I often see it attributed to dark energy. I don’t understand entropy very well admittedly, but this explanation makes sense to me. So what is the difference between the expansion of the universe and entropy?
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You can think of entropy as a measure of how much energy in a system is usuable but it is different from the total amount of energy in the system.
Say you have a cup of water with cold water at the bottom and hot at the top. Over time the temperature equalizes and the entropy increases however the total thermal energy is the same it’s it just evenly spread out in the cup now(assuming no losses).
Expansion of the universe is like if the cup over time get hotter and hotter maybe until the entire cup is boiling. Where the energy for this comes from no one really knows so we call it dark (physic talk for we don’t know not actually dark) energy.
entropy just means chaos or “disorganization”
an entropy of spacetime would mean that as the universe expands, time AND space would literally be more and more fuky.
Using our telescope and mk1. eyeball, we can see that there haven’t been “noticeable” changes to our observation.
This doesn’t entirely rule it out, as the distortion might just be undetectable via our methods, but it also generated 0 proof of support. and our math also doesn’t exactly check out (based on observation)
While the two are related, they are different.
Entropy is how much energy is within the universe that remains in a usable state. Think pouring milk into a cup of coffee. Entropy describes them going from the state of two seperate fluids slowly mixing and then becoming equally distributed.
Expansion has the coffee getting slightly hotter as time goes on until it boils. Scientists are not entirely sure why this happens so they refer to it as “dark energy”
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