If there was going tp be a heat-death of the universe, would that be order or chaos?

[halfeye]

Someone once said that the universe goes from the chaos of the big bang, to the chaos of the heat death. Black holes will eat all of it, so there won't be a heat death, but if there was, it seems to me that that would be order, not chaos.

Does anyone agree or disagree? if neither, then what?

[Anymage]

Order and chaos aren't really scientific terms. The heat death universe where you have no change because everything is the same meaningless gray blah does line up with certain views of order taken to destructive extremes, but that's author dependent. I'll note that if we just look at D&D cosmology, the plane of pure Chaos is indeed a riotous flux of matter and energy, but the gray blah plane is the NE Hades.

If you want to talk about low vs. high entropy, I'll just note that the technical uses don't necessarily match with the colloquial ones.

[Razade]

Someone once said that the universe goes from the chaos of the big bang, to the chaos of the heat death. Black holes will eat all of it, so there won't be a heat death, but if there was, it seems to me that that would be order, not chaos.

Does anyone agree or disagree? if neither, then what?

I don't even understand what you're asking. Black holes eating everything? Not likely with Hawking radiation. I'm a layman on this, at best, but unless some serious science has been overturned heath death is still one of the most likely proposed ends for all of this. As for order or chaos...neither of those are scientific terms and as the old adage goes what is order to the spider is chaos to the fly.

[Batcathat]

heath death is still one of the most likely proposed ends for all of this.

Too soon to make a Heath Ledger death joke?

[Rockphed]

The ultimate order the universe could see would be having all the energy in the universe trapped as matter at absolute zero in a series of simple orbits. I do not see a way to get there from our universe.

Heat death means there are no more temperature gradients to exploit to do work, not that everything is stopped and uniformly spread out.

[Mastikator]

Assuming that the expansion of the universe continues to accelerate forever, and assuming that all black holes will eventually evaporate away, then given enough time most space will be completely empty and every particle will be stretched out into nothingness and be alone forever. Functionally the universe will be empty and nothing will ever happen again.

Entropy does not really deal with order and chaos, as @Rockphed said. It's about useful energy, the potential for change. When the heat death has occurred nothing will change or happen. It will only be ordered in the sense that nothing is ordered.

[LibraryOgre]

The heat death of the universe will happen because of entropy, which is generally held to be a chaotic force. However, it will then become entirely orderly... unchanging and static.

[halfeye]

Black holes eating everything? Not likely with Hawking radiation.

Big ones have temperatures very near to absolute zero, it would take a very long time for them to evaporate, and when they converge they get bigger very quickly. It seems possible that they will all merge into one, which will be very very cold, and absorb all the radiation before it begins to evaporate, maybe detonating into a new big bang when it gets big enough.

As for order or chaos...neither of those are scientific terms and as the old adage goes what is order to the spider is chaos to the fly.

The are linguistic terms, and as users of language we can debate their meanings.

The heat death of the universe will happen because of entropy, which is generally held to be a chaotic force. However, it will then become entirely orderly... unchanging and static.

That's the dilemma/paradox I was trying to point out. Maybe entropy is orderly?

[Anymage]

Big ones have temperatures very near to absolute zero, it would take a very long time for them to evaporate, and when they converge they get bigger very quickly. It seems possible that they will all merge into one, which will be very very cold, and absorb all the radiation before it begins to evaporate, maybe detonating into a new big bang when it gets big enough.

Dark energy says that galaxies are overall going to fly away from each other. You'll have mergers as galaxies in clusters do get drawn together, but that will only be "all black holes in the observable universe" because other galaxies and their black holes are no longer visible. One uber black hole would be the big crunch, and we've pretty much ruled that out.

The era where black holes and their evaporation are the only energy gradients in the universe will last longer than the time between the big bang and the heat death of all non-black hole matter (speculative/unknown physics notwithstanding), but the universe has infinity time to finally achieve heat death (again, speculative/unknown physics notwithstanding).

The are linguistic terms, and as users of language we can debate their meanings.

As long as everyone's on the same page that's possible, but things like "evolution is just a theory" have made sciencey types very cautious to establish baseline terms before they wax poetic. If you want to use words more freely, I mentioned upthread that the big bang was like Limbo and the heat death universe is like Hades.

[LibraryOgre]

That's the dilemma/paradox I was trying to point out. Maybe entropy is orderly?

No, it is simply that entropy leads to order, but can also only be appreciated within order.

If you take a look at the brand-new universe, all was chaotic, but that chaos was indescribable, because there was nothing to compare it to. As parts of it ordered themselves, they became the contrast to the chaos, which, in turn, worked against their ordering. The order that will eventually result... the heat death of the universe... is the triumph of entropy, which results in order.

Law and chaos are seen as being a dichotomy, not complementing forces. It's a yin yang, not two forces staring at each other over a wall.

[DavidSh]

Law and chaos are seen as being a dichotomy, not complementing forces. It's a yin yang, not two forces staring at each other over a wall.

Are you suggesting that law and order are synonymous? Or could the relation between law and chaos be different from the relation between order and chaos?

(insert appropriate emoji of your choice here)

[LibraryOgre]

Are you suggesting that law and order are synonymous? Or could the relation between law and chaos be different from the relation between order and chaos?

(insert appropriate emoji of your choice here)

Sorry; in this case, they are synonymous, because I have my alignment head on. I was not speaking "the law", but rather Law, as a principle of order.

[Razade]

Big ones have temperatures very near to absolute zero, it would take a very long time for them to evaporate, and when they converge they get bigger very quickly. It seems possible that they will all merge into one, which will be very very cold, and absorb all the radiation before it begins to evaporate, maybe detonating into a new big bang when it gets big enough.

It's not very possible they will all merge into one. It being near absolute zero doesn't really mean much. Space is pretty much near absolute zero as well, most of it anyway. The expansion rate of the Universe basically makes this so unlikely as to not even consider it. You're right though, it will take a very long time however the end of the Universe is a very long way away under the Heat Death model. I'm not even sure how to approach the "detonating into a new big bang" bit.

The are linguistic terms, and as users of language we can debate their meanings.

They absolutely are linguistic terms and we can debate their meaning, context still matters and no matter the meaning we ascribe to them in our discussion they don't mean anything in relation to the actual discourse of the science. We can discuss the order and chaos in a bowl of soup but what are we really discussing?

[crayzz]

The are linguistic terms, and as users of language we can debate their meanings.

Sure, but you're asking a specific question that depends on those meanings, so pinning down those meanings beforehand is kinda necessary. The time to debate their meaning is before asking these kinds of questions.

"Entropy" doesn't really have much to do with chaos or order directly. In stat-mech, we take entropy as a function of the degeneracy of a system: systems with high degeneracy (i.e. a large number of equivalent energy states) have high entropy. Systems with low degeneracy (with a small number of equivalent energy states) have low entropy.

This tends to give an intuition of entropy being "chaotic". A perfect crystal lattice is very low entropy: a perfect crystal lattice has exactly 1 configuration at its energy level. A flawed crystal lattice is high entropy: you could introduce the same flaw at very many points in the lattice and get the same energy level, so there are many configurations at that energy level. We tend to think of a perfect crystal lattice as ordered, and a disrupted crystal lattice as chaotic, so we associate entropy with chaos.

Another way to think of this is in terms of the information required to construct a system. If I tell you I have one gram of iron with a perfect body-centred cubic lattice, you know the exact configuration of every atom in that lattice. However, if I tell you that there is a single vacancy defect, one hole in the lattice with a missing iron atom, suddenly you don't know the configuration of every atom. Indeed, you don't know the configuration of any atom, it would take time and effort to identify which atoms are in which configuration. You need a lot more information to reconstruct the exact crystal lattice. High entropy systems are high information. We tend to view high information states as chaotic and low information states as ordered.

Heat death of the universe would be highly degenerate: there are functionally innumerable equivalent states at that precise energy level with no functionally useful energy gradients for anything to exploit. There are many, many, MANY possible states that our universe could end up in. Saying "heat death" tells use very little about the exact configuration. All we know is that its plausible we end up in one of the practically innumerable many.

So is that ordered or chaotic?

[Bohandas]

That's the dilemma/paradox I was trying to point out. Maybe entropy is orderly?

The way I understand it, which may be incorrect, is like this: Imagine you have a bottle, and you pour in different colors of sand, one after the other, so that the different colors of sand form neat, uniform layers. Now start shaking the bottle. The layers mix together and become less neat and uniform. Entropy has increased. Now keep shaking the bottle. Eventually everything is uniform again, albeit still not neatly arranged at the lowest level, entropy has increased again.

[halfeye]

It's not very possible they will all merge into one. It being near absolute zero doesn't really mean much. Space is pretty much near absolute zero as well, most of it anyway.

The CMB is at about 3K (a black hole of one solar mass (M☉) has a temperature of only 60 nanokelvins (60 billionths of a kelvin)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation), a SMBH will be much cooler than that, and a SMBH will evaporate only when the external radiation temperature falls lower than its own temperature, and then very, very slowly.

The expansion rate of the Universe basically makes this so unlikely as to not even consider it. You're right though, it will take a very long time however the end of the Universe is a very long way away under the Heat Death model.

The time involved gets very close to nfinity.

I'm not even sure how to approach the "detonating into a new big bang" bit.

It's a possibility, but it's so long range as to be almost (but not quite) meaningless. I think it's so long range that we don't know enough to make significant guesses at this point in time.

They absolutely are linguistic terms and we can debate their meaning, context still matters and no matter the meaning we ascribe to them in our discussion they don't mean anything in relation to the actual discourse of the science. We can discuss the order and chaos in a bowl of soup but what are we really discussing?

Science is a "game" within language, is a "game" within science, is a "game" within language... It's turtles all the way down.

The way I understand it, which may be incorrect, is like this: Imagine you have a bottle, and you pour in different colors of sand, one after the other, so that the different colors of sand form neat, uniform layers. Now start shaking the bottle. The layers mix together and become less neat and uniform. Entropy has increased. Now keep shaking the bottle. Eventually everything is uniform again, albeit still not neatly arranged at the lowest level, entropy has increased again.

"Uniform layers" is not a uniform whole thing at all in my view.

[Razade]

The CMB is at about 3K (a black hole of one solar mass (M☉) has a temperature of only 60 nanokelvins (60 billionths of a kelvin)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation), a SMBH will be much cooler than that, and a SMBH will evaporate only when the external radiation temperature falls lower than its own temperature, and then very, very slowly.

I'm not even close to an expert, I am as lay as a layman can get on this stuff but my understanding is that the black holes get hotter as they evaporate, and thus cause them to evaporate faster. Someone who has actually studied this on a collegiate level can check me on that. I certainly can't burp up the math to demonstrate it, but a cursory google search (so the barest attempt to verify) at least seems to point that my layman understanding is accurate. Black holes evaporate faster as time goes on, not slower because it's in inverse proportion to the temperature of the space around them. Colder the space, faster the evaporation.

The time involved gets very close to nfinity.

The time involved for what? All black holes evaporating? Because that doesn't seem like the consensus. For the Heat Death of the universe, because it's one of the prevailing models of how our presentation of the Universe is going to end so I don't think it's consensus either. Not only that but infinity isn't a measurement, so I don't think using it in that context is particularly useful.

It's a possibility, but it's so long range as to be almost (but not quite) meaningless. I think it's so long range that we don't know enough to make significant guesses at this point in time.

Well...if you count "anything with more than a 0% chance of happening possible" then yeah. It's possible, but that's not particularly useful as a metric. It's possible we all turn to cheese tomorrow under that model and I'm willing to bet we all won't be brie this time next Tuesday. I more meant however that I don't know how to approach it because the Big Bang wasn't a detonation event. So another Big Bang, if it's at all like the one we have on paper, isn't going to be one either. It was an expansion event, not an explosion.

Science is a "game" within language, is a "game" within science, is a "game" within language... It's turtles all the way down.

Using the rules for Monoply when you're playing Sorry still nets you a lot of wasted time and confusion. Games don't overlap just because they're games without a lot of work and instead of doing the legwork you make comments like this which don't elucidate what you're actually asking, what you're driving at or what the topic is actually about. People have asked. What do you mean by Chaos? What do you mean by Order?

[gomipile]

Without definitions that can be pinned to measurable physical quantities, the question is meaningless.

[halfeye]

Without definitions that can be pinned to measurable physical quantities, the question is meaningless.

When the question is "are the current definitions sensible?" supplying just one set of definitions seems counter productive.

I'm not even close to an expert, I am as lay as a layman can get on this stuff but my understanding is that the black holes get hotter as they evaporate, and thus cause them to evaporate faster. Someone who has actually studied this on a collegiate level can check me on that. I certainly can't burp up the math to demonstrate it, but a cursory google search (so the barest attempt to verify) at least seems to point that my layman understanding is accurate. Black holes evaporate faster as time goes on, not slower because it's in inverse proportion to the temperature of the space around them. Colder the space, faster the evaporation.

This is also what I understand, however, it's an exponential increase, such that a one kilogram black hole would be a devastating nuclear weapon. It would take a black hole with about the mass of the Moon the current period of existence of the universe to evaporate, the last second starts at about 2,150 tonnes (but these are half-lives, not determinate times). The times for massive black holes are very, very long, compared to the duratation of the universe up to now.

Well...if you count "anything with more than a 0% chance of happening possible" then yeah. It's possible, but that's not particularly useful as a metric. It's possible we all turn to cheese tomorrow under that model and I'm willing to bet we all won't be brie this time next Tuesday. I more meant however that I don't know how to approach it because the Big Bang wasn't a detonation event. So another Big Bang, if it's at all like the one we have on paper, isn't going to be one either. It was an expansion event, not an explosion.

My understandng of the big bang isn't great, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't survivable for people as we are now.

Using the rules for Monoply when you're playing Sorry still nets you a lot of wasted time and confusion. Games don't overlap just because they're games without a lot of work and instead of doing the legwork you make comments like this which don't elucidate what you're actually asking, what you're driving at or what the topic is actually about. People have asked. What do you mean by Chaos? What do you mean by Order?

Game in the sense of formal systems. I would suggest we're not in the realm of chess or draughts.

[Razade]

When the question is "are the current definitions sensible?" supplying just one set of definitions seems counter productive.

It at least gives us a starting point. How can we know if the current definition is sensible if we don't even evaluate the current definition?

This is also what I understand, however, it's an exponential increase, such that a one kilogram black hole would be a devastating nuclear weapon. It would take a black hole with about the mass of the Moon the current period of existence of the universe to evaporate, the last second starts at about 2,150 tonnes (but these are half-lives, not determinate times). The times for massive black holes are very, very long, compared to the duratation of the universe up to now.

I don't think it matters how we measure from the duration of the Universe to the present. As I said, I'm not an expert and while I doubt those I'd call an expert would appreciate me using that term, the people who actually study this seem to think that for all the impossibility you're purporting to be present, it's still workable in their model. How they get it workable is well above my pay grade, but I trust the people who have dedicated a lot more of their time on this than myself or a random poster on the internet with (as far as I know) just as equal of credentials as myself. Last I knew Halfeye, you weren't a theoretical physicist or astrophysicist, so I have to wonder why you think the people who have studied this subject more than you don't think you're correct.

My understandng of the big bang isn't great, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't survivable for people as we are now.

No one said it was? What...what is this in reference to? Where did we get people surviving or people or anything.

Game in the sense of formal systems. I would suggest we're not in the realm of chess or draughts.

It still applies. Have you ever heard of an analogy?

[Quizatzhaderac]

As I see it, there four definitions of "chaos", and we need to be clear about which ones were thinking about.

Chaos_classical: This is a thing Greek philosophers (Hesiod) talked about. The early universe is by definition choatic. THe linguistic opposite of chaos would be fullness. The philosophical opposite of chaos was cosmos ( the universe). So the order of history would be chaos -> cosmos -> chaos.

Chaos_{lay English}: Unordered, confused. The usage tends to strongly imply you would like to understand something about it, but it's hard or impossible. For instance the thirty years war was chaotic, because we expect to be able to say "X war was fought between Y and Z". The one in a billion factorial arrangement of grains of sand on a beach isn't chaotic, because sand is expected to be in a messy pile and we don't care about the details.

This is the hardest sense to pin down because predictability and order don't go hand in hand. The early universe was orderly and unpredictable. The current universe is less orderly; it's the hardest to predict, but also the phase we have the most skill at predicting; it's also the phase that seems "natural".

A heat death universe is very easy to understand, but is also exactly the opposite of how any human would chose to "order" things.

Entropy: There is a clear definition, which is nice, but we have to ask ourselves if/when we should care.

The increase in entropy causes drives our neurology, which is the origin of our perception of time. So saying the universe goes from lowest entropy to higher to highest entropy isn't really much more profound then saying the universe goes from "early, to later to latest".

Chaos_Math: In chaos theory, a system is chaotic if a small change in the beginning makes a big change at the end. By this metric, the universe is becoming less chaotic. However, math is subjective, and the answers you get will depend on what aspects of the physical universe to define as your "system"

If you care about the path of a specific photon, a heat death universe will still be somewhat chaotic, although much less than the earlier universe.

If you care about normal/macroscopic things, a heat death universe isn't chaotic won't change at all, let alone in a chaotic way.

The early universe is very chaotic macroscopically, but it was basically inevitable that 100 billion-ish galaxies would form, just not these 100 billion.

Earth, currently, is arguable extremely chaotic. Because an idea can change the world; or in physics terms: a few femtograms of neuro transmitters can control the fate of gigawatts and petagrams of matter.

[MetroAlien]

I like to think that the fantasy tropes of "order" and "chaos" really describe the same thing, just from different angles.

You could say that all matter & energy following a set of laws to their logical conclusion is a form of "order".

Or you could say that the disintegration of any complicated structuring of matter/energy is inherently chaotic.

The difference in perspective of "order" and "chaos" mostly matter in the 'micro'-scale of our infinitesimally short lives.
On the macro-scale, the universe isn't sentient and doesn't have inherent values such as 'order' or 'chaos'.
The question is then, whether one chooses to believe in a grand design (often, but not necessarily, of divine nature) (order) or not to believe (chaos).

[veti]

If "order" means anything, it requires difference. You can put the numbers 1-10, or the letters of the alphabet, "in order" because they're different. If you were asked to order ten numbers, but they were all 1, you'd be kinda stuck. You'd probably ask for some elaboration of the request.

An airplane meal is "ordered". It comes in a neat little box with compartments, with different types of food in each. A big bowl of soup - is the opposite of that. The concept of "order" doesn't seem very relevant to it, not internally at least.

The heat death of the universe would be the ultimate soup. What would "order" even mean in such a context?

[halfeye]

If "order" means anything, it requires difference. You can put the numbers 1-10, or the letters of the alphabet, "in order" because they're different. If you were asked to order ten numbers, but they were all 1, you'd be kinda stuck. You'd probably ask for some elaboration of the request.

An airplane meal is "ordered". It comes in a neat little box with compartments, with different types of food in each. A big bowl of soup - is the opposite of that. The concept of "order" doesn't seem very relevant to it, not internally at least.

The heat death of the universe would be the ultimate soup. What would "order" even mean in such a context?

I don't think your idea of order is correct. Is a pile of apples or oranges ordered? It seems to me that the answer is "yes", there is no apple or orange that is defacto number one, or number fifty, they're just apples (unless they're oranges), but they're nicely packed so they are in an ordered array. That seems to be what happens with a heat death, you get a lot of more or less svsnly spaced particles. I think if a soup was all dark on one side and light on the opposite side I'd be very worried, if it had some food particles mixed in but they were only present in part of the soup that would be strange, croutons might float, but if they were only on one side of the bowl, that would imply to me that someone put in work to create that arrangement.

[veti]

I don't think your idea of order is correct. Is a pile of apples or oranges ordered? It seems to me that the answer is "yes", there is no apple or orange that is defacto number one, or number fifty, they're just apples (unless they're oranges), but they're nicely packed so they are in an ordered array.

A pile of apples? Maybe you could make that argument, but only by differentiating between "these apples" (the pile) and "not-these-apples" (the rest of the universe). The only "orderly" thing about them being the neatness or convenience of their arrangement.

Order is the product of intent. People (and animals too) put things in order, for their own purposes. A different purpose requires a different order. A purely natural or random arrangement might be an appropriate order for some purpose, but only when some intelligent thing notices it with that purpose in mind. Where there is no purpose, there's no order.

[halfeye]

Order is the product of intent.

This is mistaken (or a very dodgy redefinition), the atoms in a crystal are spaced regularly with no intention involved.

[veti]

This is mistaken (or a very dodgy redefinition), the atoms in a crystal are spaced regularly with no intention involved.

Regularly, but why would you call it "order"? Order for what?

Think about how the word is used. "Put things in order" - an intentional process that may refer to any kind of sequence or pattern, depending what you want to do with the Things. "Out of order" - either "not functioning", or "not conforming to an expected pattern". "In order to" - explicitly refers to an intent. "Give an order" - convey intent.

Atoms in a crystal are spaced regularly, sure. That's good order only if you want to maintain the crystal in an unchanging shape. Regularity is not in itself orderly, it only becomes so when viewed by someone who wants things that way.

Look up "order" in a dictionary. I just did, it listed 12 distinct meanings (nine nouns, three verbs). Five of the nouns and all of the verbs relate to purpose, intent or discipline (the other four nouns are about classification, which is also an intentional thing). In the absence of these things, the word has no meaning. No matter how neat the universe is, it's not "ordered" unless viewed by something with a purpose, or at least a preference, in mind.

Now, you can say that you are viewing the pattern, through the prism of your imagination, and you find it orderly, because it conforms to some sort of ideal in your mind. And no doubt you can find other people who share that perception. Which is fine for you, but purely subjective, and gives you no grounds for arguing with anyone who happens to disagree.

[halfeye]

Regularly, but why would you call it "order"? Order for what?

Think about how the word is used. "Put things in order" - an intentional process that may refer to any kind of sequence or pattern, depending what you want to do with the Things. "Out of order" - either "not functioning", or "not conforming to an expected pattern". "In order to" - explicitly refers to an intent. "Give an order" - convey intent.

Atoms in a crystal are spaced regularly, sure. That's good order only if you want to maintain the crystal in an unchanging shape. Regularity is not in itself orderly, it only becomes so when viewed by someone who wants things that way.

Look up "order" in a dictionary. I just did, it listed 12 distinct meanings (nine nouns, three verbs). Five of the nouns and all of the verbs relate to purpose, intent or discipline (the other four nouns are about classification, which is also an intentional thing). In the absence of these things, the word has no meaning. No matter how neat the universe is, it's not "ordered" unless viewed by something with a purpose, or at least a preference, in mind.

Now, you can say that you are viewing the pattern, through the prism of your imagination, and you find it orderly, because it conforms to some sort of ideal in your mind. And no doubt you can find other people who share that perception. Which is fine for you, but purely subjective, and gives you no grounds for arguing with anyone who happens to disagree.

I disagree.

If there is no order without an observing intelligence, why is it not also the case that there is no chaos without an observing intelligence?

Are you really saying that when a tree falls there is no sound if no human level intelligence is present?

The entirety of life is subjective, objectivity is illusory, we do our best to approach objectivity, but in the end, there is no absolute disproof of solipsism.

I'm suspicious that you are promoting hierarchies when you talk about order depending on intentions.

[Ixtellor]

Jumped in here late.

1) The end you are describing and what another poster above explained is sometimes called the 'big freeze'.
Everything becomes so spread out, and eventually burns out or gets eaten by blackholes that the universe looks empty and it slowly just disappears.

2) Quantum mechanics can suggest that until something interacts with classical physics you are in a cat in a box scenario. So absent of classical physics -- no a tree has both fallen and not fallen in the woods if there is no classical aspects of physics there to 'witness it'.

[Lord Torath]

I disagree.

If there is no order without an observing intelligence, why is it not also the case that there is no chaos without an observing intelligence?

Are you really saying that when a tree falls there is no sound if no human level intelligence is present?

The entirety of life is subjective, objectivity is illusory, we do our best to approach objectivity, but in the end, there is no absolute disproof of solipsism.

I'm suspicious that you are promoting hierarchies when you talk about order depending on intentions.

Chaos is also a subjective or relative term. Chaos as compared to what? Is a canvas filled with tiny black dots evenly spaced more or less chaotic that one where all the black dots are combined into one large dot?

As others have pointed out, the heat death of the universe is about entropy, not order/chaos.