Now for my friend Bill..
"THE SECOND LAW DOESN'T APPLY TO EVOLUTION BECAUSE OF THE SUN"
You may have heard of John Gribbin.. well known science writer.. and friend of atheists. He wrote a book called "Blinded by the Light" subtitled "The Secret Life of the Sun" 1991.. It is an interesting read and he is a very articulate writer who captures the excitement of science at it best.. But in the inside cover we have this..
"Our ancestors worshiped the sun, rightly recognizing it as the bringer of life."
So the atheist commends ignorant pagan religious worship of the sun!! The mere suggestion by a modern secular 'scientist' beggars belief! In context of very basis of the atheist position I think this is actually revealing of where they are likely to end up.. the dark ages.
Since he introduces 'worship' to the story.. Lets just compare what the bible says about the matter..
1- The sun is a created object.. (ordered state of matter consistent with a creator)
2- It warns not to worship any created object.. (more reasonable to worship the sun's creator)
3- Created objects cannot hear you, will never respond to you and cannot do good or evil.. (the creator of the sun by definition can do all three)
Which I find more consistent and satisfying than Gribbin's distorted thinking! So to come back to the real question in hand..
Yes the sun's energy powers just about everything on the earth.. Yes the energy flow just like a gushing flood can and will result in local pockets of order or decreased entropy. Every such occurrence will be accompanied by a bigger increase in the surroundings. No problem so far. A flood might create a great heap of sand and debris or put a boat on top of a high roof. The suns energy powers tornadoes and evaporation of water all temporary states of order. Remember any state not in equilibrium of both momentum and position of all its atoms uniformly and randomly distributed is low entropy. It is the definition of 'surroundings' that is critical to the calculation.
It is easy to see that the local order created by a flood like putting a boat on top of a high building (entropy drop), is vastly over accounted for by the increase in disorder (entropy increase) in damage to the rest of the town. It is therefore a question of entropy accounting to verify if a process can pay the entropy cost of a particular ordered state. You may say well the suns energy flux is so massive as to account for any process on earth you care to imagine. Wrong..
To put a boat on top of Mt Everest is easily within the energy budget of the sun - earth system.. but the storm to do it is just not going to happen anytime soon. The price in entropy terms is too high! For the same reason the oceans of the world will never make a sand castle.. such as a child could make.. well inside the energy budget.. but way outside the entropy budget. Meaning the sun - earth system will virtually never accomplish such a task and the fundamental reason is the state of matter of the sandcastle is too improbable. Note these states of low entropy (order) are where the position of a group of atoms is not randomly distributed.
I hoped even atheists could get that.. but alas they don't..
Thursday, 24 March 2016
4.1 LIES
Now we come to the 'closed system' MYTH..
"SECOND LAW DOES NOT APPLY BECAUSE THE EARTH IS NOT A CLOSED SYSTEM"
Previously I showed why entropy by definition means: Measure of Disorder.. because it must encompass the tendency to both random position and momentum of atoms.. If this were not the case then atomic diffusion could not occur as predictably as it does. {Ref: The Cambridge Encyclopedia: Entropy}
Now all the momentum of all the atoms in a system averaged out = temperature, which is itself a measure of the quantity of heat energy in the system. But entropy is not energy.
The tendency to a random distribution of position is not apparent if all the atoms are the same. Confusing entropy and energy leads to the mistaken belief the calculation of entropy change based on heat flow alone is all that is required. But that calculation says nothing about a mixture of atoms (positional distribution of each type). It is precisely because we know a mixture will of itself tend to distribute into a homogeneous state, (called atomic diffusion) we know any calculation of entropy cannot ignore positional distribution, of any particles in the system. If the temperature and pressure in a room is uniform but half of the room is oxygen and the other nitrogen it is in an ordered state and has not reached thermodynamic equilibrium.
The above tendencies are the reason heat will always flow from hot to cold and atoms will mix evenly (diffusion). So powerful is this tendency it means all real processes observable on earth are irreversable and will never be observed to go the other way.. unless driven to do so as in a refrigerator. The refrigerator does NOT change that tendency.. it overcomes it by having in place an ordering principle that directs energy to pump heat from cold to hot. Note the second law is dependent upon the average tendency to equilibrium (position and momentum) which always acts in all systems both closed and open.
Yes it is true the second law says.. "In an isolated system entropy will increase" if we ignore hypothetical and impossible 'reversible' systems which don't exist. We also do not need to bother with formal definitions of closed or isolated for my purpose here. So how do we know entropy will always increase.?
Because we can show that in any OPEN system for every (local) entropy decrease (ie order increase).. the process that does it creates a bigger increase in the entropy (disorder) of its immediate surroundings. That fact is experimentally verified. If this were not the case then we could not say entropy will always increase in an isolated system! So the very definition of the second law (for an isolated system) requires entropy balance in the open system.
So to state the 2nd law does not apply in open systems omits the crucial point that there is an entropy cost in open systems driven by the same thing that drives the second law. So in that sense while the second law cannot be 'applied' to an open system the principle that makes the second law possible will always work and it can be calculated.
The principle of entropy balance in open systems is all that is needed for me to show evolution by natural selection cannot pay the entropy cost for the very highly ordered states in living cells. That is the purpose of [The God Law] blog.
"SECOND LAW DOES NOT APPLY BECAUSE THE EARTH IS NOT A CLOSED SYSTEM"
Previously I showed why entropy by definition means: Measure of Disorder.. because it must encompass the tendency to both random position and momentum of atoms.. If this were not the case then atomic diffusion could not occur as predictably as it does. {Ref: The Cambridge Encyclopedia: Entropy}
Now all the momentum of all the atoms in a system averaged out = temperature, which is itself a measure of the quantity of heat energy in the system. But entropy is not energy.
The tendency to a random distribution of position is not apparent if all the atoms are the same. Confusing entropy and energy leads to the mistaken belief the calculation of entropy change based on heat flow alone is all that is required. But that calculation says nothing about a mixture of atoms (positional distribution of each type). It is precisely because we know a mixture will of itself tend to distribute into a homogeneous state, (called atomic diffusion) we know any calculation of entropy cannot ignore positional distribution, of any particles in the system. If the temperature and pressure in a room is uniform but half of the room is oxygen and the other nitrogen it is in an ordered state and has not reached thermodynamic equilibrium.
The above tendencies are the reason heat will always flow from hot to cold and atoms will mix evenly (diffusion). So powerful is this tendency it means all real processes observable on earth are irreversable and will never be observed to go the other way.. unless driven to do so as in a refrigerator. The refrigerator does NOT change that tendency.. it overcomes it by having in place an ordering principle that directs energy to pump heat from cold to hot. Note the second law is dependent upon the average tendency to equilibrium (position and momentum) which always acts in all systems both closed and open.
Yes it is true the second law says.. "In an isolated system entropy will increase" if we ignore hypothetical and impossible 'reversible' systems which don't exist. We also do not need to bother with formal definitions of closed or isolated for my purpose here. So how do we know entropy will always increase.?
Because we can show that in any OPEN system for every (local) entropy decrease (ie order increase).. the process that does it creates a bigger increase in the entropy (disorder) of its immediate surroundings. That fact is experimentally verified. If this were not the case then we could not say entropy will always increase in an isolated system! So the very definition of the second law (for an isolated system) requires entropy balance in the open system.
So to state the 2nd law does not apply in open systems omits the crucial point that there is an entropy cost in open systems driven by the same thing that drives the second law. So in that sense while the second law cannot be 'applied' to an open system the principle that makes the second law possible will always work and it can be calculated.
The principle of entropy balance in open systems is all that is needed for me to show evolution by natural selection cannot pay the entropy cost for the very highly ordered states in living cells. That is the purpose of [The God Law] blog.
4.0 LIES
Sorry to have to go to the technical stuff but this is most urgent..
In my 'travels' on the net.. particularly Twitter.. certain false ideas held very close by my critics.. recur again and again ad-nauseum..
"The second law does not apply to evolution.. because of the sun"
"The second law only applies to closed systems.. earth is not a closed system"
"The flow of energy from the sun more than accounts for any small decrease in entropy on earth with massive increase in the universe"
All three are really saying the SAME THING.. so can be answered comprehensively with the same verified and well known science. The statements include a small grain of truth.. but for reasons I will demonstrate are actually false and misleading.. because they are based on a real lie. I don't just mean something that's 'false' incidentally.. I mean a LIE.. a deliberate false statement by someone who KNOWS what they are saying..
The first is..
"ENTROPY IS A MEASURE OF UNAVAILABLE ENERGY AND ITS INCREASE IS JUST THE INCREASE IN ENERGY UNAVAILABLE TO DO WORK" and it comes from a number of sources including the Wikipedia.. It takes many guises such as..
"THERMODYNAMIC ENTROPY IS MEASURED BY HEAT FLOW AND DIFFERENT FROM STATISTICAL ENTROPY WHICH ONLY APPLIES TO IDEAL OR RAREFIED GASES"..
What these are actually saying is..
"THERMODYNAMIC ENTROPY IS NOT DISORDER".. or
"THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF ENTROPY"
Hawking, Penrose, Boltzman, Plank, Gibbs etc.. do not agree..
First I will answer in words even a deluded atheist on Twitter can understand.. then do some math..
The whole idea of entropy = disorder originates with Ludwig Boltzmann's work around 1902.. Clausius had already discovered the effect of heat energy dissipation which he called 'entropy' some 40-50 years prior. It was Ludwig Boltzmann's belief in the atomic theory of matter that gave us the real understanding of what heat and entropy ultimately are.. for which he committed suicide in 1906 tormented by the club of big names still holding that matter was continuous! So what did he discover..
Heat = energy of motion of atoms which spreads because they jostle each other.. the end result being a random distribution of motion (momentum) which can be expressed as a probability distribution.
An equally important result of this is the jostling process also leads to a random distribution of position of the atoms. By which we understand atomic diffusion.
Entropy = a measure of how random both in position and momentum a particular group of atoms (called a system) has become.
A system in any state which is not fully random in both momentum and position of its atoms is said to have order. If it is fully randomized in both position and momentum of its atoms it is said to be in equilibrium.
So entropy by definition is a measure of how disordered a system is. Boltzmann showed us how it is calculated. What people denying this are really saying is entropy is measured only by atomic momentum (heat energy) and not position as well. They have been MISLED.. more to come.
In my 'travels' on the net.. particularly Twitter.. certain false ideas held very close by my critics.. recur again and again ad-nauseum..
"The second law does not apply to evolution.. because of the sun"
"The second law only applies to closed systems.. earth is not a closed system"
"The flow of energy from the sun more than accounts for any small decrease in entropy on earth with massive increase in the universe"
All three are really saying the SAME THING.. so can be answered comprehensively with the same verified and well known science. The statements include a small grain of truth.. but for reasons I will demonstrate are actually false and misleading.. because they are based on a real lie. I don't just mean something that's 'false' incidentally.. I mean a LIE.. a deliberate false statement by someone who KNOWS what they are saying..
The first is..
"ENTROPY IS A MEASURE OF UNAVAILABLE ENERGY AND ITS INCREASE IS JUST THE INCREASE IN ENERGY UNAVAILABLE TO DO WORK" and it comes from a number of sources including the Wikipedia.. It takes many guises such as..
"THERMODYNAMIC ENTROPY IS MEASURED BY HEAT FLOW AND DIFFERENT FROM STATISTICAL ENTROPY WHICH ONLY APPLIES TO IDEAL OR RAREFIED GASES"..
What these are actually saying is..
"THERMODYNAMIC ENTROPY IS NOT DISORDER".. or
"THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF ENTROPY"
Hawking, Penrose, Boltzman, Plank, Gibbs etc.. do not agree..
First I will answer in words even a deluded atheist on Twitter can understand.. then do some math..
The whole idea of entropy = disorder originates with Ludwig Boltzmann's work around 1902.. Clausius had already discovered the effect of heat energy dissipation which he called 'entropy' some 40-50 years prior. It was Ludwig Boltzmann's belief in the atomic theory of matter that gave us the real understanding of what heat and entropy ultimately are.. for which he committed suicide in 1906 tormented by the club of big names still holding that matter was continuous! So what did he discover..
Heat = energy of motion of atoms which spreads because they jostle each other.. the end result being a random distribution of motion (momentum) which can be expressed as a probability distribution.
An equally important result of this is the jostling process also leads to a random distribution of position of the atoms. By which we understand atomic diffusion.
Entropy = a measure of how random both in position and momentum a particular group of atoms (called a system) has become.
A system in any state which is not fully random in both momentum and position of its atoms is said to have order. If it is fully randomized in both position and momentum of its atoms it is said to be in equilibrium.
So entropy by definition is a measure of how disordered a system is. Boltzmann showed us how it is calculated. What people denying this are really saying is entropy is measured only by atomic momentum (heat energy) and not position as well. They have been MISLED.. more to come.
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