EDNote: Sorry about the delay on forwarding this. I should add that,
while yours truly is biased towards admitting these kinds of
discussions, if they stray from engaging specific Nabokov texts or
contexts, they will become too abstract for most of our subscribers and
our editorial policy. ~SB
-------- Original Message --------
Dear Stan,
I've been thinking a lot about this second law of thermodynamics
you mentioned in your post, and in fact the problem with it
is not the (quite convincing) justification that in a closed
macroscopic system the enthropy is not decreasing, but in the
fundamental question what systems are closed. (Are there any?)
Usually in "popular science"
articles and books "closed" is understood as closed in space,
and this in fact is a dangerous shift of notions (dangerous
for any proof). The justifications of the second law of thermodynamics
are not valid if a system is not "structurally closed",
for example we consider some particles as indivisible,
but in fact they have inner structure. Then the
enthropy calculated on the assumption that the particles
are "atoms" is not calculated correctly, and the (hidden)
inner structure can be transferred on the higher
level. Observable effect may be decreasing enthropy.
Possible objection is that if we would be able to calculate
the "full enthropy" it will increase. But we don't know how
many structural levels there are, and to an infinite system
the calculus doesn't apply.
Another remark is that as far as I know nobody yet verified
the effect on classical calculations of enthropy of the
recent discoveries like long-distance quantum coupling
(a particle depends on its "twin" at any distance - Bell's
theorem, Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox and related
experiments etc.) This is also a major blow to the notion
of closed system.
Best regards,
Sergei Soloviev