Nothing (General)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Tuesday, December 08, 2009, 21:10 (5462 days ago) @ Mark

Stenger: "...a state of chaos equivalent to nothing..."
> How can nothing and a state of chaos be equivalent? Nothing sounds rather orderly to me. Though, of course, nothing is neither orderly nor chaotic, because it is nothing. This is what Stenger doesn't get. He smuggles something into his nothing.-I quote from Stenger (Quantum Gods p.248): "Let's talk about this 'unphysical region'. Inside this region no measurements can be made. Thus we have zero information about what is inside, which means the inside has maximum entropy ... Thus our universe ... begins in a state of disorder, or total chaos. ... This is real indeterministic chaos." ... "This is simply what you get when you extrapolate the big bang back as far as you can go, the Planck time." ... "a combination of general relativity and quantum mechanics leads us to conclude that this volume was of Planck dimensions and finite energy." ... "Such a volume would be too small to allow any physical quantities to be operationally defined. (that is, to be measurable even in principle) so we can conclude it is a region of maximum entropy." -He continues: "Now, it is often asserted that the universe must have begun with a high degree of order since the second law of thermodynamics would require its entropy or disorder to increase with time. So how could it have begun with maximum entropy? This apparent paradox is accounted for by the expansion of the universe. In any scenario where the univeres expands from Planck dimensions the entropy of the universe will increase with time ... it can be shown that the entropy increase for an expanding relativistic gas is proportional to the radius. On the other hand ... the maximum entropy of any volume is that of a black hole of the same volume. The entropy of a black hole is proportional to its surface area, so it increases as the square of its radius." ... "This leaves an increasing entropy gap in which orderly structures form. In that case, entropy decreases locally as the rest of the universe gains entropy."-This all seems pretty clear to me. If you think some other form of "nothingness" is possible, you are basing this on the ideas of classical continuum physics. A "quantum nothing" is rather different from a "classical nothing".

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GPJ