Like, I think in terms of a musical instrument; if it’s played and played and played and played, over time it’ll get out of tune. And I would think the various physical “constants” of the universe would work in roughly the same way – over time, there’d be variations due to entropy. But, for example, the speed of light in a vacuum is constant, and continues to be constant. If entropy is an unavoidable aspect of our universe, shouldn’t it affect the speed of light in a vacuum too? Wouldn’t we expect to see some sort of slowdown or at least variation over time as a result of entropy?
In: 49
I could be getting some details wrong since I’m not a physicist, just an interested layperson.
From what I understand, at a simplified level, entropy is the tendency of *stuff* toward disorder, where *stuff* is really just matter and energy – everything that’s physically tangible and has form or energy. It’s everything we can touch or see.
Universal constants are not matter, nor are they energy. They’re more like the framework that allows matter and energy to exist. Since they aren’t *stuff*, rather they are rules, intangible ideas like the concept of entropy itself, it’s not possible for them to break down or trend towards disorder. There’s no disorder that they can achieve – disorder is a property of matter and energy, not the rules upon which the universe depends.
In this context “disorder” isn’t the same idea as “chaos” or “randomness”. It’s more like “homogeneity”. Entropy says that if you have a concentrated bundle of stuff in a system, that stuff will eventually spread out to an average state. An average state is one that is less clumpy – no bundles of stuff, only a smooth homogeneous mixture. My favorite thing to think about here is stars. Once a star forms, it starts to spew energy all over the place, causing what was once clumpy (a star being a clump of matter and energy) to spread over a larger area – stars are entropy machines!
Now hopefully you can see that, because universal constants aren’t “stuff”, there is no way for them to spread out and become more homogeneous. The concept of what this would mean for a universal constant isn’t really well defined. Since it’s not stuff, it can’t become more homogeneous. There’s no “where” for a constant to “spread” to. There isn’t really any way that a constant or rule could become more disordered since it doesn’t have any order to begin with. It has no clumps, no way of becoming more average or more spread out. It’s just a single number – the average of a number is itself, and there is no direction or dimension in which it could spread out.
The important point is that disorder is more like homogeneity, not randomness or chaos. In order to become disordered, a thing must have form. Constants don’t have form.
Latest Answers