The second law of thermodynamics is a bummer. It says that the entropy of an isolated system will increase with time. It’s the reason why teacups break when they fall, why smashing eggs is easier than mending them and why teenagers’ bedrooms inevitably become messier.
That’s all rather annoying but when applied to the Universe, the second law becomes apocalyptic. It means that the Universe will just get messier and messier until there is no order at all, a demise known as heat death (the study of the death of the universe is called physical eschatology apparently). Even black holes are expected to evaporate in about 10^150 years time. And that’s bad news for us.
But Clement Vidal, a philosopher at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium has come up with a solution based on artificial life or ALife. His idea that we will soon be able to recreate not just the physical features of our universe in a simulation but also the biological and cultural ones too.
When this happens, we’ll have created our own cosmos. Artificial cosmogenesis is the term for this, says Vidal (who is remarkably good at naming complex areas of study).
Vidal also says a number of physicists have tried to explain the fact that our universe seems fine-tuned for life by hypothesising that universes may be created by the gazillion inside black holes, each with a different set of physical laws. Only those with conditions that are ripe for life (like ours) ever get observed.
That’s all promising but then he goes off the rails somewhat.
Vidal seems to suggest that all we have to do to survive heat death is to recreate our universe inside a black hole, cough. And then go and live in it, splutter. (I’m not making this up.)
The moral of this posting: beware philosophers bearing gifts for physicists.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0803.1087: The Ultimate Future of Artificial Life: Towards Artificial Cosmogenesis
Comments
7 responses to “Avoiding heat death at the end of the Universe”
Dear “KFC”,
Thank you for reading my paper.
I just would like to react to your conclusion:
“Vidal seems to suggest that all we have to do to survive heat death is to recreate our universe inside a black hole, cough.”
That’s not what I wrote. I carefully distinguished “our universe” and “an universe”. The “new” universe has no reason to be ours or exactly as ours.
“And then go and live in it, splutter. (I’m not making this up.)”
I never wrote that, and indeed you are making this up. Accordingly, this last section is rather synthetic, and I thus invite you to read the references I give about it to have a better grasp of the idea.
“The moral of this posting: beware philosophers bearing gifts for physicists.”
This moral is also worth considering: “beware physicists bearing gifts for philosophers” 😉
Best regards,
Clément Vidal.
If we think we know everything, we don’t. From your post: ‘It means that the Universe will just get messier and messier until there is no order at all…’ – hope not, lol.
Anna 🙂
The laser clocks slown down, iridium meter & kilogram prototypes are dissolving, even the supernovae explosion are weaker and weaker… Whole universe is just a evolution test – if it wouldn’t collapse, there wouldn’t any chance of better attempt.
BTW by Aether Wave Theory the black holes event horizons can be interpreted as a result of optical phenomena called total reflection.
http://superstruny.aspweb.cz/images/fyzika/spacetime/black_hole_refl.gif
While the event horizon should appears like dim red hell hole from outside, from inner perspective it should appear as a bluish, mirror-like water surface, similar to undulating waves & blobs of bright reflecting silver.
A pretty archetype of heavens, isn’t it? Maybe we are really creatures, who have crossed the event horizon in their very deep past.
Note that certain astronomical observations can be by interpreted as a reflections of remote stars or quasars from internal walls of our Universe generation. The huge red shift destroys the mirror-like illusion a bit for us, though.
http://www.badastronomy.com/pix/bablog/2005/spitzer_firstlight.jpg
It is implausible that there can be universe with other laws. The reasons for many of the laws are known, and can’t be varied: the dimension, EM, GR and others. See for proof and derivations (particularly OAIU and MRPG books)
The proof that physics, a universe, would be impossible in any dimension but 3+1 (strangely agreeing with reality) is clear and unavoidable. Stunning is that a change of any number in any of the formulas by even 1 would make any dimension, thus any universe, impossible.
That the universe allows, and has, galaxies, stars, planets, even life, thinking life, that all the conflicting conditions do not conflict and are met, is beyond stunning.
Click on
Science blog
impunv.wordpress.com
or
impunv.blogspot.com
Political blog
randomabsurdities.wordpress.com
Books (details below)
OAIU;
Our Almost Impossible Universe:
Why the laws of nature make the existence of humans extraordinarily unlikely
GTFQM;
Group Theoretical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics
MRPG;
Massless Representations of the Poincaré Group
QM,QFT;
Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Field Theory
geometry, language, logic
QFT,CGT,CFT;
Quantum Field Theory, Conformal Group Theory, Conformal Field Theory:
GT:IA:
Group Theory: An Intuitive Approach
PG,SG;
Point Groups, Space Groups, Crystals, Molecules
Our Almost Impossible Universe:
Why the laws of nature make the existence of humans
extraordinarily unlikely
R. Mirman
iUniverse, inc. 2006
Is it just me, or does this sound a whole lot like the incredibly implausible ideas of Frank Tipler, proposed in “The Physics of Immortality”? (http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/tipler.html)
Frank’s also famous, of course, for the Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle (or, CRAP, for short).
As I think I understand it, even black holes will dissipate at the heat death of the universe. Does that mean we will need to create a special kind of black hole that doesn’t dissipate? I suppose if we can do everything up to that point, there’s a chance we can do that too.