Order/Chaos bullshit question

1. Define perfect order.

2. Perfect chaos? heh.. ok, I look at it this way. The universe is just.. there, i don't know how it got there, but it just is. Now.. if you fallow the 'big-bang theory,' all objects are moving away from each other, and will eventually move back together. Now once they get back together, i believe they will have a 'big-bang: part deux,' and *everything* will start all over again.. nothign will have existed as it did, and no one will know we were ever around.

I believe this has been happening forever.. since the start of time, and will continue to happen forever, and i believe that the perfection and chaos is the same deal.

Perfection will riegn for a split second, break apart, and start to fall back to chaos, and then will recoil and go back to perfection.. forever, like a yo-yo.

3. Ok, now this is where it gets tricky. We acknowledge that there's a universe.. we can't deny it.. but maybe our views are too limiting. Maybe we aren't actually seeing what this place really is, maybe our views are so limiting, this is all we can comprehend.. but I'm straying from the point.

Where did the universe come from? I don't know. Who does? I don't know. Who cares? Well, apparently you and I do (or these writeups wouldn't be here). Man is very limited. If we can't touch it, we don't believe it (yours truely included). No one knows if there's a God. No one knows how we got here. No one knows what's going to happen, or what is happening right now.. But i believe once we all figure it out.. this world as we know it will cease to exist and we will transend our puny mortal coils and join a 'greater consiousness' if you will (Here's where you think: Oh man, what's he been smoking?). Anyway.. yeah.. The answer is: maybe.

Depends on your system. Order and chaos are defined in terms of a system. One classic example is that of a watch. It is as follows:

Take a watch. It is pretty orderly. Lots of nice gears and stuff. All ticking away, measuring time.

There are then two ways in which the system can tend to disorder:

1. Smash the watch.

2. Let the watch wind down.

In reality, what the law of thermodynamics we mentioned above say is this:

Systems tend towards a flat state.

A flat state is when all the energy in a system is evenly distributed - the energy state of the system is flat. Chaos and order can be dependent on the distribution of energy, but they are not necessarily so.

So order in a system can be defined as the irregular distribution of energy. Chaos is a flat distribution of energy.

So the idea, then, is that, in the beginning, energy was not evenly distributed. At the end of time, it will be perfectly evenly distributed.

Entropy is the tendency for isolated systems to enter a state of the greatest multiplicity. How many ways can it be arranged without being different in any significant way? This is very concise, but very imprecise. However, there are precise definitions. They are just hard to explain (they involve calculus applied to rather abstract quantities). The writeups at entropy are not adequate to explain, though they do contain much information. However, I am feeling too entropic to do more than answer some questions today:

Question 1 (It makes no sense to say that the universe began with perfect order, right?): Well, if our theories of the big bang are correct, all matter started out completely uniform over space, in an ultra-dense form. They were disturbed by quantum fluctuations which were then blown up to cosmic proportions by inflation - so, yes, the universe started in 'perfect order'.

Question 2 (If the universe's entropy is always increasing, but can't increase without bound, then it has to stop or even decrease some time, right?): Just because something always increases does not mean that it will reach its limit. For example, -1/X will approach 0 for large values of X, but it will never reach 0 for any finite value of X. It is an always increasing function, but nonetheless does not reach 0.
Correspondingly, as the free energy of a system approaches zero, its rate of losing that free energy slows down - and the corresponding increase in entropy slows down as well.
Question 2a: So no, assuming that entropy is universal does not prove its opposite.

Question 3 (Doesn't the idea of perfect order within the universe contradict the existence of God (by various means)?): Questions about God must refer to theology. Theology may refer to science as it sees fit. However, I see no reason that perfect order would imply God. Nor can you prove God's nonexistence by proving God's existence. God not existing without faith is somewhat logically awkward if one starts by assuming that God caused the Big Bang, which implies that God would not have any followers for billions of years.

Question 4 (Should we really be spending effort on these questions?): Thermodynamics is very relevant. Cosomology may become relevant, and, as pure science, it tends to pay off in spades... but ponderings on the fate of the universe are at this point philosophical speculations rather than practical questions. This hardly makes them irrelevant.

Further clearup: Within any possible set of laws of physics in which one can define a quantity which has properties like those of energy (primarily, being conserved), then one can derive the three laws of thermodynamics. Thus, entropy cannot decrease without a very dramatic change in the laws of the universe. Astronomers have yet to see anywhere with dramatically different laws than those here... unless they changed in such a way so as to very carefully disguise themselves as the same. Possible. Unlikely.