The law, as generally formulated, states that entropy increases with time. But how do we know that this is a physical law and not a pattern we notice and successfully extrapolate, in keeping with the main thesis under consideration?
I’ve recently read The Big Picture and spent some time chasing Quantum Mechanics Wikipedia articles. From what stuck, thermodynamics itself is an effective field theory of the Standard Model of particle physics. It is a macroscopic, consistent approximation of our current best QM theory. Part of this approximation is that entropy is not a physical quantity and the second law of thermodynamics is not a “law”. Entropy is a statistical property of a system and has a really high probability to increase in closed systems but doesn’t have to. From what I understand, a currently popular hypothesis is that the Big Bang was a really really low entropy state and thus we observe increasing entropy with virtual certainty.
I’m not entirely sure what my point is, but maybe it just support yours, that even such apparently ironclad properties as the second law of thermodynamics are just derived, emergent “laws” that allow us to successfully predict the universe.
I’ve recently read The Big Picture and spent some time chasing Quantum Mechanics Wikipedia articles. From what stuck, thermodynamics itself is an effective field theory of the Standard Model of particle physics. It is a macroscopic, consistent approximation of our current best QM theory. Part of this approximation is that entropy is not a physical quantity and the second law of thermodynamics is not a “law”. Entropy is a statistical property of a system and has a really high probability to increase in closed systems but doesn’t have to. From what I understand, a currently popular hypothesis is that the Big Bang was a really really low entropy state and thus we observe increasing entropy with virtual certainty.
I’m not entirely sure what my point is, but maybe it just support yours, that even such apparently ironclad properties as the second law of thermodynamics are just derived, emergent “laws” that allow us to successfully predict the universe.