We live in a low entropy* universe. How probable is it that such state of low entropy arose by chance?

*See http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9032727/entropy

Roger Penrose, one of the world's greatest living mathematicians, estimates the odds at 1 in 10^10^123.

That's ten to the power ten to the power 123.

Note: This is a one followed by 10 to the power 123 zeros. That's more zeros than there are protons, neutrons and electrons in the visible universe.

These are worse odd than winning powerball every week for a 100 years.

How do we explain this?

ANSWER 1 THE GOD HYPOTHESIS:

God set it up like that. This may or may not be the correct answer but there is no way of falsifying it. It is not a scientific answer.

ANSWER 2: THE MULTIVERSE:

Our universe is but one of a very large number, perhaps an infinity, of universes in a multiverse. By sheer chance a tiny fraction of such universes have low entropy.

Right now there is no way of falsifying that answer either. So, for now, it is no more scientific than the God hypothesis.

Another problem with the multiverse is that it explains too much. Once you invoke infinities you can explain almost anything. We've simply substituted infinity for God.

ANSWER 3: PENROSE GOT IT WRONG:

No one has seriously challenged Penrose's calculation. According to what we understand about physics today, Penrose got it right.

ANSWER 4: WE DON'T KNOW ENOUGH TO DO THE CALCULATION.

Penrose is right according to our current understanding of the structure of space time. But there is too much we don't know. For example if it turned out there was a "quantum of distance," ie if space was not infinitely divisible, that could alter Penrose's calculations.

For what it's worth, I favour answer 4. But if you choose answer 1 there is no way I could rebut you.

Any comments?

Low entropy compared to what exactly? If Penrose could answer that question, then maybe we could get somewhere. Until then it is extremely likely to be 4.

This reminds me of Dembski's calculation of the odds against proteins forming from nothing. The fact that Dembski knew nothing really useful about biology didn't stop him. How much does anyone know about the nature of the universe? Not much, but that doesn't seem to stop mathematicians from calculating nonsense. But then how else are they going to get their Fields medals?

No. We don’t live in a low entropy universe. In order for us to be able to label it ‘low’, we would have to have at least one other universe with higher entropy to compare it with.

As there is only one universe that we know of, we cannot possibly label it as having a low, high, average or any other relative state of entropy.

“Any comments?”

None of the above …

We all are characters in a giant SIMS game.
We only think we have lives outside OLO.
We exist soul-ly as avatars on OLO .

And…,
the shadowy identity Graham Y who sometimes hovers above is the game administrator

Our only hope is to tunnel through cyberspace and link up with one of the other simultaneously running ,multiverse games …

Clearly answer 4 prevails (but answers 1,2 and/or 3 might also be true).

We are not within a million miles of knowing enough to do this sort of calculation. Or maybe that should be a million light-years. Or probably more accurately, a million light-millenia.

Bugsy,

Low compared to a state of complete disorder in our own universe.

Suppose you have 100 marbles in 10 different colours. They are arranged in 10 rows, 10 marbles to a row.

Suppose you find the marbles are arranged so that each row is one colour. All the black marbles are in one row, all the green marbles in another, and so on. That is "low entropy." If you came across such an arrangement you might suspect that someone had set them up that way.

Higher entropy is if they're arranged in 10 rows but different colours are scattered among the rows.

And so on.

Dembski's calculation's failed to take into account the known mechanisms of evolution – specifically the ratchet effect. Penrose is not a Dembski and I'm not aware of anyone who seriously questions his calculations. This is a problem of an altogether different magnitude to Dembski's pseudo-problem.

BTW Penrose is an atheist as am I. He is merely highlighting a genuine scientific conundrum.

The low entropy of the universe is only one of the conundrums of our universe. Another is that the value of certain fundamental constants of physics seem to make the universe strangely life friendly. No one knows why.

Think of it this way. There are about 16 constants of nature that make our universe one in which life can evolve. If any one of them had been slightly different it is possible life could never have appeared in the first place.

It's all very well to say that maybe a different form of life could evolve. But looking at our own solar system it does appear that life can only evolve under certain tightly constrained conditions. In fact we're still not sure how life on planet Earth kicked off in the first place. It wasn't Darwin's primordial soup.

I live for questions like this, it is so entertaining to dig around in new gardens - many thanks stevenlmeyer.

Here are some random clippings I found along the way.

"The number of people in the world who can understand everything [in Penrose's work] could probably take a taxi together to Penrose's next lecture" Therese Littleton on Penrose's "The Road to Reality: a Complete Guide to the Physical Universe"

It's comforting to know I'm not alone.

"Scientists are convinced that the Universe started at a low entropy state. The clues now point towards a possible accident in a huge particle collider in a much higher dimension. The significance of this is profound. According to some scientists, while the Hyperspace has many Universes bubbling endlessly, ours is an artificial one created by the extraterrestrial Type IV civilization eager to create artificial breeding ground for recycling the zero point energies." India Daily, 26th July 2006.

Hmmmm. At least it supports intelligent design theory, I suppose.

But this one summed it up best for me:

"I feel that most of the papers written about this topic - with authors including great names such as Roger Penrose, Lenny Susskind, Don Page, and many others - are somewhat irrational texts that try to solve non-existent problems and propose absurd scenarios that we simply know to be incorrect and whose starting point seems to be some ideologically-driven confusion. It is often difficult to figure out whether certain ideas in these papers were proposed seriously or as a satire."

That was from a blog I just stumbled on with the headline "The most important events in our and your superstringy Universe as seen from a conservative physicist's viewpoint"

I'm the furthest possible from being a physicist, let alone a conservative one, but I can relate to this, big time.

Glad you like it Pericles.

Perhaps many people who quote Penrose, etc do have an ideological agenda.

My agenda is simple. I want to stir up debate.

Penrose first published his speculations about the low entropy of the universe back in 1989. He re-capitulated them in his 2004 book, Road to Reality. In fact it was idly flicking through the pages of Road to Reality that prompted me to start this thread.

Penrose's argument about low entropy is not all that abstruse. Anyone with two years of university level physics should be able to follow it.

I certainly would not call it a non-existent problem though I would add the caveat "given our current understanding of the nature of space-time."

In his popular book "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality" Brian Greene does attempt a partial answer to Penrose's conundrum. Greene's book is written with a lay audience in mind. You may want to give it a go, Pericles.

BTW I think rather more than a taxi cab full of people can understand Road to Reality. I am by no means a star physicist but I could follow most of it. I say this to praise Penrose's lucidity than to blow my own trumpet.

I've also discussed the book with quite a few people. More than could fit into a bus let alone a taxi.

The tragic flaw in this topic of discussion appears to be that in order to have any kind of meaningful discussion on the subject, we apparently have to read, or have already read, a particular book on the topic. This is of course going to severely limit the number of posters that can respond in any depth.

Unless of course there is an easy link that properly explains the topic, forget it, I'm out.

LOL Bugsy,

You do not need to read a "particular book."

There are many links that explain entropy. I've already given a link to Britannica.

Here are some more.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=entropy&btnG=Google+Search

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=entropy&btnG=Google+Search

http://www.mdpi.org/entropy/

The only other piece of information you need is the generally accepted fact that the entropy of our universe seems improbably low – always bearing in mind the caveat "given to what we know about the structure of space-time."

Onya Steven......

but the likelihood of 'us' plebes having much knowledge about this is probably remote and would be just hyper speculation about hyper space...

I rather like your point 1... (seems like another cheque is due :)

For me it is so simple.

"These things (which were witnessed by the author) are written...that you might believe, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in His name"..John 20:31

I know...I know.. blabbering again... but think about it.

On the one hand.... confusing speculation about unfathomable intricacies of space and time....

On the other.. the clear hand of God at work IN time and space.

John saw it.. then wrote about it... and his testimony is as good (today) as that of any eye witness to any major event.. such as the recent murder in Melbourne. That testimony will be used to convict or free Christopher Hudson, so.. we should not simply dismiss it as the rantings of some elderly saint on some Island...

So... how is this on topic ? easy.. Jesus is the Word

3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. (John 1:3)

I know what entropy is steven, I am talking about Penrose's calculations and the judgement that entropy is "improbably low". It certainly sounds like another restatement of the "anthropic principle", of which I don't hold to. What most of these studies of "improbability" usually serve to highlight is the gap in our knowledge of why an "improbable" (or nearly impossible)event occurred. And this is because there are often too many assumptions made in the calculation itself. That is why I mentioned Dumbski.

Alright, now I’m confused. Entropy is the measure of a system's thermal energy per unit temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work. But it is also a measure of the molecular disorder, or randomness, of a system.

The entropy of the universe is apparently increasing. But this doesn’t make sense. Clearly things are becoming more ordered in the universe, are they not?

Secondly, it seems to me that with our knowledge of the formation of stars, galaxies, etc, and all the laws of physics therein, the entropy involved would fit perfectly well with known concepts.

How could it not?

Surely it has to be a matter of accepting the energy and entropy involved as being perfectly normal, and for people like Penrose to find the mathematics that fit this normality, rather than coming up with what must be considered highly wonky calculations that indicate entropy to be extraordinarily low!

I'm surprised at the reaction to this thread.

LUDWIG,

Observation suggests the universe is becoming more DISORDERED. Stars condense out of gas clouds under the influence of gravity as you point out. That decreases the entropy of the gas molecules.

However the gravitationally induced compression of the gas heats it up. In consequence it radiates photons of electromagnetic energy. The entropy of the photons exceeds by orders of magnitude the decrease in the entropy of the gas molecules. The result is a NET INCREASE in entropy.

LUDWIG & BUGSY,

The improbably low entropy of the observed universe is NOT controversial. Most cosmologists would agree there is a conundrum to be resolved. All Penrose did was attempt to estimate, in a rough and ready way, the DEGREE of improbability. To my knowledge no cosmologist challenges it as a rough and ready calculation.

Comparisons with Dembski are fatuous. Dembski ignored almost everything that was known about evolution. Penrose has as good an understanding of cosmology as anyone.

BUGSY

I'm actually agreeing with you. As you can see, my favoured answer is 4 – we don't know enough.

CONTROVERSY

I've made only two arguments that would be regarded as controversial by most cosmologists.

(1)The critique of the infinite universe / multiverse explanation. This is the current favourite in the cosmology community.

(2)The statement that with our current state of knowledge we cannot decide between the four answers.

You and I Bugsy probably both think Answer 1, God dunnit, is a non-starter. But right now we cannot falsify that assumption as we can, say, creationism.

ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE

See:

http://www.anthropic-principle.com/

You may not like the anthropic principle Bugsy. I have no strong feelings either way.

But let's see your explanation for the strangely life-friendly laws of physics that seem to govern our universe.

Remember, Bugsy, the universe is under no obligation to please you

I only mentioned Dumbski as an example of how incorrect assumptions can lead to stupid answers. So please don't think that I am making a proper comparison. I am sure that Penrose is orders of magnitude better.

But competing ideas that cannot be falsified are essentially useless.

The anthropic principle is like asking why player X is the winner of a poker tournament and coming up with the answer that it could not have been otherwise. It was highly improbable for X to win and yet all the conditions occurred for that event or state to occur. Why? because it happened, that's why. If it didn't happen in that precise way, then we would be discussing another set of events or conditions. To say that the universe is "strangely life friendly" means that cosmologists don't really know enough about life itself. We will certainly know more when we find another form of life. Until then the cosmologists can continue to have their heads up their own astronomic calculations.

“The entropy of the photons exceeds by orders of magnitude the decrease in the entropy of the gas molecules.”

Steven, don’t you mean the free energy of photons greatly exceeds that of the gas molecules, and hence the entropy is less?

The energy available for doing work is surely increasing as stars condense and radiate energy. Hence entropy would be falling, if the overall amount of energy (or mass/energy) is constant, wouldn’t it?

I can’t possibly envisage how the universe could be becoming less ordered as a result or the formation of stars and their radiation of energy. It is becoming more complex, but that doesn’t mean more randomised.

Welllll... last saturday I was facing an opponent in a boxing ring, and I left my belly WIDEEEE open and exposed, as a bait for my opponent to see it as an irresistable target to front kick, (a move for which I have a ready solution :) but here.. I do the same verbally, and I'm ignored.. grrr aah well.. with all the intellectual 'muscle' apparent here it is clear that we are operating at different levels.... understandable of course, given that I myself totally ignored the scientific speculation...

Don't take that as 'head in the sand'.. but the speculation (specially as described by Pericles "this leads to new questions, I live for this" kind of thing) reminds me so much of what the Apostle Paul encountered in Athens, that I hesitate to engage on the scientific level.

Acts 17:21 All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.

My response to the thread was same as Pauls:

"Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.

For the word 'religious' you can substitute the word 'scientific', and given Steven's point 1.... may I dare suggest your enthusiasm is in fact 'to an unknown god'...

Paul then outlines the Gospel, albeit with a naturalistic beginning.
His conclusion though is spot on:

31For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead."

Thats the crux. How did Paul know this ? 'Damascus Road'.

Ludwig,

Below is the best online link I can provide for an explanation of the increase in entropy that results from stellar formation.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/entropy.html

In simple terms:

As a gas cloud condenses under the influence of gravity the "space entropy" of the gas decreases. However the molecules of gas speed up so the "momentum entropy" increases. The increase in "momentum entropy" is less than the decrease "space entropy" so there is a net LOCAL decrease in entropy.

BUT

The photons the gas molecules radiate, mostly in the far infrared at this stage, have a huge "space entropy" because they spread out in large numbers – zillions per molecule – at the speed of light. So there is a large overall increase in entropy as the gas cloud condenses.

Bugsy,

I don't know why you are so emotional about this. One way science advances is by resolving conundrums.

Here are some conundrums that have led to advances in science.

--The retrograde motion of the planets led, eventually, after a detour through epicycles, to ditching the geocentric model of the solar system in favour of the heliocentric model espoused by Aristarchus and Copernicus.

--The inability to make the Copernican model fit observation led Kepler to the discovery that the planets move in elliptical orbits in such a way that, inter alia, the radius vector traces out equal areas in equal times. Kepler's discoveries led in turn led to Newton's inverse square law of gravity.

--Discrepancies in the transformation properties of Maxwell's equations compared to Newtonian dynamics led Einstein to special relativity. This also resolved the conundrum of the null result of the Michaelsen-Morley experiment.

--The conundrum of black body radiation led Max Planck to quantum mechanics.

Penrose has helped publicise an interesting conundrum and I'm sure new scientific insights will result from our attempts to resolve it.

So why the emotional reaction and comparisons with Dembski?

A major conundrum for Darwin in the 19th Century was: What fueled the sun for billions of years?

SCIENCE THRIVES ON CONUNDRUMS

Emotional? LOL

I only mentioned Dumbski as am example. The calculations tell me that there is something that we don't know, right? To quote a famous philosopher: As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.

Now how is this conundrum to be solved on an online opinion blogsite? By discussing something none of us know about of course!

Sure, God did it, whatever.

Bugsy wrote:

>>By discussing something none of us know about of course!>>

I was never under the illusion we could solve this conundrum here on the online opinion forum. Just as I doubt we can solve world hunger, Iraq, what to do about GM crops or the miserable performance of the Melbourne Demons.

I did think posters might be interested to see what a real scientific conundrum looks like. A real conundrum as opposed to the pseudo conundrums posed by people like Dembski and the protagonists of intelligent design.

I think you might be flogging the proverbial dead horse here, stevenlmeier.

>>Penrose's argument about low entropy is not all that abstruse. Anyone with two years of university level physics should be able to follow it<<

It isn't "following the argument" that is the problem. It is finding anything remotely useful to say in response to a statement that is simultaneously convincingly precise (10^10^123, not 10^10^122 or 10^10^124) and utterly meaningless. Meaningless, that is, in the sense that we cannot possibly extract any useful information from it.

Does it prove anything? no.

Does it, or will it, lead to any new theories about the universe? Not likely, is it?

Anyway, given the number of galaxies that we know about just in this dimension, the number of stars in those galaxies, and the number of planets/asteroids/comets shooting around all over the place, that particular level of "odds against" does not seem out of place to me.

It is almost even money, in fact, when you consider the uniqueness of the existence of the human race - we would have needed those odds to come into existence in the first place.

So what we have here is an incontrovertible premise, upon which an argument for almost anything may be built. Doesn't sound particularly fruitful ground.

Unless of course you are the natural heir to Douglas Adams, in which case there is a wealth of material to be mined from the single statistic, 10^10^123.

Pericles,

I certainly did not mean to imply 10^10^123 was "precise." It is an "order of magnitude" calculation. All Penrose was trying to do was quantify in a rough and ready fashion what everyone already knew – namely that the entropy of the observable universe is improbably low.

Will it led to new theories about the universe?

It MAY play a role there. To be credible any new theory would have to explain the unreasonably low entropy we see. So saying the low entropy conundrum won't play a role is tantamount to saying we shall never have credible new theories about the universe.

The number of stars, galaxies, etc is besides the point. Penrose and others are making a statement about the entire observable universe which includes all those stars and galaxies.

,

this is misleading , the universe might have a low entropy generally but it is not even ,
there are node and concentration in it , inside of which there is further concentrations , leading to rich area of matter/energy

they might be statistically rare but in a sample the size of the universe their are highly probable .

.

Randwick,

Entropy is a property of a system AS A WHOLE. If you like, the universe appears to more "lumpy" than one would expect by chance.

I might add that no cosmologist has challenged Penrose's "order of magnitude" calculations. Penrose has pointed out what all reputable scientists regard as a GENUINE scientific conundrum.

I cannot give you an online reference to Penrose's calculations but you can find them in his 2004 book, The Road to Reality.

Here is a link to a short biography of Penrose.

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Penrose.html

Penrose is one of the most acclaimed mathematicians of 20th Century and of the 21st so far.

My own feeling is that there is some physics we don't yet understand. (Answer 4 in my original post.)

I'm merely pointing out that, as things stand today, there is no way of deciding between any of the 4 possible answers I presented.

To say "God did not do it" is as much an act of faith – in our ability to understand the universe if nothing else – as it is to say "God did it."

.

Penrose claim the mathematical improbability of me typing and answers to you ,

so either we won the proverbial loto
it's not random
you do not exist and this is an imaginary discussion

I knew that !

.

Actually Randwick,

The biggest conundrum of all is, to paraphrase Stephen Hawking, why the universe bothers to exist at all.

I doubt we shall ever have the answer.

Perhaps there is no answer.

.

? =>?!? => ?

or the arrow of being

.

Yep, that about sums it up.