The Second Law of Thermodynamics, Entropy

[stardustpilgrim]

James Clerk Maxwell accidentally stumbled upon the greatest mystery in physics. His thought experiment came to be called Maxwell's Demon. Engineers were trying to get the most efficiency out of steam engines. You burned wood or coal to heat water to make steam to drive a piston in a steam engine. You need heat, but you also need a heat sink. This is a differential between hot and cold. With this differential, work can be done. Steam pushes the piston up, the heat sink pulls it down, repeat. Without this differential no work can be done. The up and down motion is turned to rotary motion, and the industrial revolution happens.
Physicists and engineers knew that, if left alone any temperature differential would eventually come to equilibrium (that's what entropy is. In a closed system, entropy always increases. The full understanding of entropy is complicated, but basically, entropy is a measurement of order, how things are ordered, how things can be ordered. Take a new deck of cards. It is ordered by suits in order, 2-3...10, Jack, Queen, King, Ace. A new deck of cards has the lowest entropy it will ever have. Once you shuffle the cards, they are then in a higher state of entropy. Another thing, entropy is a measurement of the ability to do work. When a system is at equilibrium, it can no longer do work). So Clerk Maxwell knew if you have two chambers connected, one side hot, one side cold, they would eventually equalize. Hot will always get cold, the reverse never happens, cold never gets hot, if the system is left to itself. But Clerk Maxwell said, what if? What if I put a frictionless door between the two chambers? (frictionless so it takes no energy to open and close it). And I put this little observer at the door, and when he sees a molecule at the door moving faster, he opens the door and lets it go from the cold side to the hot side. He never opens the door when a hot-side molecule arrives at the door, so as not to let it go to the cold side. This scenario defeats the law of entropy, and when you have a hot side, you use it to do work. When you reach equilibrium, you start the process over again.
Nobody could show why this wouldn't work, theoretically. What had Clerk Maxwell accidentally done? He showed the relationship between thermodynamic entropy and information entropy, the latter didn't even exist as a concept until Claude Shannon in the early 1950s. His equation looked very like the equation for thermodynamic entropy. He didn't know what to call his new concept. John von Neumann, just about the smartest guy around, told him to call it information entropy, to keep everybody guessing. So he did. Now, just an aside, information entropy has nothing to do with meaning, it has to do with the least amount of coding (data) needed to transfer information, without error. Shannon worked for Bell Labs, yes, the Bell telephone people. Another aside. With the old hard lines, you needed two wires for each individual phone number. Riding down the road, look up, that bottom huge black cable (or lead), about 1 & 1/2 inches in diameter, are those masses of individual pairs of phone wires. Today, with fiber optics, using light as the medium, thousands of IP numbers can be utilized instead of two individual wires needed for each number.
So what was Clerk Maxwell missing? Why did his Demon seem to work, but not in actuality? Information. The missing key, was information. The missing energy not accounted for was the energy it took for the Demon to observe the passing molecules.

Life, is the universe reversing entropy. Bucky Fuller invented the work negentropy, life makes neg(ative) entropy.

So what is this all about? The universe is structured on the principle of polarity, essentially hot and cold. "Hot" and "cold" are the two basic polarities that makes the universe work. Without this differential, nothing would happen, nothing. When everything comes to equilibrium, nothing happens. Eventually, as physics stands now, the universe will come to equilibrium, and we will have the cold death of the universe.

Same here, when everyone agrees, nothing happens, no posting happens. But it's my view that the purpose of the whole universe, is to make life in order to reverse entropy. The unmanifest, Consciousness, (which is not directly subject to entropy) formed the manifest universe, to reverse entropy. We live in a flat universe, that is, a universe with virtually no curvature. That is, a universe formed to be virtually balanced between open and closed. So, basically, the universe is a fight between life (a closed universe) and (a cold) death (an open universe). Consciousness making consciousness, actualizing the middle. (The Law of Three: the higher, Consciousness, The Absolute, the unmanifest, blends with the lower (dirt, "Mother Nature"), to actualize the middle. To actualize means only the possibility, no guarantee. To actualize means it doesn't now exist. (Like an oak tree exits only as potential, in an acorn). The middle would be you and me, as potential, only potential. Today most physicists recognize that information is as fundamental as matter and energy. Nothing exists, for any one individual (body), without its ability to perceive, it. The human mind-body is formed with tremendous potential, but some potential requires a process, to actualize, it.

[lolly]

I had an idea about information (which is usually opposed entities like 1 and 0 forming a bit), but I thought there could be nondescript entities A and B where the relation is not if A; then not B (if on, then not off), but rather, A is to B as B is to A.

In this way A and B are not individually defined as off or on, or 1 and 0, or opposed states in general, but exist only through their relationship to each other. Hence, we still have a 'bit' of information, so to speak, but with entities that, instead of being polar opposites, have the strangest property of being the same to the precise degree that they are different. 

In this case we don't know if A or B is off or on. We only know what A is by the state of B and vice versa, but we cannot know either state in isolation, and with the entities being undefinable, the information is thought of as a dimension between them. We know A's relationship to B is one dimensional (A is to B as B is to A), and as such, it is the minimal quanta or simplest possible bit of information. As such, information is discrete, and we know its primary property, even though we have not, and cannot, define 'what' A and B are.

I don't know if it's a good idea for a 'bit' or something completely useless, but I find it interesting.

[lolly]

To add: The reason we cannot define the entities is a tautology were A is measured against B while B is measured against A.

[stardustpilgrim]

Oct 25, 2024 20:22:32 GMT -5 lolly said:

I had an idea about information (which is usually opposed entities like 1 and 0 forming a bit), but I thought there could be nondescript entities A and B where the relation is not if A; then not B (if on, then not off), but rather, A is to B as B is to A.

In this way A and B are not individually defined as off or on, or 1 and 0, or opposed states in general, but exist only through their relationship to each other. Hence, we still have a 'bit' of information, so to speak, but with entities that, instead of being polar opposites, have the strangest property of being the same to the precise degree that they are different. 

In this case we don't know if A or B is off or on. We only know what A is by the state of B and vice versa, but we cannot know either state in isolation, and with the entities being undefinable, the information is thought of as a dimension between them. We know A's relationship to B is one dimensional (A is to B as B is to A), and as such, it is the minimal quanta or simplest possible bit of information. As such, information is discrete, and we know its primary property, even though we have not, and cannot, define 'what' A and B are.

I don't know if it's a good idea for a 'bit' or something completely useless, but I find it interesting.

I don't follow exactly, but this is very like quantum computing. The concept was invented by Richard Feynmann. Quantum bits, Qubits, are in a superposition of both 1 and 0. This vastly increases the computing power, multiple scenarios/possibilities are played out, computed, simultaneously, very quickly. But during the computation you have to keep the Qubits from touching anything (classical), as if they touch anything classical, decoherence takes place, you lose the superposition of 1 and 0. This is not so easy to do.

If you don't know how quantum computing works, you may have just reinvented quantum computing.

A simple explanation of quantum computing. This is a very good, succinct explanation, about 6 minutes.

[lolly]

Oct 25, 2024 21:36:40 GMT -5 stardustpilgrim said:

Oct 25, 2024 20:22:32 GMT -5 lolly said:

I had an idea about information (which is usually opposed entities like 1 and 0 forming a bit), but I thought there could be nondescript entities A and B where the relation is not if A; then not B (if on, then not off), but rather, A is to B as B is to A.

In this way A and B are not individually defined as off or on, or 1 and 0, or opposed states in general, but exist only through their relationship to each other. Hence, we still have a 'bit' of information, so to speak, but with entities that, instead of being polar opposites, have the strangest property of being the same to the precise degree that they are different. 

In this case we don't know if A or B is off or on. We only know what A is by the state of B and vice versa, but we cannot know either state in isolation, and with the entities being undefinable, the information is thought of as a dimension between them. We know A's relationship to B is one dimensional (A is to B as B is to A), and as such, it is the minimal quanta or simplest possible bit of information. As such, information is discrete, and we know its primary property, even though we have not, and cannot, define 'what' A and B are.

I don't know if it's a good idea for a 'bit' or something completely useless, but I find it interesting.

I don't follow exactly, but this is very like quantum computing. The concept was invented by Richard Feynmann. Quantum bits, Qubits, are in a superposition of both 1 and 0. This vastly increases the computing power, multiple scenarios/possibilities are played out, computed, simultaneously, very quickly. But during the computation you have to keep the Qubits from touching anything (classical), as if they touch anything classical, decoherence takes place, you lose the superposition of 1 and 0. This is not so easy to do.

If you don't know how quantum computing works, you may have just reinvented quantum computing.

A simple explanation of quantum computing. This is a very good, succinct explanation, about 6 minutes.

The main difference as I see it is, in QM you can elicit a state by measuring it with an external device, but in my example you can only measure using A against B and vice versa, but since what A is depends on what B is and vice versa, you can't get a 'reading'. I'm then thinking, since there is information, but we don't know what A or B are (be that on/off, up/down, 0/1), the bit isn't gleaned by comparing A to B as such, but by knowing there is the singular relationship between A and B. In other words, in a classical bit we can say 2 things about A and B respectively, whereas in my thought experiment, you can only say one thing about the 'system', aka A is to B as B is to A.

I'd say it's 'one dimensional', not in the sense of a length or another unit (which would make the system dependent on the speed of an observer), but in the sense that the relationship between them is unitary and the same, regardless of frame of reference.

It's probably a useless bit of waffle, but my nerd-side thinks it's cool.