quote:
Bluejay writes:
What can we say to him? Everything that possibly can be said already has been said, all to no avail. Yet, every time someone whats to discuss the Laws of Thermodynamics on EvC, they will invariably have to deal with Buzsaw, and the debate will degenerate into yet another vain attempt to explain the most basic of thermodynamics concepts to him.
You poor souls -- my heart bleeds for you, in that there are dissenting POVs to yours and that of the majority.
This isn't about a "dissenting POV." It's about a lack of comprehension of basic physics.
As an example: a frequent Creationist argument is that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics refutes evolution because entropy always increases in a closed system.
The response, of course, is that the Earth is
not a closed system - there's a rather large fusion/fission reactor pouring energy into the Earth constantly. We call it the Sun. Overall entropy for the system as a whole still increases as per the Laws of Thermodynamics, but the entropy of Earth alone is artificially
decreased by the input of energy from the Sun.
I don't know if you've ever used this argument, Buz, but you
do tend to interject in discussions that involve the Laws of Thermodynamics and basically frustrate everyone else with your insistence that you
do understand thermodynamics when your arguments indicate you do
not. That's not a "different POV," that's just you arguing from a position of ignorance with an arrogant insistence that you are just as competent on the subject as, say, cavediver and Son Goku,
actual physicists with degrees and everything. That's not arrogance, it's simply a fact that a person with a physics degree is likely to better understand physics than a layperson, and when the physics PhD says you aren't understanding the physics model, you
just might not be understanding it as well as you think you are.
You don't need a degree in these things to debate them, but when someone who has studied the subject for a good portion of their life says that you are misrepresenting something, it's simply common sense to listen to them.
You've stated it well: "Everything that possibly can be said already has been said, all to no avail."
Perhaps not everything that can be said, but there's certainly a brick wall you carry around for us to beat our heads on.
If the time comes when perhaps you can come up with a new line other than, "we don't know," when it comes to things like where all energy, matter and forces came from relative to the BBT and the LoT which says no energy is created or destroyed, then you might begin making sense to logical folks like Buzsaw.
Exactly why is "we don't know"
illogical?
Further, do you have
evidence that matter and energy were at one time created or destroyed? The Big Bang doesn't say they were. You've never, that I've seen, provided any reference to say that the Big Bang model
does say that matter and energy were created.
This is where the frustration comes in, Buz. You insist that a scientific model says something that it
does not say, and argue from that position. It's a basic strawman based out of your lack of understanding regarding the Big Bang model.
The Big Bang model says that as you look at the Universe, the dimensions of height, length and width are all smaller in the past. As you approach T=0, length, width and height also approach zero. The four dimensions are intimately tied together in this way, in the same way that time and the spacial dimensions are tied with regard to the speed of light (see time dialation and general relativity). Because the volume of teh Universe was smaller in the past and the amount of energy and matter in the Universe were constant (becasue matter and energy
cannot be created or destroyed), the mass/energy density of teh universe was much greater, resulting in many things including increased temperature. The closer you get to T=0, the smaller, hotter, and more dense the Universe is. As you approach T=0, the volume also approaches 0, meaning that the density and resultant heat approach the infinite. Current models of the Universe that extrapolate these properties forward in time from T=0 result in a Universe that looks rather like ours does. Models like this have successfully predicted the existence of the COsmic Microwave Background, which is basically the leftover heat of the entire Universe from when the whole thing was so hot and dense. Predictions made by the Big Bang model have proven to be highly accurate.
At
no point in time did the mass/energy of teh universe
not exist. There was no violation of Thermodynamics. All of the models in fact
depend on the mass/energy of the Universe remaining constant, because that's what causes the density and thus heat to increase as the volume shrinks closer to T=0.
Only Creationists interpret the Big Bang to mean Creation
ex nihilo. It's
projection of your own beliefs, not an actual representation of the science.
No cosmologist claims that the Big Bang created mass and energy
ex nihilo.
If you want to discuss this, feel free to make a new thread out of it. If you do so, and you insist that the Big Bang does involve the creation of the mass/energy of the Universe, you'll need to point out the specific point in time at which the mass/energy did not exist. If you want to question where the Universe
itself comes from, we simpy have insufficient data to make any comment. It may simply exist on its own, it may be the result of other natural processes in some greater multiverse, it may have had a Creator, we simply don't know. And it's not
illogical to admit as much.
™ Version 4.2
