One of the cliches of applied physics theory is that you can’t fuck with entropy. Your harebrained new theory violates conservation of energy? Eh, why not? You just dreamed up a way to de-harmonize the deBroglie oscillation? Give it a try chili-girl, maybe you got something. But your theory violates the Third Law? Perish the thought, you’re all washed up, and that rot.
Entropy is what it is because we have never found an exception, we have never found a causality violation, we have never seen Nature do what Nature does in any way except as a glorious testament to the Laws of Thermodynamics.
But why?
“Why” is the kind of question that physicists don’t like to think about, it forces us to confront our own mortality. Yeah, artists and poets can handle that, but physicists … we all suffered through Jackson together, maybe we even suffered through Cohen-Tenoudji together. We have the keys to the l’automobile, why should we sit in the parking lot smoking spliffs if we can actually drive away?
We don’t think about why entropy increases because if we did, we would have to think about entropy decreasing. And entropy never decreases, right?
Unless it decreases.
Please don’t pillory me yet, just look at the expansion first. I’m going to avoid rational numbers and rational units here to avoid the temptation to do the math and take away the fun from Paul Muni. So say the Universe at this moment expands by an average of 100 knots per second. Okay, so as the universe expands, what is happening to the entropy of the universe? The particles become further apart, even the distance from the mass-defect radius to the nucleus, the decay to the Coulombic radius suffers, shit falls apart, electrons take off for parts unknown, they hang out with seedy neutrinos, they might even oscillate, the neutrons say “fuck you bitch” and leave the protons to manage their weak-force balance until they decay into a new isotope, bingo bango, Bob’s yer uncle, entropy in action. And it’s measurable.
So the expansion of the stuff of the universe itself increases its disorder as it increases the average number density in thea given volume. Things have gone to pieces, right George? (You never did a no-show when I needed your song, good buddy.)
https://youtu.be/4EBCE9OCyok
Volumetric expansion (hell, even fractal expansion between 2D and 3D) is an entropic increase, that defines the limit of the function for the work that we recover from the increased entropy. It’s like Mother Nature coyly hands us all the energy we could need by nudging down the ratio of h-bar omega (Feynman says “fuck the factor of two”) and all we have to do is take credit for sweeping it up.
But what happens when the dielectric constant between the vacuum of the Universe and the empty space that encompasses our delightful bubble of life start to equalize such that the Casimir force becomes repulsive rather than attractive? That’s likely the point that the universe says “nice eating bagels with you shmoes” and starts to collapse again, the long hard slog back to the point where the dielectric imbalance again demands an attractive Casimir force, it crunches as far as it cares and then it starts heading back to this shit again, the endless cycle of renewal and despair.
But what happens to those poor flasluguner shmucks who have to live with a collapsing universe? Because the entire universe has a decrease in entropy all the time. That seems wonderful to our monkey brain, all that delicious and delightful ORDER, but where is this endless well of work to decrease this entropy? Presumably from the fabric of the universe itself, as the mass-defect then starts to expand, and the fermions of destiny coalesce around the new mass defect, probably somewhere near European Opium (aka Europeum) or even Americium, or Amerigo Vespuccium as it will inevitably be known. So the ground-state changes, and it begins to gobble up all the available above-ground-state energy that it can, shuffleboarding it into the ground state, where the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle protects it from illegal energy poaching. (They warned us about renormalization, didn’t they?)
The idea of a universally-decreasing entropy is far more spooky than of universally-increasing entropy. At least on this journey, we don’t really know how long we have, until we actually calculate the dielectric balance of the vacuum of the universe versus the empty space around our bubble of enjoyment. But when it collapses, that’s convergence, and everything that rises much converge, said Flannery, so we look at that convergence point, and our face goes white, we see our destiny, it’s in in front of us, the end of the ride.
How many people have had to face that? Never knowing if the universe would find a way to spontaneously recombust another Tupac? Somehow find a way to grant humanity the ability to make a good batch of ceviche? Miserable. I hope those folks had the good drugs, they deserved them. And it may not have even squished everything to a point … the Big Bang only needs the delectric balance to come within the Kelvin barrier of the component average in the vacuum. (I guess Kelvin barrier wouldn’t be the right word, since it’s vacuum, but say a vacuum barrier) which then varied the dielectric balance between the vacuum and the empty space that surrounds our bubble, then engorged with the luxury of volume, the entropy of empty space, increasing and sucking up the work function of the vacuum. Like a snack gorging on its tail … so are the Days of Our Lives.