Is the universe chaotic or perfectly ordered?

Great Debates
1

I don’t claim to have a deep knowledge of chaos, time and infinity so I welcome anyone who can vet my assumptions (and logic) to have a go at it.

Assumption #1: there is such thing as chaos.
Assumption #2: there is such a thing as infinite time.

Chaos produces complexity. True chaos, given infinite time, must provide infinitely increasing complexity*. If a universe does not allow complexity to rise infinitely (stops it or reverses it at some point), then it is cyclical: entropy rises, then decreases again, in an infinite cycle. Such a universe would not be truly chaotic since that* is* a pattern.

A universe that ensures minimum chaos needs to create a perfectly even and static space. All things would be as simple as possible and no complexity could arise. It would just be a perfectly even soup of primordial particles or , if there is no such thing as a true indivisible atom (the original atom turned out to be divided in stuff like neutrons, wich are themselves divided in stuff like quarks) then the alternative must be a perfectly even, perfectly symmetrical mozaic continually expanding in fractal fashion.

So some of my questions are:

[ol]
[li]Is true chaos the only way to achieve infinite complexity?[/li][li]Does infinite complexity ultimately imply infinite power at some point or is infinite complexity and power the unreachable “asymptote”?[/li][li]Do power and complexity go hand in hand*? ()[/li][li]Do you think I’m high***? [/li][/ol]
*the “enough monkeys with typewriters will write shakespeare works given enough time” example is based on this idea I imagine.

**Human brains are the most complex ones (AFAIK) and humans are the only ones with nukes and moon landings

***I’m not :slight_smile:

2

IMHO the universe is perfectly ordered, by definition.

3

This is an example of Order, not Chaos.
Someone has to arrange e.g. that each monkey has a typewriter, that they are kept fed and watered whil they work and that the output is analysed (to be compared with the desired test result).

4

Disorder and chance over time can create complexity - or destroy it.

I’m not sure chaos does anything really. It’s like saying entropy causes something. I’m not sure it’s good syntax…

5

Far far far from it. Totally disagree. True chaos is the ultimate randomizing vehicle, destroying all order (therefore distinctions). All sand castles reduced to their component sand, all the best minds and brave hearts beating dissolved into the same blob of protoplasm, the universe in its entirety rendered to microparticulate static hiss.

6

You’ll have to define that a little better so we understand exactly what you mean, Do you simply mean true randomness?

According to current models of the universe, there isn’t infinite time in the sense of time for an infinite number of interactions to take place. Because the universe is getting colder and less dense as time goes on, and particles are decaying. Right now, it looks like gravitationally bound groupings of matter will slowly die and turn cold, while rapidly receding from each other. Each cluster will not have either infinite space or infinite time.

Even if the universe is infinite in size, we are still limited by the size of our light sphere. We have no way of interacting with parts of the universe outside of it, so for our intents and purposes, the ‘universe’ is a gigantic sphere 13 billion years in radius, which formed about 13.7 billion years ago, and will slowly cool down and die a cold death in another 100 billion years or so.

Unless there are reasons for it not to happen. For example, gamma ray bursts do a pretty good job of sterilizing large regions of space. Supernovae as well. And time isn’t infinite, and interactions aren’t infinite because the universe is clustered into gravitationally bound lumps, and the distances between them are vast.

It may well be that the stars we’re seeing at the edge of our galaxy are today teeming with intelligent civilizations. We can’t know, because the images we see of them today have been traveling for billions of years. In fact, let’s stipulate the basic conditions of what you state - that there is chaos, and things will get more complex as time goes so.

So far, that’s exactly what we’re seeing in the universe. Early on, there was just a whole bunch of light gas and a few elements like lithium. Over time, the process of star formation and explosion caused heavier elements to form. Those in turn collected in various ways which have given us the multitude of unique planets we see today. On at least one of them, life formed and has been growing in complexity. Where’s the problem? If I’m understanding your thinking correctly, you’re thinking that we should either have infinite complexity already or nothing but those original undifferentiated atoms uniformly spread around. The problem is with your assumption that time is infinite and has no starting point, and therefore an infinite amount of complexity would already have to exist. But we do believe that for our own observable universe, time had a definite starting point.

7

Yes.

I don’t understand how this is different from what has been happening and is happening right now. The amount of energy per cubic centimeter of space should be decreasing all the time and I’m guessing it’s already magnitudes smaller than it was a few billon years ago. As far as I know though, it’ll never reach 0 so living beings will just have to grow bigger and slower. Maybe the first lifeforms appeared when the universe was smaller than a blood cell, were subatomic in size and lived for femtoseconds… Who knows?

Also, that is an interesting mental picture, but I can’t quite imagine the universe as part of a multiverse that does not exist from our perspective. The notions are hard to reconcile for my weak brain :slight_smile:

Fascinating thoughts…thank you for taking the time to answer! You give me too much credit, I actually did imply the universe had a beginning and is not infinitely old, which I didn’t realize until your comments. Upon reflexion, it doesn’t mesh. :smack:

Damn you universe! Why must you be so complicated!

8

The amount of absolute energy within an arbitrary volume unit will never reach zero, but the amount of energy available to do work within said unit will.

This is entropy.

The current data suggest that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.

Barring an action by God, the entire universe will be a lukewarm sea of stasis after maybe 10^150 years

9

Yes

10

I should backtrack and say that if by “chaos” you mean what they were talking about in the 1990s in the Nova / James Gleick sense, nonperiodic turbulent outcomes to systems constrained in some ways and left wide open in others, then yes, that produces incredible complexity.

Calling that “chaos” is a bad choice of terms (I thought so at the time, even as I downloaded my share of Mandelbrot set explorers and fractal generators).

The universe as we know it is not a product of chaos in the other, original sense. The universe is a product of some initial conditions and the laws of physics. The initial conditions are a perfect example of “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” and the laws of physics are a classical constraint, yielding chaos in the nonperiodic turbulent sense as an outcome.

11

Everything is perfectly ordered, chaos would destroy as much as it built as quickly as it built it.

12

If you go into that many details you’re missing the point of the analogy. You’d also need an infinitely large supply of monkeys, or else monkeys that live forever, plus a bunch of ink ribbons if the monkeys couldn’t get their hands on any laptops, but that hardly bothers anyone.

Anyway, I’m inclined to agree with mswas in general - these are distinctions that only exist in our minds. Entropy has a specific meaning, but order and chaos are based on appearances.

13

How so? I’m afraid I still don’t quite get it.