The Big Bang: Time and Entropy – Rishit Verma

The basic laws of the Physics, things like F = ma, gravity is inversely proportional to the distance squared, Schrodinger’s equation, and so on, don’t say anything about ‘The Direction of Time’. Surely they relate what’s going on now to what happens next and to what happened previously, but there is no distinction between forward and backward in time.

The past and future are on an equal footing, as far as the microscopic laws of physics are concerned. In the microscopic world, however, there is one rule that does have time going in one direction: the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It says that any isolated system will tend towards increasing entropy or disorder, like how cold milk and hot coffee get mixed into luke-warm coffee-milk, but will never “unmix” from each other.

Once the system gets to its fully disordered state— it’s equilibrium— there is no mods direction of increasing entropy to determine the arrow of time. So the fact that we experience the flow of time right now means we’re not in equilibrium. There are two ways that could happen— either the universe just happens to be, right now, in this particular, low-entropy, configuration with two directions of time flowing out forward and backward from it with increasing entropy in both directions; or at some point in the far distant past the universe started with even lower entropy, and disorder has been increasing ever since.

(Spoiler alert: it’s option number two)

That low entropy configuration was The Big Bang. 13.8 Billion years ago, the universe was hot, dense, smooth, and rapidly expanding. A smooth dense plasma of particles might not seem organized in low entropy, but when the density of matter is extremely high, the gravitational force between particles is enormous. Smoothness, in the face of such tendencies, is not equilibrium, but is a very delicately-balanced, low entropy state.

Things want to be gravitationally clumped together into concentrated configurations like proto-stars, proto-galaxies, or even black holes.

What would a high-entropy, equilibrium universe look like?

It would be an empty space. And indeed, that’s where we’re headed.

The Universe is expanding and diluting, and eventually, all the stars will burn out and black holes will evaporate and we’ll be left with nothing but emptiness in every direction.

At that point, time’s arrow will have disappeared, and nothing like life and consciousness will be possible. The fact that our sky is decorated with billions of stars and galaxies, and our biosphere teeming with life, is a reflection of our low-entropy beginning.

We don’t know why the Universe started in such an orderly initial state, but we should be glad it did; it gave us the non-equilibrium starting point that’s necessary for flow of time, as we know it, to exist.

Everything that followed—from the formation of stars and galaxies to the origin of life—has been a study of increasing entropy.

Time’s arrow isn’t a deep feature of the most fundamental laws of physics; it owes its existence to the specific special initial condition of our Universe.

– Rishit Verma, Amity Intrnational School, Noida

 

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