🚀 go-pugleaf

00jcbenson@bsu-ucs.uucp writes:

>It seems to me that a Black Hole is an object which orders the universe.  It 
>brings matter together into a point.  Now the Law of Thermodynamics concerning
>Chaos seems to suggest that the universe tends to bring down rather than to
>order itself.  So, my question is, why can a Black Hole exist if it continually
>orders the universe instead of breaking down?  

The key is not to take too seriously the identification of entropy with
"disorder".  Disorder is a term that can be interpreted to mean all kinds
of things, whereas entropy has a fairly specific meaning.  It's the entropy
of the universe that doesn't decrease, and a black hole's entropy increases
as it grows; though I don't understand this completely, the entropy is
apparently proportional to the area of the event horizon, so the entropy
goes *up* as matter goes in. 

A somewhat more precise definition of the entropy of a system is that it
is proportional to the logarithm of the number of microscopic states of
the system that are macroscopically indistinguishable.  Since a black hole
renders many states of its interior completely indistinguishable (you can't
see in), it seems reasonable to regard larger black holes as having more
entropy.

Black holes can shrink too, by Hawking radiation, and then the entropy of
the black hole is very slowly shed in the form of thermal photons.  One way
to think about this is to think of the black hole as a device that converts
anything that falls into it (eventually) into thermal photons, with a
corresponding increase in entropy.  

-- 
Matt McIrvin, posting nonsense again