The Third Law of Thermodynamics and The Speed of Light Analogy

There has been a trend in 2010 thanks to Erik Verlinde toward Thermodynamics, the Engineering/Physics undergraduate and 19th Century specialty, in Physics. In order to get up to speed I am boning up on what I learned as an undergraduate Engineer on the topic.

One grand introduction, short, sweet, and concise, can be found in the Micropedia section of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, a reference source I still prefer to Wikipedia in many ways. It also has a long Macropedia section devoted to Thermo. For the greatest detail on things Physics and especially Mathematics, I do find Wikipedia to be outstanding however.

The Third Law of Thermodynamics

In any event, I like the way the 3rd law is defined in E.B., thus:

"The concept of temperature enters into thermodynamics as a precise mathematical quantity that relates heat and work to entropy. The interplay of these three quantities is further constrained by the third law of thermodynamics, which deals with the absolute zero of temperature and its theoretical unattainability. Absolute zero (approximately -273 degrees Centigrade) would correspond to a condition in which a system had achieved its lowest energy state. The third law states that, as this minimum temperature is approached, the further extraction of energy becomes more and more difficult."

Interesting. I knew that, but not in that well-put way. I thought of Ab Zero's attainment as simply being impossible.

So that made me think of something else:

The Speed of Light

The speed of light is described as being our Universe's upper speed limit, in a vacuum. True vacuum doesn't really exist, but in any event, trying to move a mass closer and closer to the speed of light requires an ever-increasing amount of energy, according to the special theory of relativity.

Is it just me, or could there be a connection?

Limits. The Universe has limits. Just like lives.

Carina Nebula! Hubble Hits a Home Run - Happy 20th Hubble !

This is simply the best image Hubble has ever taken IMO, which is impressive given the competition. My favorite before this was one of the first, a close-up of The Eagle Nebula, a one light year tall region of star-forming, seen face on. That was amazing because for the first time we saw the three-dimensionality of these clouds. Very Inspiring.

The Carina Nebula, below, seems similar, but in this case it's from the perspective of being near the bottom of the cloud, looking up. Even more dimensionality! The Carina Nebula is 7500 light years away, and that cloud is 3 light years tall.

Well done, Hubble Scientists! Happy 20th.

Cosmological Revolution

The Revolution for the Rest of Us

Opening Remarks in a Talk Presented by George Musser at MENSA:

In the time-honored tradition of essayists and papergivers
everywhere, I’d like to question the premise of
my own title. Is the revolution in cosmology really a
revolution? There are good reasons for thinking it isn’t.
By “revolution,” people generally refer to two broad
developments since the late 1990s: (1) a new level of
precision in measurements of cosmic expansion, the
cosmic microwave background radiation, and largescale
structures, and (2) a “concordance” model that
accounts for all these observations. It is a strange
revolution that endorses the status quo, but this one
did: the model was already cosmologists’ favorite, and
even its strangest aspect, dark energy, had been
mulled for decades. So it isn’t a paradigm shift like the
discovery of the expanding universe in the 1920s.
Moreover, the supposed revolution hasn’t had the
broad cultural ramifications of, say, the Copernican
revolution. Cosmology these days is likelier to be
ignored than put on trial.
 
I think these developments have the potential to be
revolutionary in scientific and cultural senses.
Cosmology has become part and parcel of efforts by
fundamental physicists to unify quantum mechanics
and Einstein’s general theory of relativity into a single
theory. The universe is both a testing ground for
theoretical ideas & a source of new research questions.
The unified theory, in turn, could reveal whole new
principles on which the natural world is based. We
might glean some hints of these principles from the
remarkable properties of the universe revealed by
modern cosmology: the way order has emerged from
randomness, the hierarchy of scales, the possibility of
multiple universes, the special role played by
information. In short, the revolution in cosmology may
not strictly be one, but could herald the start of one.

Is IC 352 A Better Galaxy than M51 ?

This galaxy, IC 352, presented to us by the WISE observatory, has been hidden (in detail) until now by our own Milky Way galaxy. It's about 6.6-11 million light years away. You can read more about it here.

How great is that? It's stunning, but I must ask the question, do you like it more than M51, the Whirlpool? Or the Sombrero galaxy? Well, looks and beauty are subjective, and I must admit I like this new image very much, but M51 will always be first in my heart.

The Once and Future (maybe) King:

A Possible Physical Interpretation of How A Universe Can Exist Within a Black Hole Using Holographic Conjecture and Four Radii

UPDATE (April 29, 2010): Sean Carroll weighs in on this subject: here
and
Lubos Motl's response to Sean, here.


Recent papers by Paul Frampton and Erik Verlinde which can be traced back to Ted Jacobsen and many others including Gerardus 't Hooft and Leonard Susskind regarding the Holographic Conjecture, Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein regarding Black Hole Thermodynamics, Juan Martin Maldacena and colleagues and their work in AdS/CFT, Alan Guth and Cosmological Inflation Theory, and Lee Smolin with his Fecund Universes "Cosmological Natural Selection" Theory, have led me to the following thoughts.

Is it at all possible that there is a physical interpretation to the Holographic conjecture (as Sir Roger Penrose calls it) enough to promote it to a "principle"? That is to say, can our Universe actually reside (as Frampton et. al. maintain) inside of a Black Hole? Possibly. Here is my idea:

First, for qualitative and future mathematical quantitative purposes, let's define four radii from the center of a Black Hole, thus:

Concerning the Four Radii, we then define their relationship in a Black Hole of a certain size to be:

R1>R2>R3>R4 (1.1)

R1 = The Schwarzschild Radius (for a stationary Black Hole), aka the Event Horizon, and the only part of the Black Hole visible to outside observers.

R2 = The outer surface of a Black Hole.

R3 = The average mass radius of the Black Hole. The mass between R2 and R3 = the mass between R3 and R4, so it is not at the midpoint between them because of geometry.

R4 = The Interior Surface of the Black Hole. A Universe is postulated to exist between R4 and the center of the hole. We therefore consider the sphere defined by R4 to be the 2D Holographic boundary that defines the 3D (with gravity) Universe within.

For small Black holes, let us assume

R4 = 0 (1.2)

That is to say, R4 is the center of the hole, and so no Universe resides therein. Frampton estimates the Black Hole in which we reside to be on the order of R1 = 30 Billion light years across.

If so, there must be a time t > t naught (the time of the formation of the Black hole via Supernova collapse) when a Black hole with m = or greater than a certain critical mass m sub-c (for critical and very large mass) required to create a Universe therein is achieved, thus changing (Calculus, anyone?) R4 = 0 to R4 >0, and the universe begins, via a "Big Bang."

What could possibly possess a Black Hole to do so without "divine intervention", that is to say: naturally?

My contention is that for this to be possible, that no matter can compress itself smaller than quark-gluon plasma (see Brookhaven and their wonderful current results for reference), and therefore something has to give.

What I believe gives is radius R3. It expands because it has no other choice, being the mass equilibrium point (sort of a spherical center-of-mass of the hole), and as it expands, it draws R4 away from the center of the Black Hole.

We must then ask ourselves: what "fills" the "vacuum" in the region, the "region" being the volume between R=0 and our new (and expanding) R4?

Well, that most basic of Sciences that is Physics has already provided the answer, hasn't it? Virtual particles (in the form of quarks/anti-quarks and gluons), stimulated by the quantum fluctuations of the nearly perfect but not quite perfect surface that is the expanding sphere defined by R4.

Thinking further: the black hole in which we reside will eventually evaporate, when the four radii become one, when:

R1=R2=R3=R4 (1.3)

This is when I posit (speculate) that "The Big Rip" demise of our Universe will occur. Fortunately for us, the larger the hole, the longer the evaporation, so if someone would care to check my numbers, I feel we are hundreds of trillions of years away from that event. Phew.

I eagerly await comments, both pro and con. I would much prefer to be right than wrong, but if I'm wrong then Pfft!, so be it. There are so many wonderful Unknowns in our Universe to explore and our time is finite and limited; I see no purpose in pursing dead ends, other than to learn they lead nowhere in order to back up and pursue greater knowledge.

Sincerely,

Steven A. Colyer
Cosmological Thermodynamicist, apparently

April 18-19, 2010

P.S. Thanks to:
- Tomasso Dorigo and Johannes Koelman at their wonderful blogs for making me aware of the current situation, and their post repliers as well.
- Sabine Hossenfelder and Stefan Scherer and their wonderful blog BackReAction for keeping us up to date on Quantum Gravity issues.
- Peter Woit/Columbia Math Dept. and Lubos Motl/Umbrella Corporation for their blogs, in spite of their way too-heavy moderation, for keeping the discussion going. Not all blogs are Democratic, but fine, nor are all Nations. Yet.
And saving the very best for last:
- Phil Warnell who gave me comfort that in the end, the Logic of Aristotle is most supreme, and that I was not the only person to think so.

A merger of 2 black holes. May this never happen to us.