Universe Has 100x More Entropy Than We Thought 304
eldavojohn writes "Previous estimates are now thought to skimp on the entropy of the observable universe. The researchers contend that super-massive black holes are the largest contributor of entropy. Since they contribute two orders of magnitude more than previously thought, the total of all the observable universe is correspondingly higher. The paper highlights (in gruesome detail) new issues that arise with these new calculations — like estimating us a little bit closer to heat death (moving entropy totals from 10^102 to 10^104 out of a maximum of 10^122)."
Excellent! (Score:4, Funny)
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Construction of the cannon ain't helping the situation any!
Re:Excellent! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Excellent! (Score:5, Funny)
Heat Death (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a link [wikipedia.org] for anyone curious about the Heat Death of the Universe concept
Re:Heat Death (Score:5, Interesting)
It's interesting to note that even with the new estimate being 100X greater than the old, the new data is still only a billionth of a billionth of the maximum value. What, if anything, does that mean for the past and future of the universe? Reminds me of the Stephen Baxter book Manifold: Time, where the age of stars and galaxies is thought of in the same way we think of the instant right after the big bang.
Re:Heat Death (Score:5, Insightful)
Coincidentally, the Ask Slashdot regarding SciFi works for students lead me to Isaac Asimov's cool short story "The Last Question" (http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html [multivax.com] which has an interesting perspective on this...
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Re:Heat Death (Score:5, Funny)
>>>What, if anything, does that mean for the past and future of the universe?
There was a Doctor Who TNG episode about this. The universe at the point of heat death was a sad and depressing place to be... very very dark To paraphrase Marvin the Depressed Robot - Might as well slit my wrist now, since it will all end in tears anyhow.
Now the world has gone to bed
Darkness won't engulf my head
I can see by infra-red
How I hate the night
Re:Heat Death (Score:4, Funny)
If you have an alternate way of referring to the original Doctor Who and the new Doctor Who show, I'm open to suggestions.
Doctor Two?
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Heat Death is the "Big Freeze", although I suppose you could view it as the universe burning out. Personally, I'm not too worried. IMO, anyone concerned that any life will be around to worry about the universe fizzling out is way too optimistic.
It's not that it's not interesting and "The Last Question" (linked above) is a neat fatalistic take on surviving to that point, but face it. We'll all be screwed long before it's an issue - All the way down to the hardiest little bacteria.
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They are related but not the same, they are describing different facets of the same issue. "Heat Death" refers to the ultimate state of entropy - that all the energy in the universe had moved from a high concentration to a low concentration, which results in a perfect equilibrium.
"Cold Death" happens long before heat death, it referse to the point when the expansion of the universe spreads the stars so far apart that new stars can not be re-formed from the gasses of dead stars/systems. Once all stars have
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Not to be a smart ass and shit, but the "mind" you describe, sounds like a "book", or a symphony. We already have "minds" that survives. If there's no input or output, nobody can hear the tree falls. And hence whether it is objectively alive (or conscious) isn't meaningful.
The problem I see is, when the sun explodes, when all suns explodes, your book won't be there. Not going in the multiverse thing at all here.
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You don't understand the meaning of heat death. It isn't a "burn" but a very, very low energy state of about 0.5 degrees above absolute freezing. It's the point where all energy has been consumed, even gravity, such that all stars/planets have broken-apart, and all that remains is scattered atoms just randomly vibrating..... like a watch slowly winding down until it stops.
Did I cheer you up?
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You're right about it not being a burn. However, one can have a _tremendous_ amount of energy around for a heat death. It's the entropy which matters, though, as for the energy to _do_ anything, there has to be an energy density difference from place-to-place, and time-to-time. No gradient, no energy flow. It's the equivalent of a glowing hot ceramics furnace: it's amazingly energetic, but the fact that it's uniformly energetic means that you can't tell what bit is furnace wall, and what bit is pottery.
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Fully understanding this concept led me to drink heavily in college and drop chemistry as a major. Seriously.
MC Hawking on Entropy (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.mchawking.com/includes/lyrics/entropy_lyrics.php [mchawking.com]
Re:MC Hawking on Entropy (Score:5, Funny)
The researchers contend that super-massive black holes are the largest contributor of entropy.
I have also heard that "glaciers melting in the dead of night" contribute to entropy quite a bit.
Fourth Law (Score:5, Funny)
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Fourth Law of Thermdynamics [wikipedia.org]: There's always more entropy then you think there is, even when you take into account the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics.
I still wouldn't worry about the heat death of the universe [wikia.com], though, unlike those in the aforementioned link.
Re:Fourth Law (Score:5, Funny)
Fourth Law of Thermdynamics [wikipedia.org]: There's always more entropy then you think there is, even when you take into account the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics.
I still wouldn't worry about the heat death of the universe [wikia.com], though, unlike those in the aforementioned link.
You forgot to recursively account for the fourth law, you fool! The death of the universe will now be exponentially sooner every moment that passes!
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I always found the last phrase of Hofstadter's law to be an unnesecary crutch for the logically impaired. Plus it removes most of its punch. I didn't feel like making the same mistake myself.
Having spent better part of the last decade engaged in a sysephian struggle to clean a house inhabited by three children and two working adults, you might notice that I've given this issue a lot of thought already.
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Just because there are four of something does not necessitate that one of them is the fourth.
There are four laws of Thermodynamics. One of them is the 0th.
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Good one T.E.D. I'll remember that one and use it some day.
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Actually, proposing Fourth Laws is sort of a minor industry. There are tons of them out there. This one is just mine.
My problem with the one you list is that it presupposses that the Laws are all about heat. (Thermodynamics, right?) However, to me they have always been all about entropy. So for my money, any real Fourth Law would have to say something new about entropy.
gosh (Score:3, Funny)
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Things are just falling apart all over!
On the contrary; things are falling together.
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Things are just falling apart all over!
On the contrary; things are falling together.
Oooohh!!!! Burn!!!
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"Free Countries"... ha! That's a good one.
As if a *country* could make you *free*
discovery (Score:5, Funny)
Universe Has 100x More Entropy Than We Thought
Scientists must have discovered my daughters room.
Re:discovery (Score:5, Funny)
Universe Has 100x More Entropy Than We Thought
Scientists must have discovered my daughters room.
No, but the football team sure has!
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She's eight, you insensitive clod!
David Letterman Joke (Score:2)
That was a David Letterman style joke apparently!
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It could be the Pee-Wee football team.
Re:discovery (Score:4, Insightful)
Football plays and players clearly show that simple bodies can form spontaneous order. This result was found to be in direct opposition to the prevailing dogma of the second law of teenodynamics; That the disorder of a teenagers life, property, and living space will always increase over time. This breakthrough is thought to have bearing on the great problem of "Teenage dysfunction death" which asks why when teenagers continuously degenerate over the course of their teen years, so they eventually mature into productive and stable adults.
Scientists urge caution in relation to these findings. "Current teenage theory leaves many questions unanswered", said Professor Alex Tweed of the national institute for Juvenile Entropy studies, "However, one result does not explain all the data on its own. For example, we know that there are quite a few adults who never become stable or mature. For example, many can be found making tasteless jokes about peoples' daughters on web forums, and other can be found modding up those same comments. This field will require more research before a definitive understanding of human maturity is achieved."
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because she's constantly getting sacked
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Was it attacked by a blender?
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Score:2, Funny)
So, it looks like we are closer to the novel than previously thought? And rather than witnessing the "end of the univers" (with dinner and wine) we are observing the cleaning crew (black holes) picking up the ... er ... mess?
we're doomed anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
Neutron decay isn't an entropy source (Score:2)
OMG, We're all gonna die!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
What's the big deal? (Score:2)
FTA: A black hole is the entropy champ because there are myriad ways for all the material that has fallen into it to be arranged microscopically while the black hole retains the same numerical values for its observable properties -- charge, mass and spin.
So a black hole's entropy = "we don't know by looking what's inside"? How exactly does that contribute to the heat death of the universe? If there was a million times more entropy in black holes, how would it effect existance outside of black holes? Is t
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Yeah, should've used "affect" instead of "effect" (preempting grammar nazis).
Sure there are other grammar errors tho.
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Should have used a car analogy.
It doesn't matter how much dirt is in the gas in the can in the back of the car if the gas in the car's tank is pure. Siphoning the car's gas into the gas can isn't going to make the car die, either.
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm afraid the BAC analogy really isn't appilcable. You're describing an impurity which builds up to a critical level to "kill" the host, and pointing out that if you could sequester the impurity the sequestered quantity wouldn't matter. Entropy is not an impurity that is slowly building up to eventually cause the universe to break; it's nothing like that at all.
I find it conceptually confusing to think about entropy as a finite/positive quantity. The way it's defined mathematically, of course, it is ... but at a physical level there's just something backwards about it.
Entropy describes the degree to which energy in a system isn't usable. If you consider as a closed system a bit of ice in a glass of hot water: the heat in the water is "useful" in this system. It will melt the ice, and then equalize the temperature of the water from the melted ice to that of the rest of the water. (That may not seem "useful"; I suppose the point is other processes could capture and use the energy for other ends.)
But, as the ice melts and the water temperature equalizes (or as any other process fuels itself by accelerating this process), you don't run out of energy (which is constant) - but you do run out of "usability" of energy. When your system contains only water at a fixed temperature, there is no way to make heat flow, and all of teh energy in the system is useless. (Again, this assumesa closed system.)
So the point with black holes is, they aren't sequestering entropy to keep it from harming the universe in some way (like your BAC example); if anything they sequester energy and keep it from interacting with the rest of the universe, rendering it useless. (Not sure how Hawking radiation fits in that analysis, though.)
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So the point with black holes is, they aren't sequestering entropy to keep it from harming the universe in some way (like your BAC example); if anything they sequester energy and keep it from interacting with the rest of the universe, rendering it useless.
If that's all it is, than basically what this article is saying is that "black holes account for 100 times more of the total mass of our universe than we thought", instead of "a black hole of a given mass has 100 times more entropy than we thought"? I can
Dark Energy (Score:4, Insightful)
With the "news" (circa 1998) that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing, it seems to me that worries about the heat death of the universe should be put on hold. There's something (currently labeled "dark energy") about cosmology that we simply lack sufficient understanding of.
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With the "news" (circa 1998) that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing, it seems to me that worries about the heat death of the universe should be put on hold. There's something (currently labeled "dark energy") about cosmology that we simply lack sufficient understanding of.
Yes, the president should select the "Astrophysics Center" and move the "heat death" slider to 0 and the "dark energy" slider to 100. We must find the chosen one to combat this "dark energy" threat!
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the president should select the "Astrophysics Center" and move the "heat death" slider to 0 and the "dark energy" slider to 100.
I've seen this in the Oval office, it's actually just an Etch-a-Sketch.
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Is this really a problem? (Score:4, Interesting)
Units? We don't need no stinkin' units! (Score:3, Interesting)
TFS fails to use them, so I must ask,
What are the units of entropy? Can they be useful at a macroscopic level... like in describing how much entropy your bedroom contains (before it simply must be cleaned)?
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Where the universe is expanding? Into another universe? Into emptiness? Into nothing? Is there any rational explanation? Or is it unknown yet?
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COLD DEATH? No such thing.
No sir. "Cold" is a human construct. There is only heat, and absence of heat. That is why they call it "heat death" since the universe's heat (or to be more scientific, ENERGY) eventually reduces to 0, thereby causing the universe to "die."
Entropy source (Score:3, Funny)
So if I connected my server's entropy generator to a black hole I'd never have to type a page full of gibberish to generate my SSH key pair again!
What? (Score:2)
So does this mean that the time it takes to evenly spread the matter / light which is not swallowed by the black holes is shorter than we thought previously?
I read through all the articles now, and I still don't have a clue.
What than, will the big black holes (without mass surrounding them) merge to a new gigantic super massive singularity effectively reseting the universe and causing the next big bang, and the next round?
I'm so confused..
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I think it means you still shouldn't cross the streams.
fuck (Score:2)
I did not know that 9 chevrons dialing need that m (Score:2)
I did not know that 9 chevrons dialing need that much power.
Messier (Score:3, Funny)
I propose a three level scale: Messy, Messier [wikipedia.org], and Messiest objects.
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Information doesn't come out
But V'Ger does....
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urand()
Blackholes don't block.
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Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ? (Score:5, Informative)
"Order" and "disorder" are human perceptions, not states of matter and energy. Sometimes we perceive more order when there are clear differences in energy states, sometimes we perceive less
To you, which is more ordered: a bowl of cherries next to a glass of water, or a completely smooth blend of all of them? The latter is more entropic. In the case of the room, replace the garbage bin with an incinerator, and the "empty" room (plus the stuff that used to be in it) is now in a more entropic state. The fact that you personally find it tidier isn't relevant. Assuming that you might have actually needed some of the stuff that we just burned, too, you might find it a rather poor solution to the problem of a messy room.
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it would be more apt to say that a black hole sucking stuff in is more akin to taking everything in a very messy room and giving it all to the "Will it Blend?" guy, having him whip up a "messy room" shake and compacting that into a very tiny ball.
while your room is indeed clean, everything that was in your room is now in a small ball of disorganized matter where as it used to form nice neat polymer chains and crystalline structures and other such organized molecular structures. now its all just a large amou
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The flaw is that entropy is not exactly synonymous with disorder. Sometimes it is, if a disordered state has a lower energy potential than a higher ordered states. But in many cases, such as falling to the bottom of a gravity well, the "ordered" - actually just more compact - state is the lower energy state. Entropy is just the degree to which a system has moved from a higher energy potential to a lower energy potential. If we had more potential energy after falling into a gravity well than before it, t
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Actually like the parent I am a bit confused, too. I roughly associate entropy with disorder. So I'd expect that black holes destroy entropy. They suck stuff in and destroy it totally or at least homogenize it totally -> less disorder. Like you have a very messy room. When you take out everything and throw it in a garbage bin, the room is empty and clean -> less entropy.
Question is, where is the flaw in this view?
IANAP(hysicist), but here's my thought:
The problem with this view is twofold, one is that of using "is a similar concept to" as if it were a mathematical "=". Entropy is similar to disorder and one type of disorder might be a messy room. This does not mean that a messy room has a higher entropy than a clean room.
The second is thinking that homogeny is the opposite of entropy, when, in fact, it is the ultimate form of entropy. If every single atom in the universe were the same (and stable, such as a Noble
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Re:Black holes contribute to entropy ? (Score:5, Informative)
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Could this Hawking Radiation be harnessed? That is, can it be considered as free energy as opposed to entropy?
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Three very separate questions
Could this Hawking Radiation be harnessed?
Sure, although there are some minor engineering challenges.
That is, can it be considered as free energy
Not "free energy" because you're converting mass into energy.
as opposed to entropy?
On an entire system wide basis, entropy times temperature equals energy, so "as opposed to" is a weird phrase to use. Lots of energy emitted, at a low enough temperature, means the entropy must be high.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy [wikipedia.org]
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Maybe it is an increase in entropy. But it is not a clear increase. The matter is homogenized. Isn't this a loss of entropy? Suppose you have a bag which is filled with a mixture of salt and sugar -> high entropy. Now you turn magically the sugar and the salt into a diamond. One type of matter, highly ordered -> less entropy. Isn't this the same a black hole does? You give in
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I want something that does the opposite. When I push a button. Without the billions of years it normally takes.
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Everything that comes into a black hole comes back out eventually via Hawking Radiation. It goes in as a star or a chicken or a pistachio and comes out as random energy, which is a pretty clear increase in entropy.
Exactly. Another way to think about it is this: the speed of light is the maximum speed information can travel. Since the escape velocity of a black hole is greater than the speed of light, information cannot escape either.
Because information cannot escape, it means you cannot infer what went into a black hole by looking at what comes out. (Note: information being "destroyed" in a black hole doesn't prevent you from e.g. keeping a record of what you tossed into a black hole. Once it goes inside, it won'
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Actually, the Hawking radiation doesn't come from inside the black hole.
When a particle/anti-particle pair tunnels into existence at the edge of a black hole, for some reason, the anti-particle tunnels into existence inside the black hole and is immediately annihilated by an already existing particle in the black hole (thus reducing the mass of the black hole by one particle's worth). The particle that tunneled into existence outside the black hole spins off and is referred to as "Hawking Radiation".
The wik
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Black holes have mass too, but that doesn't mean that mass comes out of them. It is a characteristic of the hole not something the hole emits.
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Everything that does anything also contributes to entropy. That's one of the more depressing facets of the Laws of Thermodynamics.
I had a(n awesome) physics professor who used to paraphrase the Laws of Thermodynamics as:
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The Earth is not an isolated system.
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No, "you can't win" is the first law of thermodynamics. The second law is: you can't break even. The third law is: you can't quit the game.
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I believe firmly in evolution and the Big Bang and all that, but in order for the universe to have been created at some point, it's first generally necessary to prove that it has a finite age. The Sec
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If the current age of the universe is finite, then it must have come into being - been created - at some point. There's no real answer to how that might have happened within the real of science. Oh, you can say there's some multiverse which creates universes such as ours, but that just shifts the question: how was the multiverse created?
My personal creation belief is that our universe is itself a supermassive black hole in some much larger universe, and in that universe the riddle of creation has some obv
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No. Even with a finite age, there's absolutely no need for a beginning. Just like the positive reals have no first element (for each positive real, there's a smaller positive real; note that 0 is not a positive real), there need not be an earliest point in time.
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Atheist movement? ROFL.
FAIL.
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Re:You down with entropy? (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, Vogons posting on slashdot!
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Re:Any astrophysics geeks out there (Score:5, Funny)
being haughty to AC is like shouting at a tree because a squirrel annoyed you.
Re:Any astrophysics geeks out there (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'm no scientist, but this doesn't seem to bode well for the theory of evolution.
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but there's a big energy source pumping low entropy energy into the earth. Its called the sun.
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As black holes evaporate due to Hawking radiation, does that mean that they defeat the laws of thermodynamics in some way?
No.
Next question. Would quantum mechanics offer any explanation as to why we are less close to heat death than we think we should be?
Um, your question has too many false premises behind it to have a direct answer. We're closer to heat death than we thought we were. If there are people who think we are either closer or further away than we "should be", well, quantum mechanics might offer an explanation, or might not, depending on why the subject in question thinks things aren't the way they should be. You'd have to be more specific.
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Stephen King already wrote a novella [wikipedia.org] about obsessive compulsive disorder saving the world. According to the wiki entry they made an animation of it in 25 segments, each running a minute and a half long.
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