Like why planet? Why sphere? Why is there a solar system? Why system instead of no system? How did entropy create anti-entropy agents? Bees, humans, anything that builds non-random structures?
Sorry if this is a bad question, it just popped into my head and it won’t go away.
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Localized lowered states of entropy still increase the entropy of the entire system because it takes energy to maintain order.
Everything is tending towards the heat death of the universe. We’re essentially in a metastable configuration right now, where it’s locally stable but not universally stable. Now why that is, that’s more of a philosophical question, which is an argument often used as a logical explanation as to why a god must exist. Somehow, order must have been in the universe at some point.
only answer I can think of is because stars are born somehow
There are stars, they give off energy, eventually that energy runs out until the energy that exists is equally spread out. Takes a while for stars to burn out, and then for some reason there are new ones
Things are tending towards entropy which is a spread of energy equally.
The idea that entropy is chaos isn’t a physics thing, there’s 2 things people mean when they talk about entropy and you’re confusing the two. Humans and bee’s aren’t really creating order, they are slowing disorder, if that makes sense?
Can’t remember where I saw it, but there was a study once of someone trying to create life in a lab using what they believed to be all the essential minerals, conditions, etc. for anything to have sparked into creation. At the end of the day, they were not able to artificially create life, but one of the scientists arrived at the hypothesis that maybe it was because they were going about it all wrong.
They were trying to bring life / order out of disorder, but, in the grand scheme of things, life is one of the most destructive forces around. For as much as we build, we also destroy and consume. That scientist’s experiment failed because his parameters are wrong – life, and humans in particular, are actually the fastest way toward entropy and disorder.
It is a problem that is really one of the biggest mysteries in science. Best possible answer in short is To take first into account 2 things. Space is expanding and gravity. Besides, there is a tendancy of systems To become dissipative structures of entropy. In a way, things gather To create entropy Faster than let alone slowly. For example, a gaz cloud contracting heats up, and stars are great dissipative structures
There are a lot of people who take this question and answer it by pointing to God.
/u/AAVale likely has the best answer you can get, since in the end its impossible to know how we started with any energy at all. There’s a hypothesis out there called the Big Crunch iirc, which tries to give existence a cyclical framing by saying that the universe will eventually stop expanding and begin to contract, bringing everything together for another Big Bang. But really its all speculation, all stories meant to give some kind of answer to something ultimately unknowable.
Not a physicist. It seems you underestimate the time it takes to get to state. The 2nd law of thermodynamics says in a closed system entropy can only increase until a equilibrium where no interaction can happen anymore and entropy stops increasing. It doesn’t say how that state is reached and how long it will take. Keep in mind that an equilibrium doesn’t mean uniformity. When entropy stops increasing that just means the state of the system stops changing.
In our solar system the sun creates the most entropy because of its size and the amount of fusion. But it will take several billion years for it to become a white dwarf and even then it will probably continue sending out light for many billion years.
It’s not a bad question at all, and the answer is fraught with unsolved problems. In short, the answer is: Because for some reason the universe started off at a state of very low entropy, and has been steadily evolving to a state of higher entropy ever since. We have planets and stars and people and the internet because we’re living in a time when there is still plenty of free energy (not free as in beer) to be had. That will change, but slowly and over a scale of something like 10^100 years.
Eventually though, assuming current trends continue, and assuming that protons decay, the universe will be a relatively uniform field of photons of a relatively uniform energy/temperature. Nothing will be left, nothing will be left to do anything with, and barring some kind of random fluctuation, that will be that.
We’re all just borrowing energy against that day, moving it from here to there, with less and less to show for it, and more and more heat. That is however, not a problem on the order of human lives, or even the likely lifetime of humanity as a species.
You might enjoy this comic based on a Isaac Asimov short story, which more or less asks this question and posits a somewhat fantastical answer:
Edit: HOWEVER… protons may not decay, in which case some atoms would be stable even on very long time scales. It’s also possible that the universe will cease its accelerating expansion and being to contract, or that our vacuum will decay. Lots of possibilities for the future exist.
Edit 2: It’s great to see so many old and new Asimov fans here. Cheers to all of you!
This is actually one of the major questions of philosophy of physics! I will come back to answer this in detail at some other time
Because we aren’t *”there”* yet.
**This** is between the big bang and the big nothing. Its like we are all in a car currently on a road trip, from something to nothing.
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