It is a strange story indeed of how Rudolf Clausius the formulator of the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics (the study of heat) ended up at the North Pole as Rudolf the Rednosed Reindeer by perky America and in the process some of the seriousness of his work has been overlooked.
The First Law of Thermodynamics is straight forward enough. In 1850, at the age of 28, Clausius published: On the Motive Power of Heat, and on the Laws which can be Deduced from it for the Theory of Heat in which he referred to Sadi Carnot's work published in 1824 on the efficiency of engines: Reflections on the Motive Force of Heat. In Clausius's book, he cataloged earlier works on different laws of conservation under a general law he called the Law of Energy Conservation. He said there are many types of energies such as solar, thermal, electrical, work (mechanical), potential, kinetic, and so on. These energies can interchange back and forth into each other, but the sum total of all the energies in the heavens never changes. (See Energy and Conservation in Physics.)
It was Clausius's depressive Second Law of Thermodynamics that caused an uproar. His First Law of Energy Conservation was an instant success and he was offered a professorship at the Ecole Polytechnicum in Zurich, Switzerland. Here, he began to formulate his Second Law of Entropy Nonconservation. Entropy was a definition he invented for a larger more comprehensive natural phenomenon than energy, a one way flow or asymmetry of least resistance that directs the flow of energy. Entropy encompassed the natural behavior of heat as it flows one-way from hot to cold (it takes addition energy to create a refrigerator which keeps temperatures inside cold while heating up the surrounding area) and the conversion of mechanical energy into heat through friction, such as putting on the brakes to slow a mechanism down and the brakes become hot.
Entropy, Clausius explained, was the natural relaxation of the universe, the unwinding expansion of the heavens that never ceases. Though there are short-term exceptions such as the creation of life which induces a negative change in entropy, if entropy were the overriding force of nature the ultimate balance of the universe would move towards positive changes in entropy. The ultimate end of life, therefore would be death, and the ultimate end of the universe would be an equilibrium where no more reactions are possible and the heavens will rest forever in peaceful nothingness.
Later in 1872, when Clausius's wife, Adelheid, died giving birth to their sixth child, a daughter, shortly after their return to Clausius's homeland of Prussia; he would not be consoled. His wife was dead, and though all six of his children grew and thrived, his beloved Adelheid was gone. Johanna Spyri, a writer of children's books who lived in Zurich, wrote the book Heidi, a shortened name for Adelheid, in 1880. Heidi's Grandfather, a depressive natural philosopher, was most likely based on character of Rudolf Clausius. and Spyri placated her morose naturalist with "love is the answer". America played off Clausius's work with Rudolf leading Santa Claus's sleigh where presents are uniformly delivered to everyone at the end of the year, the equilibrium of endings, waiting for the new year to begin. In all the hubbub, I think we have forgotten some of Clausius's initial question. No amount of looking into the faces of happy children on Christmas morning will ever change the fact that the old has passed away. It is never the same.
By 1872, Clausius had summarized the first and second laws of thermodynamics:
Ludwig Boltzmann set about to understand these ideas on an atomic level. By 1874, Boltzmann derived an equation that described how collisions of a dilute gas in a CLOSED CONTAINER drive the gas toward a state of equilibrium or randomization. It is celebrated as mathematical proof of Clausius's Law of Entropy Nonconservation and eventually earned Boltzmann a professorship of physics in Vienna, Austria in 1894. In America, Josiah Willard Gibbs, of New Haven, Connecticut was working concurrently on entropy. Boltzmann and Gibbs co-founded the field now called statistical mechanics. Entropy was and is currently seen as an extension of statistical mechanics and as such is a measure of uniform randomness in a closed system.
Entropy, according to Boltzmann's theories, was a measure of disorganization which is ever increasing. Or more convoluted, it is often descried as nondecreasing disorder where a system can level off or increase in disorder, but it can never decrease in disorder. In other words, order is either leveling or decreasing, because order can never increase. Ultimately the new version of Entropy Nonconservation meant the universe was becoming more randomized. This implied the universe began tightly woven as a clock spring and the universal clock has been unwinding ever since. When the clock eventually unwinds temperature regions will blend; gases, liquids, and even solids will gradually diffuse into a uniform randomized sea of the smallest of elementary particles. Since conservation of energy states energy cannot be created or destroyed only transformed; the maximum entropy wave in a closed system would be so even and still that all processes would cease. There would be no change, no evolution, and life as we know it would cease.
Clausius's ideas of entropy which began as heat flow and friction took a back seat. Randomization is now seen as the overriding entropy theory. The second law of thermodynamics now discusses temperature equilibrium as hot flows into cold and equalizes into warm. The third law of thermodynamics states that at maximum entropy, minimum absolute temperature, 0 degrees Kelvin, is reached. The minimum temperature is derived from experiments that show it takes an increasing amount of energy to lower the temperature each degree. The Kelvin scale was named in honor of the English Lord Kelvin who in 1848 defined the thermodynamic or absolute temperature scale based on relative ratio comparisons of cold/hot; as more heat is needed to cool each degree, the ratio becomes asymptotically zero. Kelvin's work was based on earlier ideas presented by Carnot on the efficiency of heat engines.
Is the space-mass continuum, a closed system, as necessary to be defined by Boltzmann's entropy as nondecreasing disorder? In limitless space variations and oscillations might never cease as nature moves toward irrational numbers of non-repeating decimals. The physical space-mass continuum, however, might very well be a closed system with such values as minimum temperature, maximum speed of light and minimum density of zero, a dimensional void of nothing. Discussions are still proceeding as to whether space itself is finite, or does it expand infinity outwards forever? Even with limits, however, limitlessness might still coexist with limits, because limitless would include everything including limits. Limited space may still be large enough to be above some critical value so that it will never stop oscillating, so that time will never cease. When below this critical value a closed system will randomize and reactions will cease. There was so much resistance to the idea that a closed system could still oscillate that when Boris Belousov discovered a chemical reaction that oscillated back and forth between yellow and clear colors for up to an hour before reaching equilibrium, even thought the reaction was easily repeatable and verifiable, he was not taken seriously. He finally published in 1959 in an obscure Russian medical meeting. Zhabotinsky took up the cause and finally presented the reaction in 1968 at an international conference in Prague. The reaction was named the BZ reaction. The implications of the BZ reaction are being explored in the field called dynamics which has expanded to included deterministic chaos. Oscillation remain with us as such natural non-linear phenomena as tornadoes and hurricanes which can only be explained by reversals in the flow of entropy. Since the unusual one-way flows are so pervasive, short-term reversals cause circular flows.
Edwin Hubble, in 1923, reconfirmed the effects of randomization when he discovered that there was more than one galaxy in the universe and then determined (1929) the galaxies were expanding away from each other at a rate proportional to their distance. Measure of the Doppler effect has confirmed the universe in currently expanding. A new name was created for the universe, cosmos, and many cosmologists expect to find the randomizing effect of Boltzmann to have created more than one universe. The Hubble telescope was built and sent into space to gather more data. As far as the Hubble was able to detect there is only one universe. If Einstein is right, however, about gravity bending light; we would not be able to see another universe because its light would be bent away from us. Hubble was able to see the center of our galaxy, and it is alive and dense with star nursery's exploding in its core. As suns are born, the universe heats which allows more suns to be born, sending the universe spiraling outward. Will there ever be a return back to our beginnings, or is our ending already assured as the ultimate rest as Clausius's predicted.
Gravity, the force that binds and fuses elements together, is also a one-way path, an asymmetry of least resistance that directs the flow of energy. Mathematically asymmetry forces such as heat, randomization and gravity are represented with an arrow that goes in one direction, rather than an equal sign associated with energy that allows forces to move back and forth. Gravity is a powerful force that directs motion that can be represented with a one-way arrow or asymmetry. Initially, Isaac Newton's Universal Law of Gravity is expressed with an equal sign, but upon closer examination it is only a magnitude without direction. Direction is added after magnitude is calculated and it is always in favor of the larger mass. Newton began by stating his Laws of Motion and ended with his Universal Law of Gravity. Newton's First Law of Motion states: matter in motion will stay in motion and matter at rest will stay at rest, unless acted upon by another force. But gravity is always slowing matter at high velocities and increasing velocity of matter at rest, refusing to let motion maintain its vigor without modification. Gravity as director of energy is a force of order that directs the creation of the universe.
Gravity works in the opposite direction of randomization. Gravity results in fusion, the binding of elements together to achieve increasing complexity. The word complexity was deliberately used to represent spontaneous order to differentiate it from the order humans impose on their environment which requires the expenditure of energy. The big bang theory hypothesizes that subatomic elements were condensed into a super-dense ball of matter, called cold matter. The density created heat, heat that caused subatomic elements to fuse together to form simple atoms such as hydrogen and explode into the expansion of space. Primordial cold matter was made by the collapse of irregularities in the very early stages of the universe which glows white hot by emitting radiation in the form of X rays and gamma rays, were picked up by the Hubble telescope at the center of galaxies. Gravity wells condensed large masses of hydrogen, until it fuses into helium, creating sun exploding outward into space. Increasing heat from the suns allows heavy metals to form and planets are born. Upon those planets, life is created from a cooler version of fusion fueled by heat and energy from the sun and held in by the gravity of the planet.
There is still a randomizing entropy according to Daniel R. Brooks and E. O. Wiley book Evolution as Entropy (1988) that has an effect on fusion. When conditions are possible for fusion to take place, then the randomizing effects of entropy causes fusion to happen not in just one way, but in a variety of different ways. Essentially the effects of variable randomization on fusion creates diversity as spontaneous order moves out to fill all possible microstates. This is the variation discussed by Charles Darwin (1859) upon which domestication and natural selection play.
Putting it all together. The Big Bang theory hypothesizes that subatomic elements were condensed into a super-dense ball of matter. The density creates heat that causes subatomic elements to fuse together to form simple atoms such as hydrogen and helium, sending matter exploding into space. Local gravity wells condense large masses of hydrogen, until it begins to fuse into helium, creating suns exploding outward into space. Increasing heat from the suns allow heavy metals to form and planets are born. Variable randomizing influences causes diversity of forms to appear upon earth called autocatalytic sets that could metabolized and reproduce, thus life was born. (See Spontaneous Organization and Molecular Biology by Stuart A Kauffman that can be reached through the link Net Advance of Evolution).
But the emptiness of space pulls apart bonded matter towards randomized homogeneous equilibriums. Heat can also break apart gravity and as such is an important factor in uniform randomization. Water is also a powerful solvent which causes chemical bonds to break apart and equalize as a solution. Fission, the breaking apart of molecules, however, can be caused without heat. The process of freezing fractures and randomizes. When the sun dies, the earth's core will cool until there is no more lava to patch the cracks and earth will fracture into smaller pieces.
Gravity, however, will become more powerful as the universe cools and matter fragments into the fine layer of energy predicted by randomization. We don't worry about the moon's orbit degrading into the earth, or the earth's into the sun, because there is sufficient mass from the smaller opposing body to keep its orbit in space. It is the difference between mixing water with small stones, all the water does is make the stones slippery; and mixing water with stones ground so fine it becomes mud that sticks to everything. Gravity holds together a universe whose size boggles the mind. It is might be possible for gravity, when the suns die and matter freezes, fractures and becomes fine enough, to slowly wind everything back into a cold dense ball of matter and start the process of creation all over again.
The inevitable question at this point, does all the matter in the universe have to freeze and fracture in order to create the Big Crunch that starts the universe burning and fusing again. In 1965 two American physicists, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were testing a very sensitive microwave detector when they discovered there are microwaves that bombard the earth that do not appear to be coming from any particular centered direction. These microwaves come in from the edges of the universe as well as from the center. Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978. Entropy would propose these nondirected microwaves indicate great age. If space expands beyond our universe, perhaps the microwaves indicate that there is another universe just beyond our sight. Einstein's theory of gravity predicts that light is bent by gravity, so we would not be able to see another universe even if it was just beyond our edges because its light would bend away from us. It is possible the edges of our universe will cool, while the center is still burning and run into the edges of another universe and the two edges will created a new universe.
Time can be seen as the sum of all asymmetry forces. Vector algebra was introduced in the late nineteenth century and has been very useful in portraying motion. Time may have the same quality. The vector of each asymmetry force may be linear, yet their sum causes nature to move towards spirals as the different forces exclude, compete, or merge with each other. The elements in space from the very large to the very small are being pushed and pulled in predictable directions by known forces that collide against each in probabilitistic ways to create natural selection as defined by Darwin. The forces, however, are still knowable which means one could say order rules, but it rules as a juggler creating probability theory out of which new order emerges. Ultimately nature becomes a spiral. We reflect spirals in the way we have chosen to count time. We may choose to begin each New Year in January which is a circle, but the addition of a another year is a linear line. Together line and circle become a spiral. The spiral of time.