Thread: ohhh I have a good question! Riddle me this...

Alright, so Im home about to watch some giants vs patriots... but the science channel is running a marathon of sorts of "How the Universe Works" so Im flopping between the two. The episode now is talking about stars...

Here's what puzzles me.

They are talking about star formation, and saying hydrogen gathers due to gravity and starts rotating around itself...until enough hydrogen is present that the pressure builds up, generating high tempatures that result in fusion which releases energy.

HOWEVER... isnt that a more ordered system progressing towards less order? I.E. More entropy---> less entropy. And doesn't that break the second law of thermodynamics? So wtf is that about...

Originally Posted by JFalz1024

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HOWEVER... isnt that a more ordered system progressing towards less order? I.E. More entropy---> less entropy. And doesn't that break the second law of thermodynamics? So wtf is that about...

Do you mean "a less ordered system progressing toward a more ordered system? I.E. More entropy---> less entropy." ?

I think it's like - big energy everywhere cools to get 'stuck' in a stable state of Hydrogen (which makes the gravity that will be it's own undoing). The H (which was 'energy') lets go of some of that energy when undergoing fusion to Helium - and so on. Eventually, all the mass that gets made in all the stars gets eaten by black holes and slowly radiated away. In the long run, it all goes downhill.

I feel like the hydrogen gas scattered and dispersed shouldn't coalesce into clouds where pressure and temperature increased. That seems to defy my concept of entropy. Which I recognize as something quite intriguing anyway. And then even fusion seems like a process that refutes entropy. 2---> 1 ? Ahhhh waaaah!? Universe... your as hard to understand as the fairer sex.

they radiate heat and light and eventually cataclysmically explode

gravity is stronger than pressure and heat, so it gets hotter until strong force is overcome and fusion begins. but these will eventually break down again over time. you have to expand your box for there to be no violation of entropy. the universe is the only supposed closed system, and even that is argued...

[QUOTE=TaoZero5;12824]Do you mean "a less ordered system progressing toward a more ordered system? I.E. More entropy---> less entropy." ?
QUOTE]

Yes. My mistake. Less order (diatomic H2 molecules) ---> sun (many H2 molecules / atleast initially)

In the entropy sense... does that mean stars are "alive" in the sense they are working against the entropy of the universe?

Originally Posted by litrehead

gravity is stronger than pressure and heat, so it gets hotter until strong force is overcome and fusion begins. but these will eventually break down again over time. you have to expand your box for there to be no violation of entropy. the universe is the only supposed closed system, and even that is argued...

By expanding my box, I take to mean include in this concept a longer duration of time...?

Stars are not alive because they don't have a single line of repetitive units. They explode and seed other stars, but not the way life in the organic sense is seeded.
Expanding the box of spacetime yes. Over the whole history of the universe, space and time increase while energy stays the same. So it is winding down. The pockets of energy we see are "force wells". Energy trapped by the nature of energy itself, manifested as force and action. If you just look at the cloud collapsing, it looks like higher order, but what entropy is really talking about is energy levels, order is one way of looking at it, but not the fundamental. Just like life is not anti-entropic (at least until it figures out gravity) becasue the sun is conctantly pumping energy in for it to keep capturing and storing energy, but will one day release as well when the sun explodes.

Originally Posted by litrehead

1) They explode and seed other stars, but not the way life in the organic sense is seeded.

2) Just like life is not anti-entropic (at least until it figures out gravity) becasue the sun is conctantly pumping energy in for it to keep capturing and storing energy, but will one day release as well when the sun explodes.

1) I know that much. I wasn't referring to life in an organix sense but in the anti-entropy sense.
2) I thought life was anti-entropic since you are constantly being broken down and rebuilt by chemical reactions which normally wouldn't occur unless catalysts and other exothermic reactions are coupled with them.

My main focus here is the second LAW of thermodynamics. Ok so I found this on google, "The key insight was that the world is inherently active, and that whenever an energy distribution is out of equilibrium a potential or thermodynamic "force" (the gradient of a potential) exists that the world acts spontaneously to dissipate or minimize."

Why does the universe allow the H gas to collapse onto itself due to gravity and form stars when that seems clearly to me that in that entropy sense shouldn't happen. I wouldn't beat the dead horse on this if it weren't a LAW and not a theory. To put your logic into a thought experiment... I feel like your saying molecules become more ordered so that they can become disordered, or water flows up a mountain to come down the other side.

Star formation says to me gravity > entropy