Consider an artificial system (that doesn’t obey the 2nd law of thermodynamics, but that isn’t explicitly stated)
Such a system will fluctuate in phase space
One aspect of a system is the amount of Entropy in that system
Therefore, Entropy must decrease to arbitrarily low levels eventually.
Hey, what if the real world also didn’t obey the 2nd law?
Without some bridge to address why the 2nd law (which 100% of tests so far have confirmed) might not apply, I don’t see any value in the original post?
I think you are not considering some relevant points:
1) the artificial system we are considering (an ideal gas in a box) (a) is often used as an example to illustrate and even to derive the second law of thermodynamics by means of mathematical reasoning (the Boltzmann’s H-theorem) and (b) this is because it actually appears to be a prototype for the idea of the second law of thermodynamics so it is not just a random example, it is the root of out intuition of the second law
2) the post is talking about the logic behind the arguments which are used to justify the second law of thermodynamics
3) The core point of the post is this:
in the simple case of the ideal gas in the box we end up thinking that it must evolve like the second law is prescribing, and we also have arguments to prove this that we find convincing
yet the ideal gas model, as a toy universe, doesn’t really behave like that, even if it is counterintuitive the decrease of entropy has the same frequency of the increase of entropy
therefore our intuition about the second law and the argument supporting it seems to have some problem
so maybe the second laws is true, but our way of thinking at it maybe is not, or maybe the second law is not true and our way of thinking the universe is flawed: in any case we have a problem
This looks like:
Consider an artificial system (that doesn’t obey the 2nd law of thermodynamics, but that isn’t explicitly stated)
Such a system will fluctuate in phase space
One aspect of a system is the amount of Entropy in that system
Therefore, Entropy must decrease to arbitrarily low levels eventually.
Hey, what if the real world also didn’t obey the 2nd law?
Without some bridge to address why the 2nd law (which 100% of tests so far have confirmed) might not apply, I don’t see any value in the original post?
I think you are not considering some relevant points:
1) the artificial system we are considering (an ideal gas in a box) (a) is often used as an example to illustrate and even to derive the second law of thermodynamics by means of mathematical reasoning (the Boltzmann’s H-theorem) and (b) this is because it actually appears to be a prototype for the idea of the second law of thermodynamics so it is not just a random example, it is the root of out intuition of the second law
2) the post is talking about the logic behind the arguments which are used to justify the second law of thermodynamics
3) The core point of the post is this:
in the simple case of the ideal gas in the box we end up thinking that it must evolve like the second law is prescribing, and we also have arguments to prove this that we find convincing
yet the ideal gas model, as a toy universe, doesn’t really behave like that, even if it is counterintuitive the decrease of entropy has the same frequency of the increase of entropy
therefore our intuition about the second law and the argument supporting it seems to have some problem
so maybe the second laws is true, but our way of thinking at it maybe is not, or maybe the second law is not true and our way of thinking the universe is flawed: in any case we have a problem