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Thermodynamics and the Big Bang
Improvolone
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm trying to apply the laws of thermodynamics to the big bang/creation of the universe. The goal isn't to use every law, but it would be nice.
First law: In any process, the total energy of the universe remains constant.
Okay, so energy can not be created or destroyed. Gotchya. So those four elements that composed the super dense speck of material that exploded into everything more or less contained everything that will ever be. What it contained has been changed through other forces into what we now see. So far so good?
Second law: The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.
Okay, so the longer an isolated system exists, the more chaotic it will become. The space that the single speck exploded into was an isolated system, and the longer this speck existed, the more entropy and chaotic it became. Thus, why the explosion occured (not what caused it clearly). Right?
Third law: As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant.
Okay, I don't think this can apply... but I'll take a leap of faith here. The universe, as it's expanding, is cooling down. Thus, there is a theoretical point at which point the universe has cooled down so much that the entropy and choas of the system becomes constant. If in theory this happens... what happens to the universe then? And wouldn't this contradict the first law?
Last but kinda first, the zeroth law: If two thermodynamic systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other.
If the point where everything originated was at thermodynamic equilibrium with the surrounding space, then there would have been no drastic temperature shifts causing the speck to expand, contract, and eventually explode everything into being.
If I'm wrong on anything here, please let me know. It's important for the finished concept that all the science be sound. I think I've done as much leg work as I can without consulting others.
So here we go, throwing myself into the wolverine pit...
First law: In any process, the total energy of the universe remains constant.
Okay, so energy can not be created or destroyed. Gotchya. So those four elements that composed the super dense speck of material that exploded into everything more or less contained everything that will ever be. What it contained has been changed through other forces into what we now see. So far so good?
Second law: The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.
Okay, so the longer an isolated system exists, the more chaotic it will become. The space that the single speck exploded into was an isolated system, and the longer this speck existed, the more entropy and chaotic it became. Thus, why the explosion occured (not what caused it clearly). Right?
Third law: As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant.
Okay, I don't think this can apply... but I'll take a leap of faith here. The universe, as it's expanding, is cooling down. Thus, there is a theoretical point at which point the universe has cooled down so much that the entropy and choas of the system becomes constant. If in theory this happens... what happens to the universe then? And wouldn't this contradict the first law?
Last but kinda first, the zeroth law: If two thermodynamic systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other.
If the point where everything originated was at thermodynamic equilibrium with the surrounding space, then there would have been no drastic temperature shifts causing the speck to expand, contract, and eventually explode everything into being.
If I'm wrong on anything here, please let me know. It's important for the finished concept that all the science be sound. I think I've done as much leg work as I can without consulting others.
So here we go, throwing myself into the wolverine pit...
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Thats the so-called heat death of the universe. Entropy would be at its absolute maximum, and therefore would be constant. This doesn't contradict the first law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death
This is where things get a bit umm 'tricky'.
In a big bang model there is no surrounding 'space'. The infintely small and dense singularity that exploded to form the universe was all the space there was. there was no space outside of it to expand into, as it expanded, so did the size of universe. Allegedly.
Personally, I much prefer Hoyle's steady state model of the universe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_state_model
Mainly because it dont make me brain hurt like wot teh big bang do.
But some smart arse spoilsport found some background microwave radiation while scraping bird shit off a big aerial and now we're in this bloody mess.
I'm going to lie down now.
If all that existed was this speck, is there something we can call the infinit void the spec existed in? Otherwise, all of the forces that caused the dot to explode had to have come from inside.
I think...
I know, it's completely counter intuitive, but 'space' is finite. it doesnt go on forever and for all intents and purposes there is no void 'outside' of the universe that the universe is expanding into. At least not a void in the way we normally think of it. We're used to thinking of space as having dimensions. Length, width, breadth, time. Even perfectly empty space in our universe has all those attributes. 'Outside' of the universe there are none of those attributes so as far as our imaginations are concerned there really is less than nothing out there. It's just impossible to really visualize. Like trying to imagine a colour that doesnt exist.
As to what to call it, well that's a bit of a philosphical question. Can you really name something the truly doesnt exist?
You may call it whatever you fancy!
Personally I like to call it Kevin, most Kevins I have met have tended to be a bit vacuous, so it fits for me.
You could never get outside the universe no matter how far or fast you travelled though. Not because it would take too long, though of course it would, but because spacetime (the structure of reality in our universe) is curved.
If you travelled at the speed of light in a straigt line away from the planet earth in about 30 billion years you would arrive right back where you started from, (assume the universe doesn't expand any during the time the trip would take), which of course makes the whole endeavour a bit cold and pointless.
The 'cause' of the big bang had to come from within it as you imagined, because there's nothing outside it. Though the truth is no one has a bloody clue why it happened, and we cant ever be sure that it happened the way we think it did. All these concepts are best guesses that fit the evidence available.
This is really a VAST and fascinating field of study and it's difficult to know where to start, 'A Briefer history of time' and 'The universe in a nutshell' by Hawking are nice starter texts to read, and I think Audible.com do a good selection of physics lectures though I've no idea of the prices.
Wikipedia has a decent selection of pages on the subject though they are often written poorly and difficult to understand.
Good luck with your project btw
It's extremely dicey to try to apply conventional laws of physics to things that happened in the universe all the way back to t=0. The current idea is generally that there wasn't this supersinguarity sitting in the middle of empty space - neither space nor time existed at that time. The Big Bang *created* space and time. At least, as we know it. So you can't talk about "before the big bang" because there is no such thing. One popular hypothesis is that at the time of the Big Bang, the four fundamental forces were all one. Gravity, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces. Then, they split out afterwards very shortly after the Bang. The current ideas about the timeline of the infant universe are well-described here.
The cause of the Big Bang is really very sketchy as well. String Theory (or, well, the String Hypothesis) postulates that it was an interdimensional collision, or a collision between universes.
It's fun to speculate about these things, but unless you can do the math and understand the subatomic mechanics, an amateur attempt to "apply the laws of thermodynamics to the big bang" will be about as productive as two stoners in a college dorm room arguing over neurosurgical medicine.
While I'm fully aware of the complications in applying laws of physics to t=0, I'm not necessarily trying to rationalize the big bang using physics. The end product here will be a theatrical show for a younger crowd with a huge science slant. Instead of teaching science in the conventional sense, the current idea is to have a story with science mixed in. So I decided to try the beginning of the universe, and it seemed that I might be able to explain thermodynamics at the same time. Just because the laws of thermodynamics didn't unnecessarily govern the events of the big bang, doesn't mean I can't relate the two so that both events are more understandable.
I'm trying to simplify complicated concepts, obviously, but the science still needs to be "right" and I need to understand this on a deeper level to make sure I know what I'm doing.
So while I appreciate the help, you gotta understand that this is for a fairly specific application.
But I've been curious: when mass densities cause particles excitement in the cores of large celestial bodies like neutron stars to reach a speed nearing that of light and explode, isn't it possible that the same process could account for the dense matter at the center of a black hole but to an exponentially larger (perhaps universe birthing) extent?
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What "four elements" are you referring to?
I misread some info on Wiki. What I read was "In astrochemistry, primordial elements are chemical elements which were synthesized in the first round of nuclear synthesis after the big bang. These are believed to include only hydrogen, helium, lithium, and beryllium. To produce heavier atoms, stellar nuclear synthesis is required. For this reason it is known that the sun is not a first-generation star."
Which says that those four elements were made after the big bang, not that they existed before hand.
While I applaud the idea you're going for, I'm not sure how effective doing a show for younger people talking about thermodynamics and entropy and the like will be. Those concepts won't really make much sense unless they already understand what things like matter and energy are in the scientific sense. While you could teach them about them too it may end up overwhelming the audience to have so many technical concepts introduced and built on each other in the matter of a couple hours. Depending on exactly what you mean by "young", through no fault of your own they may end up with more misconceptions than things they understand correctly.
What age is your intended audience, and is there a timeframe for this?
The audience is anywhere from 2-70, honestly. This is at a science museum, but my goal is about 12-16. Big gap, I know. I've already written a tentative script and some people at the science center will be going over it, we're going to do some work on it tomorrow. It will probably be mostly performance work, they want this up by next weekend. It's a short show however, 7 mins tops. If I cna just inspire them to learn more and keep them interested while NOT giving them wrong informaiton, I would be very happy. Someone walking away with a greater understanding of the universe is not my realistic goal, my goal is to have them "kinda know".
Maybe I should narrow this down to just the big bang.
1. What did the early universe look like? What caused the Big Bang?
2. Is information lost when it goes into a black hole? As recently as ten years ago, we would have said 'yes,' but now it looks like material is outgassed.
3. How will the universe end? When we first discovered that the universe was expanding, we assumed that it had negative acceleration and that gravity would ultimately pull everything back together to perhaps start the cycle over again. But now we know that the universe is actually expanding with positive acceleration - that is, things are going away from each other at increasing speed! We can't explain this without resorting to concepts like Dark Energy.
4. The double-slit experiment: It's something that's trivially easy to show - at least the case where you're dealing with lots of photons. You just shine a flashlight through one, then two slits, and look at the interference pattern. But the crazy thing is that the interference pattern seems to be caused by electrons from parallel uinverses. And, observing the experiment actually changes the outcome!
Not quite. It's more accurate to say "the laws of physics that we known and love are incapable of modeling what goes on in a singularity". It's not so much that nothing works down there, it's just that the shit we got just stops making sense. They still apply, but not in ways that we know of, kinda like how Newton wasn't quite wrong with the theory of gravity and all that, rather Einstein was more right.
This article at Cosmic Variance is relevant and interesting- (and pretty darn competent, Carroll is a real cosmologist, unlike me).
http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/04/27/how-did-the-universe-start/
Iconoclysm and DryFrylock are right about there being no space outside the singularity at t=0 by the way. At least as far as we know. (Which we don't.) It's not a point of matter exploding- it's the universe expanding. Very quickly.
In fact, trying to apply any sort of standard thought processes (things like the singularity existing in space) is generally futile. The conditions which existed during the singularity are essentially incomprehensible. In one sense, there wasn't even a "during the singularity," as time as we understand it probably didn't exist.
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