Hi Jonathan
> Let me interject an inversion . . .
> . . . AS ENTROPY/DISORDER INCREASES, TIME IS PERCEIVED SAID TO PASS".
> It may be an aside to Magnus's main point, but let's not forget that TIME and
> not entropy is the topic of the month.
Forgive me if I draw the wrong conclusion here but I thought that the "Time's
arrow" theme you mentioned a few days ago suggested that time and entropy was
more or less the same thing?
I'm not too keen on that idea myself I'm afraid. I'm sure the equations of
thermodynamics are watertight enough but it feels like defining one week as
"the time it takes for my desk to become cluttered with printouts".
I don't mean to make fun of the second law, and maybe I'm just old-fashioned
about this time concept, but time seems to be a more basic concept than the
rest of the second law.
> Magnus, I don't think that there is any such beast as a "quantum particle".
> Particles are particles and belong squarely in Pirsig's inorganic level. The
> problem with isolated particles is that they cannot exhibit population
> behaviour! This makes it very hard to talk about thermodynamics and entropy
> which - those "properties of state" are essentially descriptions populations
> of particles. It thus makes sense to me that IF TIME IS A CONSEQUENCE OF
> ENTROPY INCREASE,then when we try and look at single particles we lose sense
> of both entropy and time.
But time is still *there*! Granted, it's difficult to measure it because our
methods to measure time are based on entropy increase, but that doesn't mean
time just vanished. Imagine hundreds of radioactive isotopes, take one at a
time and measure the time it takes for it to disintegrate. Even though each
isotope is a population of only one particle and consequently, the time it
takes to disintegrate will vary quite a bit, the average time will still be
very close to the decay rate of that particular isotope. Right?
This means that single, lonesome particles still have a quite good grasp of
time. It does *not* mean that the different isotopes had different time
scales... methinks, I think it means that they simply disintegrated at different
times according to the decay probability of the isotope. They don't have to
hide in large populations to average out the individual differences. As long
as it's an inorganic pattern, time will be defined.
> It is little wonder that time has strange properties
> in those "quantum" experiments.
What I meant with quantum "particles", quantas, whatever, hmm... quantum patterns
of course. :) I'll take that again.
What I meant with quantum patterns having no sense of time is something completely
different than small populations of inorganic particles. These guys travel through
time like it was up, left, or forward.
Magnus
------- End of forwarded message -------
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:03:31 BST