sugar 
is more ordered/complicated than carbon dioxide.

(Actually what amazes me is that of all the energy produced by the sun, 
only the tiniest fraction gets used on earth.  Most of it gets sent into 
outer space, presumably to be seen as a point of light by some aliens 
somewhere.  The tiniest fraction that hits the earth is enough to drive 
enourmous "engines" - plants grow, coal and oil is produced, huge 
weather patterns including hurricanes push the oceans of the world 
around, water evaporates and then falls to the gound again as rain - yet 
if that enourmous amount of driving energy were to be given back to the 
sun it would not even notice.)

Incidently the famous atheist was mentioned on Jay Leno last night - he 
thinks that the reason he is changing his mind is because he is 81 years 
old.

-- 

Stephen Montgomery-Smith
EMAIL:PROTECTED
http://www.math.missouri.edu/~stephen
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