dvunkannon
Posts: 1377
Joined: June 2008
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| Quote (Zachriel @ Feb. 21 2011,07:50) | | Quote (CeilingCat @ Feb. 21 2011,00:46) | | Quote (Zachriel @ Feb. 20 2011,08:18) | Second Law of Thermodynamics
R.I.P.
| Quote | | Granville Sewell: we have to conclude that the second law has in fact been violated here. |
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Granville says that the preprint of his Magnum Tardus is here.
I must say that reading it, I get the feeling that I'm in the presence of something much bigger, much stronger and much, much stupider than I can fully comprehend. |
It equivocates on "order". Sunlight is highly ordered for the purposes of thermodynamics. Also, the Second Law is a statement of what won't happen, not what will. The Second Law doesn't require computers to assemble, but if they do, then the work has to be paid for, with inevitable losses.
Rather odd to overthrow a simple physical observation in a mathematics journal. The observation remains regardless of the fancy maths. |
Love the age of Granville's references (except his own). Not that there is anything wrong with that... though it does inform his opinion of whether OOL is improbable. He might want to talk with the Privileged Planet crew about that.
His continued reference to nuclear reactors, aircraft carriers, and digital computers is a cute strawman/goalpost move. The basic molecular components of life can literally RAIN OUT OF THE SKY and yet F-18 strike aircraft can be vastly improbable. Any planet that can get from the RNA World to photosynthesis before losing its water is probably going to be Earthlike for billions of years, meaning single cells under an oxygen atmosphere, not aircraft carriers.
But no one cares about the extreme improbability of specific events like F-18s or Paris Hilton being famous. We care about the much larger class of events called life.
As Zachriel pointed out, the sunlight we get flowing through the boundary is highly ordered. It isn't spread uniformly across the spectrum from radio waves to gamma rays. Granville never goes so far as to estimate the difference between total influx from the sun and total order growth represented by billions of years of evolution. But others have, and the resources win, hands down.
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2008/11/entropy-and-evo.html
Sewell will never engage this calculation.
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I’m referring to evolution, not changes in allele frequencies. - Cornelius Hunter
I’m not an evolutionist, I’m a change in allele frequentist! - Nakashima
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