Let me start by saying that I have no scientific background whatsoever. I am very interested in science though and I'm currently enjoying Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos. I'm at chapter 7 and so far I understand most of general ideas he has talked about. Or at least, I think I understand them :-)
There is however one part, at the end of chapter 6 that I can't grasp.
It is about entropy and the state of the universe a few minutes after the big bang.
On page 171 he says:
Our most refined theories of the origin of the universe -our most refined cosmological theories- tell us that by the time the universe was a couple of minutes old, it was filled with a nearly uniform hot gas composed of roughly 75 percent hydrogen, 23 percent helium, and small amounts of deuterium and lithium. The essential point is that this gas filling the universe had extraordinarily low entropy.
And on page 173-174:
We have now come to the place where the buck finally stops. The ultimate source of order, of low entropy, must be the big bang itself. In its earliest moments, rather than being filled with gargantuan containers of entropy such as black holes, as we would expect from probabilistic considerations, for some reason the nascent universe was filled with a hot, uniform, gaseous mixture of hydrogen and helium. Although this configuration has high entropy when densities are so low that we can ignore gravity, the situation is otherwise when gravity can't be ignored; then, such a uniform gas has extremely low entropy. In comparison with black holes, the diffuse, nearly uniform gas was in an extraordinarily low-entropy state.
In the first part of the chapter Brian Greene explains the concept of entropy with tossing the 693 pages of War and Peace in the air.
At first, the pages are ordered. The specific order they are in make sense and are required to recognize the pages as a readable book called War and Peace. This is low entropy. It is very highly ordered and there is no chaos.
Now, when you throw the pages in the air, let them fall and then pick them up one by one and put them on top of each other, the chances you get the exact same order as the initial state are extremely small. The chance you get another order (no matter what order, just not the one from the beginning) is extremely big. When the pages are in the wrong order, there is high entropy and a high amount of chaos. The pages are not ordered and when they are not ordered you would not notice the difference between one unordered state and another one.
However, should you swap two pages in the ordered, low entropy version, you would notice the difference.
So I understand low entropy as a highly ordered state with low chaos in which a reordering of the elements would be noticeable.
I hope I'm still correct here :-)
Now, what I don't understand is how a uniform mixture of hydrogen and helium can by highly ordered? I'd say you wouldn't notice it if some particles traded places. I'd say that a uniform mixture is actually in a state of high entropy because you wouldn't notice it if you swapped some hydrogen atoms.
Brian Greene explains this would indeed be the case when gravity plays no important role, but that things change when gravity does play a role; and in the universe right after the big bang, gravity plays a big role.
Is that because a reordering of the particles would change the effects of gravity? Or is there something else that I'm missing here?
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