parts need tweaking, but readable

 Entropy’s Great... Oversights

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Entropy’s Great... Oversights

The Second Law of Thermo-dynamics

Oh, My Ergodic Hypothesis...

Brownian Motion, “Brownian Entropy” and “Entropo-dynamics”

The “Arrow of Time”

Entropy as “Disorder”

A Gedanken Experiment

“Time Reversal”

“Hyper-Dimensional”, “Hyper-Topological” Time

Digression: Maxwell’s Demon

The physics of thermodynamics has had many great contributors, including Albert Einstein. This obscures the fact, as well as making it all the more incomprehensible, that certain quite serious... oversights were made and continue to be made in the law(s) of entropy (almost a theory in itself). But made they were, and they continue to this day (early 21st Century).

Perhaps even more than in Einstein’s relativity, we will find that there is a manifold-complex of... oversights that disguise their manifold-synergistic nature by that very manifold-complexity-synergy. I.e. this combination of manifold nature and complex synergy is perhaps the main reason why they haven’t been detected, or why they have failed to be reported if detected, e.g. the difficulty of comprehending them in the first place, and then communicating them, in all probability to a defensively critical audience. After all, some excessively specious reasoning goes into these... oversights, e.g. into the concept of the “arrow of time”, and into others such as “entropy measures disorder” and “the universe always goes from ‘order’ to ‘disorder’, so entropy always increases.” (The last 2 are from the late but still eminent Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, p. I-46-7.)

The study of the concept of entropy up to the end of the 20th Century is a study of “how to lie with statistics”. Almost all its hidden and largely fatal flaws arise from the invisible and highly prejudicial choices of the selection(s) of the sets from which the statistics are then derived, even the seemingly non-statistical “entropy always increases”. This affects not only the “second law”, but the concepts of “entropy is equivalent to disorder” and the (currently) ever popular “time reversal”.

We can also note that general thermodynamics is, too oversimplify the situation, an extension of “ideal gas law” thermodynamics. It is an almost invisible bias: it is “obvious” to chemists that they must always use thermodynamics in studying chemical reactions, but chemistry (along with nuclear physics, etc) is left out of the picture when we study thermodynamics “per se”.

“Time reversal” is another favorite scientific concept in trouble that derives from thermodynamics and its concept of entropy. There has been a serious confusion between “reversing time” in the “past trajectory” of a system (the history of the states the system went through as it operated with system time increasing) and “reversing time” for the system and/or system operation itself. (This is like confusing reversing the output of a computer with reversing the operation of the computer.) But this confusion, which does not turn out all right, is obscured by the concepts just mentioned, that “entropy measures disorder”, etc.

Not nearly all of these... oversights in entropy relate directly to “reversing time”, but we can safely reverse-paraphrase the ancient Chinese curse and say: “may we all live in interesting time reversals”.