Is entropy finally winning? (AKA A random post about randomness)

[TubaMorg]

I have noticed over the last couple of years a disturbing increase in randomness. I first noticed this when my daughter began describing random events in her life:
"I was, like, looking at a small tree and, like, I just randomly said 'sticks are just dead branches that have fallen off of trees'"

I commended her for her astute observation but was troubled by the seemingly lack of randomness in her random comment. Have I, being older, begun to loose my powers of observation? As she settled firmly into her tweener years, she began to describe (ad nauseam) many more random comments she makes every day. I was still having trouble detecting the randomness but I was getting worried.

Now, evidently, many more young people are noticing randomness where none has existed previously. Evidently people are just going about their day when BAM! curious sentences are exiting their mouths with no thought or sensory input.

This phenomenon is also, apparently, intercalating itself into our robots too! We've all seen it! Robots randomly going the wrong way. Robots randomly driving in circles. Robots randomly hitting driver station walls. And most amazing of all.....robots randomly breaking!

So the question is, with all this extra randomness that we are seeing recently, is the universe winning? Are we devolving back to complete disorder?

[Leav]

if the universe thinks it's winning it's because it/he/she/they doesn't know about the Ace in Asimov's sleeve!

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

-Leav

[JesseK]

What really boggles my mind is that my entropic experiences come back to me as deja-vu years after the experience occured. I figure that once this stops happening the universe will explode.

This next part isn't a bunch of jibber-jabber. I actually have thought about this alot since 2004 when I started a research project with a professor a GaTech that was aimed at a hierarchal-style of memory retrieval & cognitive function for a artificial cognition system. There's a paper of the basic theory of it in IEEE somewhere, but I digress...

Perhaps you're confusing the concept of randomness with the concept of discovery. Perhaps as you get older you figure out the pattern of how to discover and therefore subconsiously reject all random discoveries outside of that pattern?

Young people (well, at least me when I was younger) become fascinated by discovery and don't understand how they derived the facts in their heads about what they've discovered...hence it all seems random. Yet in reality, constructive learning is all about discovery and derivation. The only thing that is random about it is the chronological sequence of varying discoveries. Since learning curves are always exponential, we have no way of predicting when a young person will discover something new since we do not know when he/she derived the basic thoughts needed to derive the higher-level discovery. Since a young mind can hardly fathom this concept, let alone understand it, most discoveries seem to be random from the young mind's point of view.

Robots will always do what they're instructed to do. However, it is not always the creators of the bot who give the instructions: surrounding environments, rogue IR signals, incorrect programming, un-maintained mechanical systems, and dynamic interactions with other bots all have a hand in the metaphysical "instructions" a bot receives.

Hence this is not randomness and therefore the universe is not winning.

[Un Luchador]

[insert second law of thermodynamics]
no, the universe will never win. We will always maintain a constant increase in process development which in turn release entropy into the universe, subsequently leaving us at command of that which creates this entropy. Unless the universe itself manages to somehow create new processes, like us humans do, we will always be winning.

[Jack Murphy]

Help me out please. I’ve got 30 pounds of dictionaries and the vast array of the web but I don’t get entropy. You folks are making my head hurt. I find this fascinating.
What is intercalating?

[TubaMorg]

Originally Posted by Jack Murphy

Help me out please. I’ve got 30 pounds of dictionaries and the vast array of the web but I don’t get entropy. You folks are making my head hurt. I find this fascinating.
What is intercalating?

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/intercalating

[Frenchie]

Entropy = Chaos.

Chaos always wins.
My room is a perfect example. It takes more energy to clean it than to make a mess of it. Naturally, my room just gets messier and messier.

[coldfusion1279]

Depends on your defined system I suppose.. Entropy will always increase, so does it really surprise you?

If anyone likes thermodynamics and also likes to think about interesting arguments...

Creationists claim that evolution contradicts the second law of thermodynamics because living organisms are constantly evolving, becoming more organized.

People say that creationists misconstrue the law to explain what they want to be explained.. They say that evolution isn't ruled out by this argument, and that creationist's have offered no evidence to discount evolution.

Now, set aside what you believe in, whether its creationism, evolution, both, or neither, and give it the old college try. It is interesting to think about. I think the key is in, like i said before, how you define your system.

But lets hear it...

(this was a short answer question on my thermo exam a year ago)

[JoeXIII'007]

Originally Posted by TubaMorg

I have noticed over the last couple of years a disturbing increase in randomness. I first noticed this when my daughter began describing random events in her life:
"I was, like, looking at a small tree and, like, I just randomly said 'sticks are just dead branches that have fallen off of trees'"

I commended her for her astute observation but was troubled by the seemingly lack of randomness in her random comment. Have I, being older, begun to loose my powers of observation? As she settled firmly into her tweener years, she began to describe (ad nauseam) many more random comments she makes every day. I was still having trouble detecting the randomness but I was getting worried.

Now, evidently, many more young people are noticing randomness where none has existed previously. Evidently people are just going about their day when BAM! curious sentences are exiting their mouths with no thought or sensory input.

...

So the question is, with all this extra randomness that we are seeing recently, is the universe winning? Are we devolving back to complete disorder?

It's either that, or that there has been this disorder all this time and no one has bothered recognizing it... as JesseK sort of pointed out.

I personally think that the universe has had us all along. First it was through astrology and the astrologers trying to predict near and distant futures with horoscopes, now it has astronomy and astronomers trying to figure out what the motion and the actions of the stars mean through telescopes. I mean, we just recently, on a historical time scale, demoted Pluto to dwarf planet. Then of course there's this very planet, which just recently parked a twister in Atlanta: only the second twister I have heard of to strike a metropolitan area (Salt Lake City being the other). I could go on, but yeah, randomness and entropy have rocked this universe since prior to Adam and Eve.

That said, I tried to do a short response to this right around 4:47 this morning, when I couldn't sleep, only to find out CD was down for a routine system backup .

Good day to you all! Thank you for starting this little thread: right when General Chem 2 decided to start covering entropy and the Laws of Thermodynamics. Coinkidink I think not...