Entropy, Energy and the Universe

Isaac Asimov was one of the best science fiction writers of the world. He writes about a multitude of different themes, some of which I'm really fond of (Artificial Intelligence!). Asimov is one of those writers that I've always want to read works from. Tonight I read for the first time one of his stories, and I have to say, I'm not disappointed.

The Last Question is about entropy, which is basically a measure of disorder in a system. In other words, disorder refers to the number of different "states of all the molecules making up a system" that the system can be in. As a simple example, suppose that you put a marble in a large box, and shook the box around, and you didn't look inside afterwards. Then the marble could be anywhere in the box. Because the box is large, there are many possible places inside the box that the marble could be, so the marble in the box has a high entropy. Now suppose you put the marble in a tiny box and shook up the box. Even though you shook the box, you pretty much know where the marble is, because the box is small. In this case, the marble in the box has low entropy.

If you remember your high-school science lectures, the first law of thermodynamics is the law of conservation of energy. That law states that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant. Energy can be neither created nor be destroyed, but it can change form. For instance, chemical energy can be converted to kinetic energy in the explosion of a stick of dynamite. A consequence of the law of conservation of energy is that no system without an external energy supply can deliver an unlimited amount of energy to its surroundings.

Entropy is the basis for the second law: the Universe evolves such that its total entropy always stays the same or increases. Unlike energy, entropy can be created. In fact, your body is creating some right now as it generates heat. One of the reasons that you have to sweat off water when your body is too warm is that you have to get rid of the extra entropy (otherwise, you would become disorganized and eventually die). The energy that your warm body radiates also carries away the extra entropy. It does this because losing this energy decreases the number of microscopic states that the atoms and molecules of your body can be in.

[SPOILER ALERT]

You may have read the story before (or following the link I just posted), and read that humans built a super-computer to manage and calculate everything. As billions of years pass, humans of different eras ask the computer if it's possible to reduce the amount of entropy. The computer knows that eventually it will have enough data to know the answer, but that takes quite a long time. So long, that humans have actually all disappeared and merged with the computer itself. To prove that final question of whether entropy can be reversed, the computer, or God, reshapes the universe with the mystical words "Let there be light!".

Fuckin' hell, that was some short story. When I was a kid in sixth grade, I told my friends that one day, the universe would stop expanding, start contracting and eventually have a massive explosion back at it's center. The explosion would generate so much energy that it bend time and would act as the Big Bang, taking us back around the circle. That was, of course, quite naïve, but it's nice to see that a quite renowned science fiction writer has a similar idea to mine.

Anyway, Asimov's story is based on the fact that "no problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances" and that the computer will eventually break the 2nd law of thermodynamics and revert entropy. While it may be impossible, it would be quite spectacular to witness such an event, but ultimately something so distant from us that we can't even conceive it in our small brains. You, me and anyone else that reads these words will be long gone before the Sun even runs out (the exact same reason the book's first characters ignored the problem!), so there is no need to lose your sleep over this problem.

Hoping you enjoyed this story,

David

PS: thanks to the New Mexico Solar Energy Association for their post on entropy, of which I quoted a lot of information

Starting

It's almost 2am. Game of Thrones is playing in the background.

You may wonder why I started this blog. I basically dream a lot during the day. Unless im focused on something interesting (say, a videogame, a good series or movie, a decent book, a complex problem) my mind will usually wander and question a lot of things. This blog is so i have somewhere to write those things down so I can remember them in the future and compare and contrast what my opinions will be from what they were.

At the moment, my first thought will be about the Wolfram Language. I just saw a nice video about it and the friend who sent me told me it was the future. For those of you who know next to nothing about computers, programs on your computer (or tablet or phone) are all written in a given language. That language will usually be something that can be read and understood easily by people. We then use other programs to convert that language into something that computer understands (you know, bytes and bits). 

What Wolfram (the guy who created the language) seems to be attempting with his new language is "a highly general multi-paradigm programming language, (...) designed to be as general as possible, with emphasis on symbolic computation, functional programming, and rule-based programming. It is built to represent arbitrary structures and data." (yeah, i copied this from Wikipedia). Now, for those people who enjoyed the simple explanation about programs being written in human languages, this paragraph got real awkward, real quick. In non-nerd terms, this language is meant to be everything you need for any situation where you have to write a piece of software.

With that short video, Wolfram shows us that using built-in functions and methods from his language, you have access to what you would otherwise need hundreds of regular programs to do. The language knows how to do almost everything you can need. The concept seems interesting, no doubt. It seems like the next logical step in this trend and evolution of programming languages will be having the languages and programs learning by themselves everything they can need to do what is asked of them.

Now, before you start thinking Skynet or I, Robot, it might not be that bad. Keep in mind that just because computers can learn, doesn't mean they will be smarter than us. If we teach them "ethics" or "morals", could they become a threat to us? Even if they could, a computer still cant stand up and walk around, can it? And why would computers want to harm mankind? If computers really evolved to the "revolution level", isn't it obivous we wouldn't even know? All the phones we carry around in our pockets would feast a grand database to track every human on the planet. They would control what news would show up in the Internet or on real media. Any talk of a computer controlling the world would be just joked about or thought of as rumors. We would have an illusion of freedom. 

I could go on and on about what can we define as being free or not, but that should be the topic for another post. This should be it for my first post, I hope you have enjoyed.

And now, as a final note... How do you know you aren't already being controlled and tracked (not necessarily by a mega-computer) through your phone and through your dependency on technology? Have you never found strange that ads on the internet seem to show things that are related to your areas of interest?

Cya next time! 

David