< God's Rule over Entropy

May 4, 2024

   For those of you who have watched superhero movies, let's imagine a new superhero. This superhero, which we will call Maxwell, has mediocre strength, wisdom, and has no superpowers at all except one: he can easily reverse entropy. As budding authors, we could write stories about Maxwell, and submit them for making into comic books or a movie. Except that stories about our superhero would probably be rejected by the publishers and studios: they would say the stories would be too boring because our superhero is too "over-powered". As we will come to see, if our superhero Maxwell could control entropy, and nothing else, he would be somewhat close to all-powerful.

What Exactly is Entropy?

   The first law of thermodynamics can be summarized as "you can't get more energy out of something than you put in. The second law can be summarized as "you can't even break even." We have a term for the second law: entropy. Entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system. To over-simplify a bit, let's call your room a system. Entropy would be a measure of how messy your room is. If you carelessly throw things everywhere, it gets messier and messier by itself. It takes work to clean your room and put everything in its place.

It is easy to go from low entropy to high entropy, but it takes what physicists call "work" to go from high entropy to low entropy. You can take a material from low entropy to high entropy just by burning it, for example. But to take a system from high to low entropy can be as hard as trying to "unburn" something.

   But more commonly entropy is though in terms of random forces and chaotic (Brownian) motion. In a physical material, molecules that are held in place, in a solid material, have a lower entropy than the same material in a liquid state. As the temperature is increased, and the molecules get more energetic, entropy keeps going up slightly, until it turns into a gas and the entropy is much higher.

   Information entropy is another type of entropy. Information-wise, a low-entropy system has a lot of non-random information, while a high entropy system has a lot of random information, or noise. Someone needs to do work to create or copy information, while degrading the signal increases the entropy. Imagine a hard drive, filled with good information, being bombarded by radiation. The information content would degrade; ultimately all the bits would be random, similar to when it was first manufactured. How does a new hard drive, with no information and high entropy become a low entropy system, filled with information; it takes work to copy the information over.

If you look at all the information and order in a living being, life is an extremely low entropy system. Death and decay greatly raise the entropy.

Since God is Almighty, God can reverse entity. Ezekiel 37 is an example, which refers to the resurrection of dry bones. Since God can reverse entropy, and God can look and work through space and time, even though God has other powers too, those two powers alone would be enough to be practically all-powerful.

Maxwell's Demon

   The famous scientist James Clerk Maxwell in 1867 tried to do a thought experiment to disprove the law of entropy. Imagine you had two chambers of gas, both at exactly room temperature, with a small hole that could let one molecule at a time go through. There was a door that could be opened to let molecules go to the other side, or closed to prevent them. Image a small "finite-being" in Maxwell's terms, later renamed to a "demon" by Lord Kelvin, who controlled the door. Every time he saw a fast molecule would make sure it stayed on the left side. Every time he saw a slow molecule, he would make sure it stayed on the right side. Eventually the left side would be very hot, and the right side would be very cold. If the door had mass, it would require work to open and shut the door, so the second law of thermodynamics would be preserved. However, if the door had no mass, and if it took no work to measure the speed of molecules, then this looks like it might violate the second law. Tiny systems that might almost violate the second law of thermodynamics are a study in nanotechnology.

What About an Angel instead of a Demon?

   What if an angelic being had the complete power to reverse entropy? He could unmix anything, he could totally undo damage from a tornado. He could make something that was burned go back to the state it was before it was burned. All of those things could "theoretically" happen by chance, but the chance is so infinitesimally small that we just say it can't happen. But sometimes people are too quick to say something can't happen, as the next three examples show.

Example 1: Matter cannot travel faster than light

While no ordinary matter can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, in some circumstances matter actually does travel faster than light. Electrons and alpha particles emitted from radioactive atoms can travel, in water, faster than the speed of the phase velocity of light in water. When this occurs, it gives off a bluish glow, called Cherenkov radiation. There are many restrictions on things that we can observe and read about, but those restrictions do not apply to God or His angelic creatures.

Example 2: Human heavier than Air Flight is impossible

Sometimes people say these things are impossible, or cannot happen. Just as a famous scientists said that man will never fly, people are often restricted by their earthbound thinking. The Wright brothers first flew on December 17, 1903. Here are some interesting quotes from experts listed on http://www.skygod.com/quotes/predictions.html.

It is complete nonsense to believe flying machines will ever work. — Sir Stanley Mosley, 1905.

It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane, which two or three years ago were thought to hold the solution to the [flying machine] problem, have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere. — Thomas Edison, quoted in New York World, 17 November 1895.

The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be. — Simon Newcomb, professor of mathematics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science, 1906

 "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." -- Lord Kelvin, President, Royal Society, 1895

Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which man will never be able to cope. . . . The example of the bird does not prove that man can fly. Imagine the proud possessor of the aeroplane darting through the air at a speed of several hundred feet per second. It is the speed alone that sustains him. How is he ever going to stop? — Simon Newcomb, in The Independent: A Weekly Magazine, 22 October 1903.

All attempts at artificial aviation are not only dangerous to human life, but foredoomed to failure from the engineering standpoint. — Engineering Editor, The Times, 1906

Their Lordships are of the opinion that they would not be of any practical use to the Naval Service. — British Admiralty, in reply to the Wright's offer of patents for their airplane, 1907.

We do not consider that aeroplanes will be of any possible use for war purposes. — The British Secretary of State for War, 1910.

The aeroplane will never fly. — Lord Haldane, Minister of War, Britain, 1907 (yes, 1907).

The popular mind often pictures gigantic flying machines speeding across the Atlantic, carrying innumerable passengers. It seems safe to say that such ideas must be wholly visionary. Even if such a machine could get across with one or two passengers, it would be prohibitive to any but the capitalist who could own his own yacht.

— William Pickering, Harvard astronomer, 1910.

So did the Wright brothers perform a miracle, or "break" a law of nature. It might have seemed that way, but it was not so. Rather, they briefly "superseded" the law of gravity with "aerodynamic lift". The law of gravity was never broken'; it is just that aerodynamic lift provided force to counteract the law of gravity.

Example 3: Quantum Mechanics

The second law of thermodynamics works on a large scale; for individual particles quantum mechanics can give results that would seem to disobey the second law of thermodynamics.

For example, an electron could be considered as a particle in one location, and then be at a second location, without being at any location in between. It would be like a ball on one side of a wall disappearing and appearing on the other side of the wall, without any hole in the wall or damage to the ball.

Summary

   There are many things people do not know how to do, and many things people will never be able to do. But that does not stop other beings, like angels, demons, of God, from doing them. Some miracles might be "breaking" the laws of nature; if God made the laws then God can break them. But other things might only appear to be breaking the laws of nature but are actually only superseding the laws of nature.