Originally posted by: Garth
It's funny that creationists who so regularly tout the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics in their anti-evolutionary arguments appear so very ignorant of the 1st law of Thermodynamics: Mass-energy is always conserved, meaning that it is never created nor destroyed.
It has always existed and will always exist, in other words.
In our simplistic, everyday world, that's true. In reality, not so true. The sun converts matter into energy. Nuclear reactors do the same. A very tiny amount of matter yields a huge amount of energy. e=mc^2 is just part of that equation, but that does show just how much energy matter can yield. Mass (kilograms) times the
speed of light squared (m/s)^2 gives you the amount of energy (joules) in that quantity of mass. It's huge.
Other oddities happen in singularities such as black holes or the Big Bang singularity. Our happy little laws don't work. Hell, Newtonian physics doesn't work once you start moving fast. GPS satellites need to take general relativity into account, otherwise time dilation would cause their internal clocks to read the wrong time. Result: they would lose a lot of accuracy, because they need to rely on precisely timed signals between themselves and the other satellites in the network.
Even GR breaks down when you are dealing with places beyond the event horizon of a black hole. What do you do when the escape velocity is faster than C? When gravity is so strong that electric repulsion is no longer relevant?
And when you're talking about something like the Big Bang singularity, well, some theorize that both time and space erupted together, with energy embedded within it. As I understand it, matter is a sort of tightly bound energy, which formed once the early Universe spread apart a bit and cooled slightly. So in this sense, there was no "before" the Big Bang. There wasn't
time in our present sense, nor was there space. Both of those things found their existence in our reality with the occurrance of the spacetime eruption. This too is how the Universe is larger than it seemingly should be. The farthest known objects are at least 13 billion light years away, but the Universe is estimated to be anywhere from 13.7 billion to 180 billion light years in diameter. How can it be larger than the 13 billion light years of the farthest object? Imagine a cookie spreading out as it is baked. If you're an ant on that cookie trying to run toward the center, relative to the cookie, you might be moving a centimeter a second, but relative to the pan, you're only going a half a centimeter a second.
But the cookie expands in all directions, so if that ant tried to run toward the perimeter, he might not ever make it if the cookie is expanding too quickly. For the ground he covers, the cookie continues to expand, so that perimeter can never be reached.
What am I saying with this? Two things: 1) The light left distant objects a long time ago, when the Universe was expanding more rapidly than it is now. So that light was moving at the same speed it is moving now. The problem is, it was doing all that moving but not getting very far due to the expansion of the space through which it was travelling. So now in addition to that damned plane on a treadmill, now we've got a beam of light travelling across a multi-dimensional treadmill that is expanding in all directions.
2) We can't ever get to the edge of the Universe. It's receeding too quickly. We could zoom toward it at the speed of light, but then there are also other fun effects like that time dilation I mentioned.
Time and space get really weird things at high speeds - and interestingly enough, speed itself is a function of both space and time. As speed changes, it affects those things upon which it depends. So you can't apply Earth-bound laws of physics to singularity phenomena. They just don't work there.
Concerning thermodynamics:
That's been debunked many times. The second law says that a
closed system will become less orderly with time. Earth is not close. It receives about 1.8*10^17 watts. That is an incredible infusion of energy, which totally blows away any restraints by the second law.
And yes, I see now that some of what I typed has been said already. That's what I get for making up a long reply, and getting distracted a few times in the process.
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