Is the universe inherently creative?
Well, yes.
Of course.
But you have heard incessantly that it is running down, that the Second Law of Thermodynamics implies that the useful energy (capacity to do work) in the universe is dissipating. You have heard incessantly that the entropy (disorder) of the universe is rising, that it is falling into disorder. Isn't the universe slowly deteriorating?
Well, yes.
Of course.
Yet we see order all around us, and new order appearing daily, as snowflakes form and fall, plants grow up through the snow in spring, babies and new stars are born, and poems are written.
How is it possible that a universe that started from some sort of explosion, known as the Big Bang, which belched out in one hot breath all of what would become all the matter in the universe, is constantly creating? The history of the universe has been no more than the continued expansion of that Bang, yet we see everywhere the emergence of the new -- we see creation at work at every level from the completely inanimate to the sentient.
Is this kind of creation compatible with the Second Law? Doesn't it argue against the Second Law? Not at all. In fact, the universe is still dissipating the massive energy of that first burst. A finding of a later-developing branch of thermodynamics called non-equilibrium thermodynamics says that when a system dissipates energy (essentially, when energy flows through a system), it is inevitable that order will appear in that system. The energy flowing through the system will maintain that order. When the energy has all dissipated, the order will collapse into random motion. When this happens in a living object, we say it has died.
Even in simple system like a pan of liquid on a heating unit of the kitchen range, order emerges spontaneously as heat enters from the bottom of the pan, rises through the liquid, and radiates away at the surface. As shown in this figure, the liquid in the pan, if it is not disturbed, spontaneously organizes itself into packed columns, called convection cells, where liquid rises in the middle of each cell, and falls with liquid from neighboring cells around each rising column.
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Convection cells in a heated liquid. Liquid is rising in the center of
each cell, and sinking at each little periphery (or vice versa).
Image, along with more about non-equilibrium thermodynamics, from HERE.
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Does this look like disorder and dissipation? Well, yes. It looks just like the kind of thing non-equilibrium would lead you to expect. Heat energy enters at the bottom, creates this highly ordered motion in the liquid, then is lost to the at the surface, increasing the disorder there -- in the air. So some of the rising energy sustains the ordered motion in the liquid, while some increases molecular disorder in the air above. Overall, the universe is becoming more disordered, and losing energy, but in the pan, dissipation is sustaining order.
Want another example? Look in the mirror. That candy bar that you ate instead of breakfast this morning was broken down to carbon dioxide, ammonia, and water. The abundant energy produced by those oxidation reactions was conserved as chemical energy (think ATP), moved around to parts of your cells that are making and doing energy-requiring things like movement or biosynthesis (think DNA replication before cell division), and being dissipated there. Overall there is dissipation of the energy from that candy bar, but some of the energy is creating and maintaining order.
It is keeping you alive.
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