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.