so that every physical process, big and small, is governed by the 2nd law and the other physical laws. Admittedly, this is a bald assertion without evidence,
Woah, there bubs, didn't you just say:
So far, all I'm getting from you guys are posts like this one. You've made a conclusion without an explanation. I'm not interested in posts without analysis and explanation.
So are you saying you aren't interested in
your own posts???
That would certainly explain your reticence to test your own grande claims in relation to Temperate's Challenge.
but some things can be known without evidence and relied on to a 100% degree of certainty.
I hope for your sake you never get e-mail scams in your inbox.
When a mathematician and scientist seeks to create a law of the universe, like the second law, they formulate the law exactly like the Supreme Court--by narrowly tailoring the law to a specific set of facts.
Honestly, where do you get this stuff? Do they constrain the system to explain it? Yes. Does that make it such that you, the uninformed on the topic, can come along and redefine it to your liking? No.
To keep the law from coming under attack, they defined the law in such a way as to preclude any possibility that the law would not apply to every conceivable system in the universe.
I
really think you should go back and learn where the Second Law comes from. It comes from understanding the efficiency in HEAT ENGINES. Really it is just that fundamental.
Please go read Fermi's book on Thermodynamics. Pay special attention to page 30:
Postulate of Kelvin:
"A transformation whose only final result is to transform into work heat extracted from a source which is at the same temperature throughout is impossible"
Postulate of Clausius:
"A transformation whose only final result is to transfer heat from a body at a given temperature to a body at a higher temperature is impossible"
In my previous post, I went beyond the strict confines of the 2nd Law as applied by physicists.
And when you go beyond the strict confines of the boundaries of the Law you fall right off the cliff. YOU are not, sorry to tell you this, God. You are a mere person. You may not understand how science is really done or why we even
need the Second Law. You extrapolate off into the aether until you are so far removed from the Second Law that you no longer are saying anything related to the second law.
First, I said the 2nd Law also applies not just to things like heat engines but to every conceivable system with any semblence of order in the entire universe.
Indeed, but it
starts with heat engines.
I care far more about the practical application of the law than the simplistic academic construction of the 2nd Law.
But see, True_blue, you have to
start from an academic understanding of the Second Law.
I must disagree that your statement that the 2nd law only works in a closed system.
Well, please do explain why just about every statement of the Second Law that defines the boundary of a system read something like this:
2. Any system which is free of external influences becomes more disordered with time. This disorder can be expressed in terms of the quantity called entropy. (
SOURCE)
The total energy, including heat, in a (closed) system is conserved (
SOURCE)
The entropy of an isolated system remains constant or increases. (
SOURCE)
For an isolated system, any change over time in
S is either positive or zero, that is:
ΔS > or = 0 (
SOURCE)
Now of course, truly isolated systems are pretty hard to come by, but this is where it becomes important for
you to tell us specifically
why you think some of these topics are sufficiently closed systems that they somehow mean there is a supernatural force driving them or responsible for them somehow.
We appear to have two competing "hypotheses":
1. True_Blue's Hypothesis: Life is so complex it must violate the Second Law unless there is an external (supernatural) means by which it is sustained.
2. Science's Hypothesis: The fact that life is sustained indicates it is indeed
not a sufficiently closed system. Hence it is not in violation of the Second Law.
Here's the data we have for the Science Hypothesis:
A. Energy is constantly being introduced into our bodies.
B. Fuel and matter transfer easily across our "physical boundaries" when we eat and excrete
C. Sunlight provides energy to the earth to drive many of the processes that lie at the base of almost every food-chain.
NOW: Here's a challenge for
you (Don't worry, I know you won't or can't take it so I'm not expecting you to rise to this challenge):
PROVIDE evidence that life is a SUFFICIENTLY CLOSED SYSTEM such that it is impossible that it can function owing to its being in violation of the Second Law.
Please show how:
i. There is no energy going into or coming out of a living being.
ii. There is no food going into or coming out of a living being.
iii. The sun is not providing energy to the planet
iv. The ability for animals and plants to
metabolize is impossible because there is no increase in entropy in the universe during their metabolism.
I don't actually expect you to be able to prove your point or make a reasonably coherent
scientifically robust argument. I suspect you'll come back with more rhetoric, analogies and excuses as to why you don't have to do the same things scientists have to do when they make a claim.
But that's OK. You aren't a scientist and you don't have the scientific discipline to be able to handle that level of "competition". We all have to live with it in our daily lives, but you are insulated from it. You get to spout and pontificate all you like and when the going gets tough you can just walk away from it.
It works on a practical level only if the system is "materially closed", and as applied to abiogenesis and the enormous complexity of even a simple protein or DNA segment, the 2nd Law is truly overwhelming.
This should be easy for you then. Please show how the apparent complexity of life is rendered impossible. Remember, you actually have to "leak test" the system you are looking at to make sure it is sufficiently closed so that the pesky scientists can't come along and point out that there is energy/matter being exchanged through this or that point.
All the sunlight in the universe does nothing to make abiogenesis more likely.
Sorry but you cannot unilaterally discount an energy source in this exercise.
Remember our sun produces 3.8 x 10[sup]26[/sup] joules/second of energy.
The earth receives about 1.74x10[sup]15[/sup] watts of energy from the sun at the upper atmosphere. Approximately 30% is reflected back into space. (
SOURCE).
That's a large amount of energy.
It cannot be ignored in this exercise. If you wish to ignore it then I highly recommend you don't go out to the beach on a sunny day. It is sufficient energy to drive the weather systems and surface waves on the world's oceans and cause massive burning of the skin without sufficient sunscreen on a sunny day. (Maybe you've never had a sunburn).
Only a force with greater power than the 2nd Law can void entropy and allow the creation of life, and that force is God--a creative, loving, and powerful being.
Yes, we understand, you love God. Excellent. Good for you. Now can you prove that God is the ONLY reasonable explanation? Remember you have to prove the systems you are talking about are sufficiently closed to be clearly in violation of the Second Law
without God.
Thaumaturgy, I recognize this thread and this conversation is a spiritual debate more than a scientific debate.
No, it's only spiritual for
you because you are incapable of handling the
science. For me it's a science debate.
Whenever science is applied to religion, a person's religious convictions kick in, regardless of their viewpoints on science.
Only if they can't handle the science.
It overwhelms a person's capacity to reason objectively.
Only if they can't handle the science.
From the get-go, before I ever posted on CF, I knew that threads such as these would only influence someone who is genuinely undecided, those who have already decided would wither move ever so slightly toward my view or harden their viewpoints even more. Those are my expectations--I do not expect some sort of ideal Platonic discourse.
No, you expected people to just swallow your unevidenced claims whole. Sorry you can't handle the science, but this is what scientists do. If you can't run with the big dogs, as they say, stay on the porch.