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I had thought it turned on the 'in principle' conceptual possibility
of macroscopic tunnelling and on which aspects of the info-theoretic
formulation of thermo entropy are subjective and which are objective.
Nope. I know nothing about that.
The crystalline form of quartz has a
lower internal energy than the glass, I believe. In any event the
internal energies (and the free energies) are different.
That is
what I meant by a broken degeneracy. There is no such difference in
the internal energies of two ordered states in a deck of cards.
There is a tendency (on a very long timescale) for viteous quartz to
"devitrify", or return to a crystalline phase. This tendency is
accelerated by the presence of some foreign materials on the surface
of hot fused quartz, whence the warning that quartz light bulbs not
be handled with the bare hand.
The ordered
pack has exactly the same entropy as the disordered pack, and the
ordered pack is clearly not in a state of "quenched disorder".
Actually, neither deck is in a state of quenched disorder *if* they
both have their sequences specified as part of their macroscopic
state.
It matters not one bit whether a particular sequence is "specified"
or not! A physical deck of cards *has* a perfectly well-determined
sequence whether it is known to or specified by anyone, or not.
.... This *is* a
quenched system. It is prevented from sampling the microstates of the
other sequences, i.e. annealing, by a dynamical constraint/bottleneck.
Methinks this smacks of magic! A deck of cards doesn't anneal if
you don't watch it any more than a cat can be in a mixed state of
vitality if it remains unobserved. The idea of quenched entropy
surely can't apply here.
The problem here arises from the common perception of order. If a
pack of cards is arranged according to suits and pips we say it is
ordered, but that is a cultural, not a physical distinction. The
physical idea of order is quite different in this case. All
possible arrangements of the deck are equally orderly from a
physical perspective.
True, but some card sequences require fewer bits of algorithmic
information (i.e. complexity) to precisely describe, and, by my
definition of disorder, those such sequences *are* more ordered than
those sequences which require more information to completely
characterize. But, I agree each of the sequences are physically
equivalent as far as their thermodynamics is concerned.
I guess I must apologize to John Denker; I thought he had made
the assertion above. (I'm responding more slowly to David Bowman
because I know he's smarter than I am.) Please accept the
challenge to John in my last note in this long series.
...
Moreover it gives aid and comfort to
religious fanatics who do not seek physical understanding.
I do not understand what is meant here.>
You haven't seen Wayne Gish perform. The "Scientific Creationists"
invoke the second law of thermodynamics in its popular form as a
neo-Aquinian argument from design. The existence of any order in
the universe is antithermodynamic because in the beginning there
was chaos. Order cannot arise spontaneously from chaos. Therefor
there must have been a creator.