AnderDethsky
/̵͇̿̿/'̿'̿ ̿ ̿̿ ̿̿ ̿̿(╥﹏╥)
- Oct 19, 2024
- 100
Many people have heard that our universe is about 13.8 billion years old. And that it came into existence as a result of the Big Bang. But the question here is, what do we call "the universe" and what does "The Beginning" mean? When you hear the phrase "The universe came from nothing", it rather means "not from nothing" but from something we don't know how to describe. Also, when we talk about the age of the universe, we are only talking about the period from the beginning of the Big Bang to the present day. But that doesn't mean that there was nothing before the Big Bang.
The exact same thing applies not only to time, but to space itself. The universe is supposed to have been concentrated into an infinitesimal point. At the time of the Big Bang, it sort of had a finite size, like less than one atom or whatever they usually say in popular science shows. But we're only talking about the visible part of the universe. So it doesn't mean at all that the universe wasn't infinite at the time of the Big Bang. In fact, all the evidence tells us that the universe is infinite. Which means that it was much denser, but it was still infinite. And infinity is one of those things that you shouldn't think about too much.
You might ask, what's the point of all this?
Oh, guys, I think we are so used to hearing from religion and believers in God different scares about not the most pleasant afterlife: purgatory, circles of hell, limbo - what only punishments after death were not invented by believers in the spiritual world. And, of course, few of us expected that science would ever will start claiming something similar. Science (
), at its current level of development is really capable of scaring us no worse, if not more than any religion, by the fact that we will LITERALLY suffer forever.
To feel it for yourself for sure we'll have to start from afar, there's a lot of things to clear up. But Soon all this will become a little clearer to you.
In August 1881, the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was walking along Lake Silvaplana near a village in Switzerland and stopped to rest near a small pyramidal rock.
At that very moment, the philosopher was struck by a thought that almost crushed him, as he would later put it in a letter to his friend and assistant Heinrich Köselitz:
"And thought has risen on my horizon, the like of which I have not yet known."
This moment was so important that it was immortalized by this very plaque on the rock you see. The quote on it literally reads:
"I stopped beside a mighty pyramidal block of stone which reared itself up...It was there that this thought came to me."
Nietzsche realized that the idea that struck him must be the most important idea in his philosophical teachings, but at the same time the most horror, so horror that he was very reluctant to talk about it at all. Many people who knew him well reported later that Nietzsche spoke of this idea in a whisper and implied by it some unheard-of discovery.
We will get to the very thought that illuminated Nietzsche, but before we do, for now:
You know that the farther away an object is from us, the smaller it appears to us, right? For example, from a bird's-eye view, people appear as ants. So: the same thing happens in the nearest part of space: the Sun is 400 times larger than the Moon, but at the moment of total solar eclipse the Moon almost perfectly covers it, because it is 400 times closer to us than the Sun. And this whole pattern with the change in size depending on the distance is maintained over billions of light years. That is, the farther away a galaxy is, the smaller it appears to us, as one would expect.
But at some point, at a distance of about 14 billion light years, suddenly the exact opposite pattern begins to work, namely that the farther away an object is, the larger it appears. And this has one simple but slightly unfamiliar explanation.
To begin with, though it is hard to believe, but looking at any star or galaxy in the night sky, you right at this very moment experience the gravitational influence of this object, even if this object is removed from you at a great distance. If you see it, its gravitational field reaches you because gravity propagates at the speed of light. Not only do you see the Sun as it was 8 minutes and 20 seconds ago, our entire planet is not attracted to where the Sun is now, but to where it was 8 minutes and 20 seconds ago. The peculiarity of gravity is that although it weakens with distance, it never reaches zero.
I am not sure that the gravitational influence of very distant objects is even somehow possible to register, unless it is a merger of, for example, two black holes, because gravity as a force is so weak that even for example the force of magnetism, for which magnets are held on the refrigerator door, can so easily overcome the gravitational force of the whole Earth. However, believe me, the gravitational force would be enough to make all massive objects collapse sooner or later. You would never be able to get far enough away from an object to not be gravitationally affected by it on some level. Meanwhile, our universe is not collapsing. In fact, something quite the opposite is happening: we don't know why, but the universe is expanding and doing so at an accelerating rate. And since physicists have no idea what makes the universe expand, they usually refer to any hypothetical phenomenon that could accelerate the expansion of the universe as dark energy.
Yes, yes, if you've already watched various space videos, you're probably sick of hearing about dark energy by now. But, dark energy is apparently one of the most disgusting phenomena that exist in the world.
13.8 billion years ago, Somewhere near the very, very tentative beginning, we discovered a paradoxical moment in which for some reason we don't fully understand why the expansion of the Universe just suddenly accelerated, and the area that was to become our observable Universe increased in size by more than 100 trillion trillion times. This happened much faster than the speed of light, because there is no limit to the rate of expansion of space itself. To be at least somewhat clear, a section of the universe no bigger than your monitor screen expanded to the size of the observable universe in less time than it takes a quark to cross from one side of a proton to the other. But then this monstrous expansion, again for some unknown reason, slowed down. And this frenzy that occurred is called the "cosmic inflation".
We don't know for sure if that expansion in the beginning is related to the expansion we are seeing now, but most importantly, we have no reason to say that cosmic inflation can't happen again, for example, right now as you are reading this. We wouldn't even have time to realize anything if such a thing happened. However, the mere disappearance of humanity would not be the worst option. You might ask, what could be more important to humanity than the death of all of humanity?
You have certainly heard that the Universe is expanding not from any particular point, but at all points simultaneously. And so the farther away an object is, the faster it moves away. If it is not clear, here is a simple example: stretching the popular at some time slinky toy:
Each of its coils is only a finger's width away from the neighboring one, while the two coils at its opposite ends are more than a meter apart. Now imagine that this slinky is infinite. This is the same thing that happens to galaxies in the Universe. Thanks to this mechanism, distant galaxies can move away from us at the speed of light or even faster, because let me remind you that no prohibitions apply to the speed of space expansion. And the expansion of space is the reason why, at a certain distance from us, objects start to look bigger the farther away they are from us. This happens for the same reason that we can observe objects that are currently moving away from us at superluminal speeds due to the expansion of space. At the time these quoted "FTL" objects "emitted" the snapshot, they were much closer and took up more space in the sky because the Universe itself was "denser".
Despite the fact that these objects are now much farther away, the "snapshot" they sent us has been traveling all this time, and because the expansion rate of the Universe slowed down for a while, as you may recall, that snapshot has now reached us, showing a ghostly image of a much closer and much older object. Thus, the further into the past we look, the more "compact" the universe we observe. So a galaxy that is now farther away than another galaxy could have been closer at the time the light was emitted.
But gradually the images of all the most distant galaxies that we can see will fade and disappear forever because, as you realized, the color that they're emitting now will never reach us, unless, of course, the expansion slows down. And that's something that's only getting worse by the second.
And those galaxies that remain - although we will be able to see their former light for a while, any new light they create from this very moment will never reach us again.
Any information about these places is now fundamentally inaccessible to us, even with however advanced the technology. We will simply be causally unconnected to them.
And this will happen to every galaxy. If the force of space expansion can never overcome the gravitational force within galaxies, then gradually each galaxy or local group of galaxies will slowly fall into darkness, left all alone. Gradually, the existing stars will burn out, particles will disintegrate, black holes will vaporize due to Hawking radiation, and the Universe will be just an empty space, in which there is only dark energy, providing exponential expansion during eternity.
It should be noted, dark energy is the opposite of gravity. That is, the more filled space is, the stronger the gravitational force. And the more empty space is, the stronger dark energy is. Because, although it's counter-intuitive, its density per square meter does not decrease with the expansion of space. So you see what's happening?
As the expansion of the Universe accelerates, there will be more and more empty space, which in turn will lead to an acceleration of the expansion process, which will lead to more empty space, and so on ad infinitum. Events in some places in the universe will not be able to influence events in others. Eventually, the universe will be an empty space with only dark energy to support its exponential expansion. This is called De Sitter space, and according to physicists, it is evolving in the same way that the very early Cosmos did during the inflation stage. But unlike inflation, this expansion will last forever. Can such an infinite expansion be considered the end of the universe? The question here is what do we call "the universe" and what does "the end" mean?
You see, if, for example, we consider the concept of time, it turns out that it is one of the unsolved riddles of physics. No one knows why it should flow in a particular direction. There are only a few assumptions, called Arrows of Time, and one of them comes from thermodynamics.
Look, are these particles moving into the future or into the past?
You don't know the answer, because no matter which way I play this animation, the laws by which these particles move will remain the same.
It is believed that physical processes at the microscopic level are either completely or mostly symmetrical in time. If the direction of time were reversed, changing the direction of time in the equations would have no effect on the outcome. The theoretical statements that describe them would remain true. And that's what you've just observed.
Now look at something else: does the paint separate from the water or mix with it?
Well, here you know exactly where the past is and where the future is, because already at the macroscopic level there is an obvious direction of time. So it seems the only part of physics that cares about the direction of time is entropy.
Why did your closet become completely chaotic again some time after you put it in order? Imagine your closet and all possible ways to arrange things beautifully in it. Now imagine how you can arrange them in an ugly way.
Since there are many more combinations of ugly ways, the probability that the system, called the "storeroom with things", will gradually become more and more chaotic is higher than the probability that the system will continue to maintain some kind of orderly form. Because of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that in an isolated system, the total entropy cannot decrease. Sooner or later, your closet will be in a mess again. You can say, "Well, I folded things, which means I lowered the entropy inside the closet. Have I violated the laws of physics?" — No, because the closet is not an isolated system.
Also you spent a lot of energy cleaning, digesting food and releasing carbon dioxide, and the air in the room was heated by the convection of sweat. Thus, the total entropy increased even more.
By the way, that's why, if you want to cool the room, leave the refrigerator door open, and as a result, the room will heat up, not cool down. And I remember being puzzled when they said on TV that air conditioners contribute to global warming.
Every attempt we make to order some part of the world creates disorder in another part of the world, usually in the form of heat. And of course we don't know this for sure yet, but perhaps it is entropy that creates what we call time.
If we extrapolate the second thermodynamic law to the entire Universe - Everything you see now: galaxies, stars, people - it's all the result of the fact that for some reason the Universe at the moment of the Big Bang was in an improbably ordered state, and the gradual movement from that initially ordered state of the Universe to a disordered state is what we experience as the movement of time.
It's like mixing paint in water. And just as we couldn't tell which way time was flowing in the frames with the paint already fully mixed in the water, in the same way, in a Universe that has come to maximum entropy, the concept of a Time Arrow ceases to exist. The fact that you feel the Arrow of Time pointing in the same direction indicates that the Universe has not yet reached the equilibrium state that the law of entropy seeks. Upon reaching the De-sitter state, the universe will have maximum entropy because from that point on, the total entropy of the universe will no longer be able to increase. Which means nothing else will be able to happen in the sense we are used to, because for something to happen, energy must move from one place to another. But, alas, the paint in the water has completely dissolved.
Yes, although it's not entirely accurate, in a sense a synonym for the word "entropy" is "homogeneity". Given that the universe is expanding not from any point but at all points simultaneously, when it reaches exponential expansion, a sphere can be outlined around any, any point, beyond the boundary of which will be a forever hidden part of the cosmos, just as galaxies are hidden to us now, as I mentioned. And this has a name: the heat death of the universe.
You will ask: "Why do we even care? What makes you think it will be worse than your death or even the death of all of humanity? By the time heat death occurs, we will have been gone so long that it won't matter" This is where we get to what I was talking about at the beginning of the video. Because there's one thing that changes everything.
Ask yourself two questions:
And
The answer to both of those questions –
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Can I suffocate because all the oxygen in my room is concentrated in one far corner? In a finite amount of time, never. Entropy protects us from this situation because, as you remember, there are far more disordered states than ordered states. And it is unnatural for oxygen like any gas to be in such an ordered particular place. No investigator would even think of such a version of my demise.
But in fact, when we say the word "never", we often mean the word "usually". Decreasing disorder in the system is possible, it's just extremely unthinkably unlikely. Conventionally, if I sat in my room for an infinite amount of time, it would happen with 100% probability.
And a completely empty universe is only seemingly empty, because even where there are no particles, there are still quantum fields, which, as you probably know, never behave completely quietly. Quantum fields don't have a constant value, their value at any point in space is always jittering a little bit. The jitters are called quantum fluctuations, and they are nothing but the consequences of Heisenberg's uncertainty – famous principle in quantum mechanics.⠀
And at the quantum level, or even at larger scales, if you're willing to wait long enough, and by "long" I mean very very long, every now and then really strange things happen, driven by unpredictable fluctuations, leading to finally some part of the system suddenly moving to a state of lower entropy, lower homogeneity. Even if we believe that the universe had a beginning and that it is not infinite in space, nevertheless, in an expanding universe, time and space become so abundant that extremely, extremely unlikely events can and will occur with a hundred percent probability.
It is unlikely that an entire object, such as a piano, would spontaneously assemble in empty space. However, if you wait for a trillion trillion years, which is more than the age of the universe, you will see it appear right before your eyes. The lower probability of an event only tells us that we will have to wait longer until it happens . But if you have infinite space or infinite time, and certainly if you have both, then any however unlikely events will happen an infinite number of times.
The implications that we can deduce from the hypothesis of the heat death of the Universe are capable of horrifying, nay, numbing anyone who seriously considers them. The thought that pierced Nietzsche I mentioned at the beginning of the post. A few months after the epiphany, Nietzsche would write a book called "The Gay Science", where he very carefully touches on his idea at the very end, in the penultimate passage of the first edition of the book, which he would call "The greatest weight." It sounds like this:
The last passage of this book was called "Incipit Tragoedia", and this same passage will be the preface for the main work of Nietzsche's life - "Thus Spoke Zarathustra". A book for everyone and for no one. The basic idea of Thus Spoke Zarathustra was conceived as Eternal Recurrence
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The concept of Eternal Recurrence states: "Time in its endless flow, in certain periods, must inevitably repeat the same state of affairs".
And you know what? Even if Nietzsche was far from today's cosmological theories, his conclusion may be correct.
Because exactly this conclusion is physically possible, if we consider the origin of our universe and everything that is created in it as a result of random fluctuations that occurred in the ever-expanding space containing only dark energy. At some moment in this space due to quantum processes there is a jump to a very low-entropic state, and the universe appears, which then gradually comes again to its normal, high-entropic state, becoming again the same De Sitter space.
Of course, no one is saying that in every particular big bang the history of this universe will one-to-one repeat the history of our universe, but that is the horror of the concept of infinity. Having infinite time, sooner or later exactly our universe will repeat itself with any accuracy. And we will be here again, and it will happen an infinite number of times. And also, having infinite De Sitter space, big bangs evolving exactly in our Universe happen at every moment an infinite number of times.
We can also recall what else Nietzsche is well known for — his treatise on ubermensch - the superman. If you still don't know the quickest and most accurate test of whether you are a Nietzschean ubermensch , just ask yourself: are you ready to accept this model of the universe? That very passage from "The Gay Science" goes on to say that:
As we can see, an Ubermenschis, first of all, someone who has the courage to loudly and confidently say "Yes!" even to this world, which is so ruthless and does not give up hope of heavenly consolation.
Nietzsche is often called a nihilist philosopher. In my opinion, this is the most superficial thing that can be said about Nietzsche's philosophy. Compared to Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, if we translate it into our language, was a "pro-lifer". If the idea of the Eternal recurrence entails the meaninglessness of what is happening, then the doctrine of the Ubermensch was a call to become a kind of demand addressed to the human will, should be a call to the human race to finally find the strength to show such unthinkable courage to leave all the illusory hopes with which religion, science and philosophy have so far comforted, and to say "Yes" even to such a ruthless and senseless world in order to make sense of it. Such reflections can be classified as the most "pro-lifers" of all. And ironically, this very same "pro-life", this very same brightest expression of interest in life, morally pressed the philosopher the most, which eventually broke him.
For Nietzsche, who had a tragic fate, filled with pain and suffering mostly from physical ailments, his own theory of the Eternal Recurrence and the Ubermensch who was devastating, paralyzing, and absolutely terrifying. Perhaps that is why Nietzsche reveals his deepest idea directly in only one passage from "The Gay Science", in two passages from "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" once in "Ecce Homo" and once in "The Will to Power", as if he did not dare to face the idea. Eight years after that most illuminating and most fruitful period in his life, Nietzsche went mad. There are different versions of the reasons for this: drugs for insomnia, schizophrenia and so on. Someone even really believes that Nietzsche's madness was of psychogenic origin. Whatever the case, the disease did not retreat from the philosopher not a step. August 25, 1900 Nietzsche died in complete madness.
"I don't want to start this life over again. Where would I have found the strength to bear it? Creating a superman and looking up to him, hearing him say "Yes!" to life, I myself, alas, have only tried." he writes in his notes (ich will das leben nicht wieder)
The exact same thing applies not only to time, but to space itself. The universe is supposed to have been concentrated into an infinitesimal point. At the time of the Big Bang, it sort of had a finite size, like less than one atom or whatever they usually say in popular science shows. But we're only talking about the visible part of the universe. So it doesn't mean at all that the universe wasn't infinite at the time of the Big Bang. In fact, all the evidence tells us that the universe is infinite. Which means that it was much denser, but it was still infinite. And infinity is one of those things that you shouldn't think about too much.
You might ask, what's the point of all this?
Oh, guys, I think we are so used to hearing from religion and believers in God different scares about not the most pleasant afterlife: purgatory, circles of hell, limbo - what only punishments after death were not invented by believers in the spiritual world. And, of course, few of us expected that science would ever will start claiming something similar. Science (
just some reasonable assumptions
To feel it for yourself for sure we'll have to start from afar, there's a lot of things to clear up. But Soon all this will become a little clearer to you.
In August 1881, the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was walking along Lake Silvaplana near a village in Switzerland and stopped to rest near a small pyramidal rock.
At that very moment, the philosopher was struck by a thought that almost crushed him, as he would later put it in a letter to his friend and assistant Heinrich Köselitz:
"And thought has risen on my horizon, the like of which I have not yet known."
This moment was so important that it was immortalized by this very plaque on the rock you see. The quote on it literally reads:
"I stopped beside a mighty pyramidal block of stone which reared itself up...It was there that this thought came to me."
Nietzsche realized that the idea that struck him must be the most important idea in his philosophical teachings, but at the same time the most horror, so horror that he was very reluctant to talk about it at all. Many people who knew him well reported later that Nietzsche spoke of this idea in a whisper and implied by it some unheard-of discovery.
We will get to the very thought that illuminated Nietzsche, but before we do, for now:
You know that the farther away an object is from us, the smaller it appears to us, right? For example, from a bird's-eye view, people appear as ants. So: the same thing happens in the nearest part of space: the Sun is 400 times larger than the Moon, but at the moment of total solar eclipse the Moon almost perfectly covers it, because it is 400 times closer to us than the Sun. And this whole pattern with the change in size depending on the distance is maintained over billions of light years. That is, the farther away a galaxy is, the smaller it appears to us, as one would expect.
But at some point, at a distance of about 14 billion light years, suddenly the exact opposite pattern begins to work, namely that the farther away an object is, the larger it appears. And this has one simple but slightly unfamiliar explanation.
To begin with, though it is hard to believe, but looking at any star or galaxy in the night sky, you right at this very moment experience the gravitational influence of this object, even if this object is removed from you at a great distance. If you see it, its gravitational field reaches you because gravity propagates at the speed of light. Not only do you see the Sun as it was 8 minutes and 20 seconds ago, our entire planet is not attracted to where the Sun is now, but to where it was 8 minutes and 20 seconds ago. The peculiarity of gravity is that although it weakens with distance, it never reaches zero.
I am not sure that the gravitational influence of very distant objects is even somehow possible to register, unless it is a merger of, for example, two black holes, because gravity as a force is so weak that even for example the force of magnetism, for which magnets are held on the refrigerator door, can so easily overcome the gravitational force of the whole Earth. However, believe me, the gravitational force would be enough to make all massive objects collapse sooner or later. You would never be able to get far enough away from an object to not be gravitationally affected by it on some level. Meanwhile, our universe is not collapsing. In fact, something quite the opposite is happening: we don't know why, but the universe is expanding and doing so at an accelerating rate. And since physicists have no idea what makes the universe expand, they usually refer to any hypothetical phenomenon that could accelerate the expansion of the universe as dark energy.
Yes, yes, if you've already watched various space videos, you're probably sick of hearing about dark energy by now. But, dark energy is apparently one of the most disgusting phenomena that exist in the world.
13.8 billion years ago, Somewhere near the very, very tentative beginning, we discovered a paradoxical moment in which for some reason we don't fully understand why the expansion of the Universe just suddenly accelerated, and the area that was to become our observable Universe increased in size by more than 100 trillion trillion times. This happened much faster than the speed of light, because there is no limit to the rate of expansion of space itself. To be at least somewhat clear, a section of the universe no bigger than your monitor screen expanded to the size of the observable universe in less time than it takes a quark to cross from one side of a proton to the other. But then this monstrous expansion, again for some unknown reason, slowed down. And this frenzy that occurred is called the "cosmic inflation".
We don't know for sure if that expansion in the beginning is related to the expansion we are seeing now, but most importantly, we have no reason to say that cosmic inflation can't happen again, for example, right now as you are reading this. We wouldn't even have time to realize anything if such a thing happened. However, the mere disappearance of humanity would not be the worst option. You might ask, what could be more important to humanity than the death of all of humanity?
You have certainly heard that the Universe is expanding not from any particular point, but at all points simultaneously. And so the farther away an object is, the faster it moves away. If it is not clear, here is a simple example: stretching the popular at some time slinky toy:
Each of its coils is only a finger's width away from the neighboring one, while the two coils at its opposite ends are more than a meter apart. Now imagine that this slinky is infinite. This is the same thing that happens to galaxies in the Universe. Thanks to this mechanism, distant galaxies can move away from us at the speed of light or even faster, because let me remind you that no prohibitions apply to the speed of space expansion. And the expansion of space is the reason why, at a certain distance from us, objects start to look bigger the farther away they are from us. This happens for the same reason that we can observe objects that are currently moving away from us at superluminal speeds due to the expansion of space. At the time these quoted "FTL" objects "emitted" the snapshot, they were much closer and took up more space in the sky because the Universe itself was "denser".
Despite the fact that these objects are now much farther away, the "snapshot" they sent us has been traveling all this time, and because the expansion rate of the Universe slowed down for a while, as you may recall, that snapshot has now reached us, showing a ghostly image of a much closer and much older object. Thus, the further into the past we look, the more "compact" the universe we observe. So a galaxy that is now farther away than another galaxy could have been closer at the time the light was emitted.
But gradually the images of all the most distant galaxies that we can see will fade and disappear forever because, as you realized, the color that they're emitting now will never reach us, unless, of course, the expansion slows down. And that's something that's only getting worse by the second.
And those galaxies that remain - although we will be able to see their former light for a while, any new light they create from this very moment will never reach us again.
Any information about these places is now fundamentally inaccessible to us, even with however advanced the technology. We will simply be causally unconnected to them.
And this will happen to every galaxy. If the force of space expansion can never overcome the gravitational force within galaxies, then gradually each galaxy or local group of galaxies will slowly fall into darkness, left all alone. Gradually, the existing stars will burn out, particles will disintegrate, black holes will vaporize due to Hawking radiation, and the Universe will be just an empty space, in which there is only dark energy, providing exponential expansion during eternity.
It should be noted, dark energy is the opposite of gravity. That is, the more filled space is, the stronger the gravitational force. And the more empty space is, the stronger dark energy is. Because, although it's counter-intuitive, its density per square meter does not decrease with the expansion of space. So you see what's happening?
As the expansion of the Universe accelerates, there will be more and more empty space, which in turn will lead to an acceleration of the expansion process, which will lead to more empty space, and so on ad infinitum. Events in some places in the universe will not be able to influence events in others. Eventually, the universe will be an empty space with only dark energy to support its exponential expansion. This is called De Sitter space, and according to physicists, it is evolving in the same way that the very early Cosmos did during the inflation stage. But unlike inflation, this expansion will last forever. Can such an infinite expansion be considered the end of the universe? The question here is what do we call "the universe" and what does "the end" mean?
You see, if, for example, we consider the concept of time, it turns out that it is one of the unsolved riddles of physics. No one knows why it should flow in a particular direction. There are only a few assumptions, called Arrows of Time, and one of them comes from thermodynamics.
Look, are these particles moving into the future or into the past?
You don't know the answer, because no matter which way I play this animation, the laws by which these particles move will remain the same.
It is believed that physical processes at the microscopic level are either completely or mostly symmetrical in time. If the direction of time were reversed, changing the direction of time in the equations would have no effect on the outcome. The theoretical statements that describe them would remain true. And that's what you've just observed.
Now look at something else: does the paint separate from the water or mix with it?
Well, here you know exactly where the past is and where the future is, because already at the macroscopic level there is an obvious direction of time. So it seems the only part of physics that cares about the direction of time is entropy.
Why did your closet become completely chaotic again some time after you put it in order? Imagine your closet and all possible ways to arrange things beautifully in it. Now imagine how you can arrange them in an ugly way.
Since there are many more combinations of ugly ways, the probability that the system, called the "storeroom with things", will gradually become more and more chaotic is higher than the probability that the system will continue to maintain some kind of orderly form. Because of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that in an isolated system, the total entropy cannot decrease. Sooner or later, your closet will be in a mess again. You can say, "Well, I folded things, which means I lowered the entropy inside the closet. Have I violated the laws of physics?" — No, because the closet is not an isolated system.
Also you spent a lot of energy cleaning, digesting food and releasing carbon dioxide, and the air in the room was heated by the convection of sweat. Thus, the total entropy increased even more.
By the way, that's why, if you want to cool the room, leave the refrigerator door open, and as a result, the room will heat up, not cool down. And I remember being puzzled when they said on TV that air conditioners contribute to global warming.
Every attempt we make to order some part of the world creates disorder in another part of the world, usually in the form of heat. And of course we don't know this for sure yet, but perhaps it is entropy that creates what we call time.
If we extrapolate the second thermodynamic law to the entire Universe - Everything you see now: galaxies, stars, people - it's all the result of the fact that for some reason the Universe at the moment of the Big Bang was in an improbably ordered state, and the gradual movement from that initially ordered state of the Universe to a disordered state is what we experience as the movement of time.
It's like mixing paint in water. And just as we couldn't tell which way time was flowing in the frames with the paint already fully mixed in the water, in the same way, in a Universe that has come to maximum entropy, the concept of a Time Arrow ceases to exist. The fact that you feel the Arrow of Time pointing in the same direction indicates that the Universe has not yet reached the equilibrium state that the law of entropy seeks. Upon reaching the De-sitter state, the universe will have maximum entropy because from that point on, the total entropy of the universe will no longer be able to increase. Which means nothing else will be able to happen in the sense we are used to, because for something to happen, energy must move from one place to another. But, alas, the paint in the water has completely dissolved.
Yes, although it's not entirely accurate, in a sense a synonym for the word "entropy" is "homogeneity". Given that the universe is expanding not from any point but at all points simultaneously, when it reaches exponential expansion, a sphere can be outlined around any, any point, beyond the boundary of which will be a forever hidden part of the cosmos, just as galaxies are hidden to us now, as I mentioned. And this has a name: the heat death of the universe.
You will ask: "Why do we even care? What makes you think it will be worse than your death or even the death of all of humanity? By the time heat death occurs, we will have been gone so long that it won't matter" This is where we get to what I was talking about at the beginning of the video. Because there's one thing that changes everything.
Ask yourself two questions:
What happens when you have an infinite amount of time?
And
What happens when you have an infinite amount of space?
The answer to both of those questions –
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I̝̗͖̙̘̐͊̽̏́̅̅̊̉̎̚S̜͙̥̱̭̩̙̳̓͌̓́̇̓͛̅̚ É͙̙͔̤͎͈̭̱̭̓̀̀́̈̽̈́̅V̩̱̪̤̬̜̥͛̍̾͂̎̑̌̅̈E̙̦̙̥̮̿̓̔̄̇͆̋̅̆R̗͍̣̤͐͑̈̌͒̔̾ͅỴ̣̠͉̦͙́͋̒͗ͅT͚̳͉͈̿͂̔̀͂̌́͛̂̎H̱͕̤̥̆͗̅̽̆̇͂͆͑̆̅ͅĨ̫̗̝̣̘͙̝͓̠̆̉̓̂͊̉́̿͗̂ͅN͖̱̗̤̖͚͚̏̾͐̔̃̔̾͛G̘̙̯̭̟͖̖͍͔͈͎̀͋̒̂̀̌̾͊
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Can I suffocate because all the oxygen in my room is concentrated in one far corner? In a finite amount of time, never. Entropy protects us from this situation because, as you remember, there are far more disordered states than ordered states. And it is unnatural for oxygen like any gas to be in such an ordered particular place. No investigator would even think of such a version of my demise.
But in fact, when we say the word "never", we often mean the word "usually". Decreasing disorder in the system is possible, it's just extremely unthinkably unlikely. Conventionally, if I sat in my room for an infinite amount of time, it would happen with 100% probability.
And a completely empty universe is only seemingly empty, because even where there are no particles, there are still quantum fields, which, as you probably know, never behave completely quietly. Quantum fields don't have a constant value, their value at any point in space is always jittering a little bit. The jitters are called quantum fluctuations, and they are nothing but the consequences of Heisenberg's uncertainty – famous principle in quantum mechanics.⠀
And at the quantum level, or even at larger scales, if you're willing to wait long enough, and by "long" I mean very very long, every now and then really strange things happen, driven by unpredictable fluctuations, leading to finally some part of the system suddenly moving to a state of lower entropy, lower homogeneity. Even if we believe that the universe had a beginning and that it is not infinite in space, nevertheless, in an expanding universe, time and space become so abundant that extremely, extremely unlikely events can and will occur with a hundred percent probability.
It is unlikely that an entire object, such as a piano, would spontaneously assemble in empty space. However, if you wait for a trillion trillion years, which is more than the age of the universe, you will see it appear right before your eyes. The lower probability of an event only tells us that we will have to wait longer until it happens . But if you have infinite space or infinite time, and certainly if you have both, then any however unlikely events will happen an infinite number of times.
The implications that we can deduce from the hypothesis of the heat death of the Universe are capable of horrifying, nay, numbing anyone who seriously considers them. The thought that pierced Nietzsche I mentioned at the beginning of the post. A few months after the epiphany, Nietzsche would write a book called "The Gay Science", where he very carefully touches on his idea at the very end, in the penultimate passage of the first edition of the book, which he would call "The greatest weight." It sounds like this:
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live it once more and innumerable times more: and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"
The last passage of this book was called "Incipit Tragoedia", and this same passage will be the preface for the main work of Nietzsche's life - "Thus Spoke Zarathustra". A book for everyone and for no one. The basic idea of Thus Spoke Zarathustra was conceived as Eternal Recurrence
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The concept of Eternal Recurrence
states: "Time in its endless flow, in certain periods, must inevitably repeat the same state of affairs".And you know what? Even if Nietzsche was far from today's cosmological theories, his conclusion may be correct.
Because exactly this conclusion is physically possible, if we consider the origin of our universe and everything that is created in it as a result of random fluctuations that occurred in the ever-expanding space containing only dark energy. At some moment in this space due to quantum processes there is a jump to a very low-entropic state, and the universe appears, which then gradually comes again to its normal, high-entropic state, becoming again the same De Sitter space.
Of course, no one is saying that in every particular big bang the history of this universe will one-to-one repeat the history of our universe, but that is the horror of the concept of infinity. Having infinite time, sooner or later exactly our universe will repeat itself with any accuracy. And we will be here again, and it will happen an infinite number of times. And also, having infinite De Sitter space, big bangs evolving exactly in our Universe happen at every moment an infinite number of times.
We can also recall what else Nietzsche is well known for — his treatise on ubermensch - the superman. If you still don't know the quickest and most accurate test of whether you are a Nietzschean ubermensch , just ask yourself: are you ready to accept this model of the universe? That very passage from "The Gay Science" goes on to say that:
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as your are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more reverently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
As we can see, an Ubermenschis, first of all, someone who has the courage to loudly and confidently say "Yes!" even to this world, which is so ruthless and does not give up hope of heavenly consolation.
Nietzsche is often called a nihilist philosopher. In my opinion, this is the most superficial thing that can be said about Nietzsche's philosophy. Compared to Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, if we translate it into our language, was a "pro-lifer". If the idea of the Eternal recurrence entails the meaninglessness of what is happening, then the doctrine of the Ubermensch was a call to become a kind of demand addressed to the human will, should be a call to the human race to finally find the strength to show such unthinkable courage to leave all the illusory hopes with which religion, science and philosophy have so far comforted, and to say "Yes" even to such a ruthless and senseless world in order to make sense of it. Such reflections can be classified as the most "pro-lifers" of all. And ironically, this very same "pro-life", this very same brightest expression of interest in life, morally pressed the philosopher the most, which eventually broke him.
For Nietzsche, who had a tragic fate, filled with pain and suffering mostly from physical ailments, his own theory of the Eternal Recurrence and the Ubermensch who was devastating, paralyzing, and absolutely terrifying. Perhaps that is why Nietzsche reveals his deepest idea directly in only one passage from "The Gay Science", in two passages from "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" once in "Ecce Homo" and once in "The Will to Power", as if he did not dare to face the idea. Eight years after that most illuminating and most fruitful period in his life, Nietzsche went mad. There are different versions of the reasons for this: drugs for insomnia, schizophrenia and so on. Someone even really believes that Nietzsche's madness was of psychogenic origin. Whatever the case, the disease did not retreat from the philosopher not a step. August 25, 1900 Nietzsche died in complete madness.
"I don't want to start this life over again. Where would I have found the strength to bear it? Creating a superman and looking up to him, hearing him say "Yes!" to life, I myself, alas, have only tried." he writes in his notes (ich will das leben nicht wieder)
Dr Katherine (Katie) Mack is a theoretical astrophysicist who studies a range of questions in cosmology, the study of the universe from beginning to end. She currently holds the position of Assistant Professor of Physics at North Carolina State University, where she is also a member of the Leadership in Public Science Cluster. Throughout her career she has studied dark matter, the early universe, galaxy formation, black holes, cosmic strings, and the ultimate fate of the cosmos.
Fortunately for Nietzsche, and for all of us non-Superhumans, the Heat Death of the Universe, which implies the possibility of Eternal Recurrence, is only one of 5 assumptions of how the Universe will end, described in the book "The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)" by Katie.
This entire post was written under the inspiration of the same book.
And was also based on this video essay from an increasingly popular reviewer of similar concepts.
Fortunately for Nietzsche, and for all of us non-Superhumans, the Heat Death of the Universe, which implies the possibility of Eternal Recurrence, is only one of 5 assumptions of how the Universe will end, described in the book "The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)" by Katie.
This entire post was written under the inspiration of the same book.
And was also based on this video essay from an increasingly popular reviewer of similar concepts.
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