The Second Law and Cosmology
Abstract
I use cosmology examples to illustrate that the second law of thermodynamics is not old and tired, but alive and kicking, continuing to stimulate interesting research on really big puzzles. The question "Why is the entropy so low?" (despite the second law) suggests that our observable universe is merely a small and rather uniform patch in a vastly larger space stretched out by cosmological inflation. The question "Why is the entropy so high" (compared to the complexity required to describe many candidate "theories of everything") independently suggests that physical reality is much larger than the part we can observe.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0904.3931,
title = {The Second Law and Cosmology},
author = {Max Tegmark},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0904.3931},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Transcript of talk at the MIT Keenan Symposium; video available at http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/513, including slides and animations