Good piece

Posted Dec 4, 2012 22:31 UTC (Tue) by chithanh (guest, #52801)
In reply to: Good piece by man_ls
Parent article: LCE: Don't play dice with random numbers

> You are aware that Laplace's demon (as Maxwell's) is nothing short of God-like in nature. And that its very nature was refuted (as seen in Wikipedia) by the second law of Thermodynamics:

And the second law of thermodynamics has been refuted by Poincaré recurrence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincaré_recurrence_theorem

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Good piece

Posted Dec 5, 2012 8:35 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (2 responses)

Hardly a rebuttal since this theorem and the second law operate on different time scales. Boltzmann had a similar argument for the whole universe; it only made the second law stronger.

Whenever something contradicts the second law, that something loses. But if you feel better with a recurrence every 10^10^100... seconds or so, then so be it.

Good piece

Posted Dec 5, 2012 21:25 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

> recurrence every 10^10^100

And don't fret, those 10's are rounded up from e, so it's not as long as it might seem (though I think you're missing few stacks and should be 10^10^10^10^10^1.1).

Good piece

Posted Dec 5, 2012 21:38 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

You are right, I added the ellipsis on a Googolplex because I could not find any good estimate at the moment. Now I have: in the Wikipedia no less, and it is as you say. Saying it is bigger than the age of the universe is a bit of an understatement. So don't hold your breath for a recurrence.

Besides, it would only happen if our universe is an energy-conserving system; probably just changing size would break the recurrence.

Finally, even if a recurrence was possible in an expanding universe, it would just leave us at the starting point; not just diminish the entropy.