Chapter 329 The Mystery of Cosmic Suicide

From the perspective of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics can be described as follows: in an irreversible thermodynamic process, the incremental increase in entropy is always greater than zero.

So... the question is, what exactly is entropy?

In a statistical sense, entropy measures the disorder of a system, that is, the more disordered the system, the greater its entropy value.

In short, heat flows from hot places to cold places, and after enough time, all the heat will be averaged out. These are all obvious characteristics, and there is nothing mysterious about them: boiling water becomes cold, and ice cubes melt. To reverse these processes, you have to consume extra energy.

But such a simple law is so annoying that it makes people despair of the world.

Scientists would rather not discover it, and some people even commit suicide because of it.

In the broadest sense, the second law of thermodynamics states that the "entropy" of the universe is increasing day by day.

For example, the spring of a mechanical watch is always getting looser; you can tighten it, but this requires a little energy. This energy comes from the piece of bread you eat, and the wheat used to make bread needs to absorb energy from sunlight during its growth;

In order to provide this energy, the sun needs to consume its hydrogen for nuclear reactions.

In short, the decrease of entropy in each part of the universe must be at the expense of the increase of entropy in other places.

"In a closed system, entropy always increases until it cannot be larger. At this time, the system reaches a completely uniform state of thermal equilibrium, and no changes will occur unless the outside world provides new energy to the system."

But for the universe, there is no "outside world". Therefore, once the universe reaches a state of thermal equilibrium, it will die completely. This final result is referred to as "heat death".

By then, stars will go out, black holes will die, and all atoms will be almost evenly distributed in the universe, and the temperature of all spaces will be the same.

In the era of heat death, quantum events at a tiny scale will become the ultimate dominant force.

"Heat death" is a major conjecture of mankind about the end of the universe.

It will take at least 10^1000 years for the entire universe to reach heat death. For humans, this end is still too far away.

So, let's go back to a smaller perspective to describe the "entropy increase theory".

If no one cleans a house, it will inevitably be covered with dust over time. At this time, we can think that the disorder of the room has increased, which means that the entropy of the entire room has increased spontaneously.

If someone enters the room to clean it, and the room becomes clean, does the entropy of the room decrease?

Yes, the local entropy decreases, but the entropy of "people + room" does not decrease.

People consume physical energy in the process of cleaning, which leads to a decrease in the entropy of the isolated system "room". Since the energy conversion process will inevitably produce heat energy that cannot do work, this increase is greater than the decrease in disorder brought about by "the room is cleaned up".

From a general point of view, the entropy value of the "people + room" system has increased.

Scientists are very dissatisfied with this entropy increase conclusion, which means that the disorder of the world has been increasing and the future is not good.

In order to find a more powerful counterexample, people try to create perpetual motion machines or other ways to avoid entropy increase.

In 1871, British physicist Maxwell envisioned such an experiment: there is a box divided into two by a board, and there is a trap on the board, which is guarded by an elf captured from Mount Hyjal to do hard labor.

The elf can measure the speed of gas molecules. For molecules coming from the right, if the speed is fast, he will open the door to let them pass, and if the speed is slow, he will close the door to prevent them from passing.

For molecules coming from the left, the slow ones will be allowed to pass, and the fast ones will not be allowed to pass.

After a period of time, the molecules on the left side of the box will be very fast, and those on the right will be very slow.

This means that the disorder of the box has decreased and the entropy has decreased.

The clever Maxwell also assumed that the valve has neither mass nor friction, so the elf did not do any work in this process. Doesn't this violate the second law of thermodynamics?

It was not until 60 years later that this problem was successfully solved.

Hungarian physicist Szilard proposed that it was the "intelligence" of the elf that did the work.

He believed that the observation process of obtaining information (the elf judges the speed of molecules) requires energy, which will inevitably cause an increase in entropy, and its amount is not less than the entropy that decreases due to the order of molecules.

In this way, the entire system consisting of the box, molecules and elves still obeys the second law of thermodynamics.

Looking back now, it is logical that extra work is needed to obtain information. However, at the end of the 19th century, even a wise man like Maxwell did not see the impact of the elf's "observation ability" on the box-molecule-elf system.

It was not until the 20th century that physicists realized the important role of "observer" in quantum mechanics, and the relationship between information and physics was understood.

Then someone will ask: Since all processes in nature eventually tend to disorder, why is there such a highly ordered existence as life?

In thinking about this philosophical question, Schrödinger proposed in his book "What is Life" written in the 1940s that life extracts "order" from the environment to maintain its own "order".

Eating and drinking is the process of taking in "order". The order of food is reduced after digestion, and finally the "disorder" is discharged back to the environment in the form of defecation.

In addition, organisms will release the excess entropy generated in physiological processes into the environment by emitting heat. The higher body temperature of warm-blooded animals is conducive to more efficient removal of entropy, thus producing more intense life processes)

In general, the entropy emitted is greater than the negative entropy taken in, so the entropy increase principle is satisfied.

In this sense, the emergence of life, especially intelligent life, has accelerated the uniform distribution of energy and greatly promoted the process of disorder in the universe!

"We speculate that the universe dislikes the entire process of heat death is too slow, so it created life, is it so?"

For example, the act of burning coal, oil, and natural gas releases the energy originally stored in fossil fuels, allowing it to be distributed to the environment faster in the form of radiation, heat transfer, etc., and the use of nuclear energy even enables life to release the energy inside atoms.

If the entropy increase process is likened to demolition, then intelligent creatures are like the city management hired by the universe.

The higher the level of civilization, the more it can help the universe return to heat death.

In this way, does the purpose of the universe look like a carefully planned and magnificent suicide?

But why does the universe commit suicide? Why does it want to return to heat death?

Why does entropy increase spontaneously instead of decreasing spontaneously?

Why do we need to set such a rule?

Unfortunately, this is a philosophical question at the cosmic level, and we don't know the answer.

The above part is the [Thermodynamics Theory of Entropy Increase].

We can extend the concept of "entropy" to other aspects and find that it is everywhere.

For example, a drop of ink will slowly spread until the ink is evenly distributed due to the thermal motion between molecules in a glass of water. The ink becomes disordered from order, and it becomes extremely difficult to restore its original appearance.

This is a process of entropy increase.

A pile of sand, which takes a lot of effort to pile into a cone, will slowly collapse... This is also a process of entropy increase.

The universe is decaying, and everything in the human world is also decaying.

Life, this highly ordered existence, is a low-entropy body. But life is not eternal, and individual life will also get sick and age.

From the moment a person is born, his entropy is constantly changing until the moment of death, which means that his individual entropy increases to the maximum value.

This entropy can be vaguely quantified and is specific. We can simply replace it with [physical health indicators], [life expectancy], etc.

If a reasonable lifestyle or certain technologies are equivalent to absorbing negative entropy flow into the living body, its entropy increase will become slower, or even decrease.

But in general, measuring the entropy of an individual is still a process of slow increase until the individual dies.

Then, let's talk about civilization.

Nothing in the universe is eternal. We assume that civilization also has its own [entropy value], but the entropy of civilization is more abstract.

It is difficult to intuitively calculate how big the entropy of civilization is. It changes all the time and can only be simply estimated based on some performance.

In the Earth era, there are many reasons for the change of dynasties and regimes, but in the end, can entropy be used to measure the degree of order?

There are many factors that affect the entropy of civilization, including but not limited to the external environment, technology, social system, population size, population quality, etc.

Especially the technological factor, which is a significant negative entropy flow. As long as science can continue to progress, civilization can easily remain strong...

If the [civilization entropy increase hypothesis] is established, we must be careful, because entropy will always increase spontaneously, and we must find ways to control its entropy increase, whether it is social factors or technological factors.

Otherwise, the extinction of civilization will become an inevitable event.

From this perspective, tomorrow is not beautiful... According to the entropy increase theory, tomorrow will only get worse naturally, not better naturally.

This is also a hypothesis on the cosmic philosophy tree.

——Professor Hegel, a cosmic sociologist.