Claim CF001.2: Response #2

I have expanded the newsgroup lines to include some
relevant newsgroups.

"Grinder" wrote in
:

From the index:

Claim CF001.2:
http://home.earthlink.net/~misaak/guide/CF/CF001_2.html

The entire universe is a closed system, so the second law
of thermodynamics dictates that within it, things are
tending
to break down. The second law applies universally.

Response 2. The entire universe, because it is expanding,
is not a closed system.

Is this a matter of convention? If not, how is it known?


Physicist Victor J. Stenger wrote in _The Unconscious Quantum_
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1995) on p. 228:

At the Planck time, the universe was a speher with a radius equal to
the Planck length. Since the universe was a black hole at that time,
its entropy was as large as it possibly could be. Now, the second
law says that the entropy of a closed system cannot decrease with
time. Such a system would not spontaneously become more orderly;
ordering energy must be supplied from the outside. Thus it would
seem that, barring any outside help, order cannot occure in the
universe beyond the Planck time.

A closed system of constant volume, as the universe was assumed to be
in nineteenth-century cosmology, has a fixed maximum entropy. On the
other hand, a closed system of increasing volume, like the
now-established expanding universe, will have an increasing maximum
entropy. Thus as the universe expands beyond the Planck time the
maximum possible entropy grows faster than its actual entropy,
leaving ever-increasing room for order to form.




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"Harlequin" wrote in message
. 6...
snip

Physicist Victor J. Stenger wrote in _The Unconscious Quantum_
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1995) on p. 228:

At the Planck time, the universe was a speher with a radius equal to
the Planck length. Since the universe was a black hole at that time,
its entropy was as large as it possibly could be.

According to all the calculations I have seen, the entropy oif a single
particle is zero. Of course, in a one-particle universe, that is also the
maximum.


Tom Davidson
Richmond, VA