The Cold Dark Night Sky, Entropy, and Us. Part 2 in this series.
An article in Scientific American in the early 1980s presented the idea that in a dynamically changing, open system, such as our expanding unbounded Universe**, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says information (order) can increase and entropy (disorder) can decrease, at least locally. This is because the thermodynamic statement that entropy must always increase is true only in closed, slowly changing systems.
I understood this immediately to mean that the cold dark night sky** could drain off entropy and allow information to increase on Earth. (I had taken two undergraduate physics courses in thermodynamics at pre-”woke” University of Pennsylvania. Also, I had taken all of Penn’s astronomy courses, and I had a long-time interest in astronomy and cosmology. I graduated Magna Cum Laude with Distinction in physics.)
** Part 1 in this series explains the astronomy and physics of our understanding of the expanding Universe, and why the night sky is cold and dark.
Entropy and Information in Thermodynamics
In the incredibly complex field of thermodynamics (the study of how differences in temperature and heat can produce action), the conclusion that entropy must always increase is drawn only when situations are so simplified that systems are closed to the outside and are only slowly changing—employing the notion of “quasi-static change”—as heat slowly spreads out and temperatures gradually equalize.
I laughed at the words “quasi-static change” when I first encountered them, even as I understood their validity. An example of quasi-static change is how the surface of the Earth curves so gradually that we can treat the Earth as flat in practical daily life and not have to deal with complexities produced by living on a curving surface.
This is an example of how making simplifying assumptions allows some problems to be solved, but doing so also limits the applicability of the solutions.
For a thermodynamic example of a slowly changing system, consider a refrigerator/freezer after the power is shut off in a sealed room:
At first, different compartments have different temperatures. If one knows the temperature, one knows where the thermometer is. That knowledge amounts to “information” in thermodynamics and is equivalent to order, which is equivalent to organization.
When heat slowly migrates between the freezer, food compartment, and the sealed room until everything acquires the same temperature, knowing the temperature tells us nothing about where the thermometer is. Information has thus been destroyed and the resulting disorder is called “entropy” in thermodynamics.
Such “information” is thus the negative of “entropy.” Useful information is a subset of this.
Entropy and Heat Death in Thermodynamics
As noted above, thermodynamics is the study of using heat to produce action; the greater the difference in heat and temperatures, the greater the power that can be applied: Highly mobile molecules in hot air rush and put pressure on slower-moving molecules in cooler air. The rushing air can do many things, such as drive a bullet, spin the movable component in an electric generator, or drive a car’s pistons.
For clarity: “Temperature” measures the average energy of motion that individual atoms and molecules have. “Heat” measures the collective energy of all the atoms and molecules. For example, aluminum foil at 500 degrees F might not burn your fingers at all because of how little mass—therefore little total heat energy—it has, while a hot plate at 130 degrees might burn you if you leave your finger on it, because it has so much more mass and heat energy.
Enter Entropy as ambient heat rises: Problematically, the use of heat warms things up generally until temperatures equalize or harm the materials being driven by that increased ambient heat. This prevents further action, unless the excess heat is drained off. Hence we need radiators in gasoline-powered cars, exhaust fans for air conditioners, etc. That increased ambient heat is called entropy, and the prevention of further useful action is called “heat death.”
Some people will be quick to object that when fans expel heat from a car’s radiator or from an air conditioner into the outside air, that expelled hot air contains entropy too and the entropy of the combined system still goes up. True, but the Earth ultimately radiates heat into the very cold outer space, draining entropy.
Yes, the Earth can heat up, but researchers tell us that in the Earth’s history, there have been several periods of “glaciation,” with large parts of the earth covered in ice, one being called “Snowball Earth.” Moreover, they tell us that we have been in a super cycle of glaciation for 2.5 million years—with long periodic ice ages interrupted by much shorter warmer periods, in at least one of which virtually all the ice melted and sea levels were 320 feet higher than now.
All the evidence points to us being in an “interglacial” period that has lasted roughly 10,000 years, has been cooling for several thousand years (with short warming periods, such as at present), and is due to enter another periodic ice age; we just don’t know when. (See my post on Climate-Change Alarmism.)
How Cold Is the Cold Dark Night Sky?
Astronomers have worked out that the farther away distant galaxies are, the faster they are moving away from us. (detailed in Part 1)
This recessional motion subtracts energy from the light that stars emit. The faster the recession, the more that visible light and other radiations shift through progressively lower energy levels, from blue to red, to infrared, and on to microwaves, making them invisible to us; hence very dark.
Background cosmic radiation has been observed to correspond to a background temperature for outer space of -454.76 Fahrenheit, equal to -270.42 Celsius.
Of course, starlight and other EMF radiations add to this temperature, but the total heat is still very low, leaving outer space very cold and very dark.
For Clarity: Notions of Entropy Exist that Are Not Governed by Laws of Thermodynamics
Notions of entropy and information have been generalized for use in other studies (especially in information theory and social theories, such as Marxism), but their validities as “entropy” stand or fall on considerations other than thermodynamics, and importing the special thermodynamic condition of “entropy must always rise” is fundamentally invalid.
For example, some people explain “entropy” by observing that gas expands to fill its volume but never compresses to a small volume. As only an example, that proves nothing. Moreover, to the contrary, gas does compress often in our lives: in air conditioners, in propane gas tanks, in liquified natural gas tanks, etc. Yes, human beings cause such compressions to happen, but humans must obey thermodynamics too. So these reversals of such “entropy” still count.
Claude Shannon made foundational contributions to such areas as communication theory, information theory, cryptoanalysis, and AI (while at MIT, Bell Labs, Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, and elsewhere). As part of these works he developed his theory of “information entropy,” but this is not the “entropy” of thermodynamics.
Capitalism in Plain Sight, and Denials of It
You don’t need to know thermodynamics and astronomy to see, in plain sight, that information has been increasing for a very long time.
The fossil record shows that increasingly complex and capable life forms have evolved over time—life forms increasingly well organized and capable of using information. Similarly, human society has evolved ever-more complex organizations and ever-more means of organizing physical things.
In this context, “organization” and “information” mean the same thing: order.
You can see for yourself too, if you look carefully, that capital* has been producing so much valuable information for the past few hundred years, by organizing production, that living standards have skyrocketed and can continue well into the future as new information is created.
* Capital is private wealth
that already** has been put at risk by investing it in physical form (factories, offices, human skills, mortgages, etc.),
while operating in free markets
with strong but limited government.
** Accountants may extend this definition of capital, and modify its dollar measure over time, but that is only to keep track of the money as it gets collected and then gets invested, and to try to track capital’s value as the physical form gets used up or becomes obsolete. Ultimately, it takes years to know what new value, if any, the investment created.
That invested wealth can only be gotten back in spendable form by creating new/better/cheaper products that people can afford and will pay money to buy. This in turn creates paying jobs to provide those goods and services.
Naturally, some monetary reward—profit—is anticipated to compensate for temporary loss of use, and for risk of permanent loss of wealth, because profits are decidedly not guaranteed.
Any economic system in which capital works is generally called capitalism. However, the way capital operates in a specific system will depend on the specific laws, regulations, customs, resources, and law enforcement of a given nation, region (such as the European Union), or locality (such as a state in the U.S.A.). Some of these specific systems will allow capital to be much more active, and more productive, than in others.
Deniers in Plain Sight
All sorts of people deny, or just don’t recognize the significance of, what is so plainly visible: that new information can be created and that capitalism makes life better..
For example, “European socialism” is a mixture of 1) extensive bureaucratic “regulation“ of—interference in—business, 2) outright government ownership, and 3) strong union involvement in government (think “labor” political parties).
Similar, but with different modus operandi, is fascism, which involves an intertwining of big business and big government (think the FDA and “big Pharma”).
None of the above is capitalism anymore, because government is just too big and markets are just too distorted and unfree, even if “private-sector” companies still do business. (This is discussed in Capitalism Makes Life Better and in a later post.)
Worst of all is Marxism. At root, it denies that new information can be continually created to make lives better, assuming in effect that entropy must always increase. This is the essence of Marx’s concept that “surplus value”—profits—must lead to economic collapse or to foreign wars.
Marx’s concept of “surplus value” leads directly to Marxists’ efforts to destroy not only capitalism but everything capitalism requires to function, including private property, individual merit and identity, nuclear families, and parental rights.
Part 3 in this series shows in greater depth how the cold dark night sky signals that Marxism is disastrously wrong. It focuses on the harm that social Marxism does (i.e., “woke”). Following it is a post on The U.S. is on the verge of a Marxist President, with disastrous possibilities. Later posts will look more extensively at the highly destructive political and economic aspects of Marxism.
Good Health to You!
Nice segue.