What does Negentropy really imply?

[Gideon Falcon]

So, I'm an avid science fan as well as... well planning to become an author, at least. As my plans are solidly in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy genre, I've put a lot of thought into how the fantastic elements would actually interact with the known laws of physics- on one hand, trying to make it bend as few of the fundamental rules as possible, and on the other, using science as a source of inspiration. My main planned work has a lot of aspects of its magic system and cosmology drawn from what I know of real-life physics, particularly quantum mechanics and Membrane theory.

Now, while many questions have come up in my design of these elements, the one big one I want to ask about is on the subject of Entropy. To my understanding, Entropy is along the lines of Conservation of Mass/Energy and Momentum in terms of how fundamental it is to physics, but it is also one of the most irritating laws to deal with in... like... anything. There's a reason the Three Laws of Thermodynamics have been summarized as "You can't win, you can't break even, you can't get out of the game."

From what I gather, there are a few different, but not necessarily mutually exclusive interpretations of what Entropy is, exactly: At its base, it's how 'usable' an amount of energy is (or rather, isn't), with thermal energy being the most entropic form because it's the least efficient to use. By another interpretation, it's the amount of information in a system- how much there is to extrapolate if you could extrapolate everything- less entropic systems have less going on and thus less to figure out. Related is that some theorize Entropy may be what actually defines Time as a direction, what separates backwards from forwards and thus the reason we only experience it one way. Another interpretation is that Entropy is the number of possible configurations of a system that would be indistinguishable- an organized one would only have a few arrangements close to it, while a totally random one would be hard to tell from any other totally random one.

Now, in designing the magic system for my works, I've tried to utilize those interpretations to justify how magic has the potential to reverse entropy. If anyone asks, I can get a bit more specific, but what I really want to talk about are the consequences of that idea: If there was a workaround to entropy- the law still applied normally, but there was a situation where it could be undone- what would happen to the laws of physics as we know it?

Would the hypothetical universe still work? Or, would this break everything in ways we do know wouldn't be fixable? Would this make a worse information paradox than Black Hole evaporation? Would everything just explode? Or, could I use this idea in a magic system without you guys groaning and tearing your hair out?

That's what I'm really trying to find out about this.


TL;DR: Entropy bums me out, but would giving it a loophole be a terrible idea?

 

[Graviator]

One sane implementation would be that a spell has access to some out-of-the-picture entropy storage area. Magic would ultimately be limited by its access to such areas, or there could be some procedure for venting the entropy back into real space.

Another implementation would be that the 2nd law thinks such a storage area exists, but it's a magical illusion.

Either way, weird stuff happens while the spell's active, but the effects are limited to what the spell actually does.

 

[Nicholai]

So, I'm an avid science fan as well as... well planning to become an author, at least. As my plans are solidly in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy genre, I've put a lot of thought into how the fantastic elements would actually interact with the known laws of physics- on one hand, trying to make it bend as few of the fundamental rules as possible, and on the other, using science as a source of inspiration. My main planned work has a lot of aspects of its magic system and cosmology drawn from what I know of real-life physics, particularly quantum mechanics and Membrane theory.

Now, while many questions have come up in my design of these elements, the one big one I want to ask about is on the subject of Entropy. To my understanding, Entropy is along the lines of Conservation of Mass/Energy and Momentum in terms of how fundamental it is to physics, but it is also one of the most irritating laws to deal with in... like... anything. There's a reason the Three Laws of Thermodynamics have been summarized as "You can't win, you can't break even, you can't get out of the game."

From what I gather, there are a few different, but not necessarily mutually exclusive interpretations of what Entropy is, exactly: At its base, it's how 'usable' an amount of energy is (or rather, isn't), with thermal energy being the most entropic form because it's the least efficient to use. By another interpretation, it's the amount of information in a system- how much there is to extrapolate if you could extrapolate everything- less entropic systems have less going on and thus less to figure out. Related is that some theorize Entropy may be what actually defines Time as a direction, what separates backwards from forwards and thus the reason we only experience it one way. Another interpretation is that Entropy is the number of possible configurations of a system that would be indistinguishable- an organized one would only have a few arrangements close to it, while a totally random one would be hard to tell from any other totally random one.

Now, in designing the magic system for my works, I've tried to utilize those interpretations to justify how magic has the potential to reverse entropy. If anyone asks, I can get a bit more specific, but what I really want to talk about are the consequences of that idea: If there was a workaround to entropy- the law still applied normally, but there was a situation where it could be undone- what would happen to the laws of physics as we know it?

Would the hypothetical universe still work? Or, would this break everything in ways we do know wouldn't be fixable? Would this make a worse information paradox than Black Hole evaporation? Would everything just explode? Or, could I use this idea in a magic system without you guys groaning and tearing your hair out?

That's what I'm really trying to find out about this.


TL;DR: Entropy bums me out, but would giving it a loophole be a terrible idea?

Click to shrink...

One approach I've seen involves the concept of multiple universes. They could be alternate dimensions which are variations on a theme or they could be entirely different in scope, age, and even how physics works within them. Either way the approach is that there has to be something between the dimensions. What's keeping them separate? A literal sea of potential - meaning a sea of energy. Realities are effectively bubbles in this sea that will eventually burn down to nothing and "pop." New realities are formed more or less randomly. Some don't function at all - physics breaks itself during their creation. Others last for trillions of years. How long they last is based on how much energy a new reality captures as it forms. In effect each reality is a closed system.

Using this approach there's no safe way to traverse the sea of raw potential but that doesn't mean you can't use it. When a magician casts a spell they are is basically opening a portal and using the other side as a power source or raw materials. (Casting a fireball or replacing lost material when reassembling a broken item.)

If you want the magicians to have consequences to their magic like physical exhaustion you can use that portal as an answer. They have to manage it while they are drawing power from it. They also have to hold it open as, go figure, reality really doesn't like having that portal open. (The forces that keep reality together are applying pressure to seal the breach.) That means the process is going to cost calories somewhere and also cause wear and tear on whatever the magicians use to access magic. That can, if you choose to pursue the option, open the door to the concept that they have to magically "work out" to build up their magical strength or they can "burn out" by trying to do too much at once.

In answer to your comments about time this doesn't change how time and entropy function any more than winding an antique clock does. Magic is just adding energy to a closed system.

 

[Roadie]

Entropy as a principle really just boils down to physics being non-symmetric when measured forward and backwards in time. Reversing entropy is the same thing as local time travel, because you can't get any of that energy back without undoing the reactions that already happened. If treated in a materialistic way, this has obvious ethical problems when applied to people rather than inanimate objects.

 

[Horologer]

Now, in designing the magic system for my works, I've tried to utilize those interpretations to justify how magic has the potential to reverse entropy. If anyone asks, I can get a bit more specific, but what I really want to talk about are the consequences of that idea: If there was a workaround to entropy- the law still applied normally, but there was a situation where it could be undone- what would happen to the laws of physics as we know it?

Would the hypothetical universe still work? Or, would this break everything in ways we do know wouldn't be fixable? Would this make a worse information paradox than Black Hole evaporation? Would everything just explode? Or, could I use this idea in a magic system without you guys groaning and tearing your hair out?

Click to shrink...

I am completely unqualified to talk about any cosmic or physics-related consequences. That said, I do know that fiddling around with entropy while anything living is present would probably have pretty dire consequences. Entropy, in the chemical sense, drives lots of the biochemical reactions that keep things alive. If those get disrupted, anything affected would probably die instantly as their metabolism simply ceases to exist.

Life is tough, but it leans pretty heavily on the precise values of chemical laws. If you tweak them even slightly, biological structures stop being viable.

Basically, if you're going to reverse entropy, or stop it, or do anything with it, don't do it to anything living. Especially not yourself.

 

[Gideon Falcon]

So, it seems some of you may have misinterpreted me; I have the system figured out for how magic bypasses entropy, I just wasn't going into it to save space. I'm just asking about the consequences of such a bypass once it's there-

If I do need to be more specific, the idea is that Magic interacts with the Aether, which is a fabric of energy analogous to Spacetime but which acts as a conceptual space rather than a physical one- it's not like a plane of existence you could travel to, but certain magic would allow you to see how it connects to the universe, which looks like the cosmological maps of dark matter we've made in this universe. Part of the idea is that the unused mass/energy in the Aether is what Dark Matter is (though that may become an outdated idea eventually).

Within the Aether, though, the arrow of time is reversed because of (or causing or whatever) the nature of prophecy- if you can retrieve information from the future, that means that there is a massive reserve of information that is steadily decreasing both as the future comes to pass and as potential futures become invalidated, meaning by the 'amount of information' definition, Entropy is decreasing, thus time is going backwards. That information is still preserved in the material space, and presumably is in some way conserved however many times it's swapped between material and Aether even if that puts it elsewhere in time.

The fact that the Aether depends on concepts is what makes it usable to magicians- where physicists need to understand far more complex ideas and then find applications for them, magic is based on more instinctual ideas with self-explanatory applications. The Concepts are what allow, say, a Druid to turn into a bear without losing continuity of identity, as the Identity is an extremely powerful idea that remains tied to the concept of the Druid's body regardless of form- essentially, the complex of ideas that forms ones' Identity is what one would call the Soul, and it is the main conduit between the material and the Aether (some natural expressions of magic do happen, but since it's based on concepts you can only get so far without someone to think about those concepts).

So, I guess in a way it uses @Graviator 's idea of an Entropy storage space, one which is constantly depleting by the process of Entropy increasing outside of it, but if enough Magic is used consistently throughout the universe it can hypothetically stave off Heat Death indefinitely, which is good for the philosophical tone I want for the work.

Thanks also to @Roadie and @Horologer , those are some of what I was looking for. It also demonstrates why the 'tied to concepts' thing is so vital to the system, as you make good points on why otherwise it would be really bad to use on a living being. I'll still have to do some thinking for how to account for the irreversible reactions in biochemistry, that's an excellent point.

As to @Nicholai 's idea, that actually more touches on the Lovecraftian/Proto-Indo-European influences in the Cosmology- I'm framing the Lovecraftian (or Post-Lovecraftian, as some are nicer and the heroes have a chance against the bad ones) elements in terms of the primordial Chaos referred to in P.I.E. mythology with the Chaoskampf concept (Marduk or Baal or whoever kills Lotann or Tam or Tiamat to create the world). Between universes is what D&D would call the Far Realm, where all the rules get thrown out the window, the Darkness or the Waters or the Nothing or the Chaos that used to be and waits at the gates to drown out all those weird things like 'rules' and 'existence' and 'things.' So, tapping into the Outside for magical power is possible, if one is unsatisfied with the energies of their Soul and whatever framework their world has figured out for using magic, but it is what we would call a Bad Idea. Which means it happens all the time, of course.

 

[Graviator]

Within the Aether, though, the arrow of time is reversed because of (or causing or whatever) the nature of prophecy- if you can retrieve information from the future, that means that there is a massive reserve of information that is steadily decreasing both as the future comes to pass and as potential futures become invalidated, meaning by the 'amount of information' definition, Entropy is decreasing, thus time is going backwards.

Click to shrink...

Information about the future is the opposite sign of thermodynamic entropy; destroying the information increases entropy.

Consider a robotic Maxwell's Demon - a gate that opens whenever fast molecules approach it from one side and slow molecules approach it from the other. This device uses information about the future to reverse local entropy - it starts with the same temperature on both sides of the gate, and sorts the gas into a hot side and a cold side. However, it consumes the information about the future in the process, balancing out the entropy decrease.

 

[linkhyrule5]

Now, in designing the magic system for my works, I've tried to utilize those interpretations to justify how magic has the potential to reverse entropy. If anyone asks, I can get a bit more specific, but what I really want to talk about are the consequences of that idea: If there was a workaround to entropy- the law still applied normally, but there was a situation where it could be undone- what would happen to the laws of physics as we know it?

Would the hypothetical universe still work? Or, would this break everything in ways we do know wouldn't be fixable? Would this make a worse information paradox than Black Hole evaporation? Would everything just explode? Or, could I use this idea in a magic system without you guys groaning and tearing your hair out?

Click to shrink...

Two things to remember:

First, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is actually a lot 'weaker' than the other laws of physics. In general, the laws of physics are just flat absolute; you can't go locally FTL because that just doesn't make physical sense (rapidity 'more than infinity'), you can't fall in a way that isn't a geodesic (i.e. fly/float without support) because it just doesn't make physical sense (that's what falling means, is moving in a 'straight line'), etc etc. But the Second Law is in fact probabilistic -- it merely says that in practice, things will usually end up this way.

(Of course, "weaker" is relative; by "usually", I mean numbers that look like "if you tiled the entire observable universe with parallel universes, each of them the width of a proton on the 'outside', and each of them simulating a particular event you wanted to go the low-entropy way on the inside, and repeating when they failed once a second, and waited the entire age of the universe... you still wouldn't get yourself a thermodynamic miracle on average, even with the entire lifespan and spatial extent of the universe to play with." So.)

But because it's probabilistic, no, the answer is that nothing in particular breaks if you can break it on occasion.

Second, as with most physical laws, it's purely a local effect in both space and time; so if you did work around it, it'd just start applying again to your magically-created result unconcerned with its violation in the past.


Mind you, permitting this sort of thing could do all sorts of wonky stuff to physical systems inside the universe -- aka "well, you did call it 'magic' for a reason..." -- but no, it's not going to fold spacetime into a pretzel or something.

Taking off my "official physicist hat" for the rest of this post: my intuit says it might be abusable for hypercomputation in excess of what's permitted by a Turing machine, just because information theory -- which is basically what thermodynamics is on the microscale -- depends so much on this concept. But, well, I don't have a formal training there and I haven't explored the consequences mathematically, so take that with a very hefty graiin of salt.

 

[Gideon Falcon]

Information about the future is the opposite sign of thermodynamic entropy; destroying the information increases entropy.

Consider a robotic Maxwell's Demon - a gate that opens whenever fast molecules approach it from one side and slow molecules approach it from the other. This device uses information about the future to reverse local entropy - it starts with the same temperature on both sides of the gate, and sorts the gas into a hot side and a cold side. However, it consumes the information about the future in the process, balancing out the entropy decrease.

Click to shrink...

That... technically doesn't contradict what I was saying. The information about the future is stored in the Aether where divination can access it despite the reversal of causality, and the increase of information in the material world decreases the information in the Aether as the progression of time and increase of Entropy- but any use of magic that reduces Entropy in the material overall does so by dumping the Entropy back into the Aether, where it will trickle back the normal way.

I suppose I should note that my setting is intended to be partially non-deterministic; you can use the laws of physics to predict how things will normally go, but Magic changes things because it is powered by the agency of thinking beings- an object will always accelerate in the direction of an applied force, but a person may push back. It's another philosophical theme tied into it that what drives magic and ultimately acts as the strongest force in the system is the will of sapient beings.

Spoiler: For Space

Two things to remember:

First, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is actually a lot 'weaker' than the other laws of physics. In general, the laws of physics are just flat absolute; you can't go locally FTL because that just doesn't make physical sense (rapidity 'more than infinity'), you can't fall in a way that isn't a geodesic (i.e. fly/float without support) because it just doesn't make physical sense (that's what falling means, is moving in a 'straight line'), etc etc. But the Second Law is in fact probabilistic -- it merely says that in practice, things will usually end up this way.

(Of course, "weaker" is relative; by "usually", I mean numbers that look like "if you tiled the entire observable universe with parallel universes, each of them the width of a proton on the 'outside', and each of them simulating a particular event you wanted to go the low-entropy way on the inside, and repeating when they failed once a second, and waited the entire age of the universe... you still wouldn't get yourself a thermodynamic miracle on average, even with the entire lifespan and spatial extent of the universe to play with." So.)

But because it's probabilistic, no, the answer is that nothing in particular breaks if you can break it on occasion.

Second, as with most physical laws, it's purely a local effect in both space and time; so if you did work around it, it'd just start applying again to your magically-created result unconcerned with its violation in the past.


Mind you, permitting this sort of thing could do all sorts of wonky stuff to physical systems inside the universe -- aka "well, you did call it 'magic' for a reason..." -- but no, it's not going to fold spacetime into a pretzel or something.

Taking off my "official physicist hat" for the rest of this post: my intuit says it might be abusable for hypercomputation in excess of what's permitted by a Turing machine, just because information theory -- which is basically what thermodynamics is on the microscale -- depends so much on this concept. But, well, I don't have a formal training there and I haven't explored the consequences mathematically, so take that with a very hefty graiin of salt.

Click to shrink...

Good point. My understanding was that you could hypothetically have a tiny, subatomic event happen from time to time that ever so slightly increased the order of the system, but that you physically could not have that happen reliably. Your point is probably the more accurate summation.
By the information definition of Entropy, though, there's also the issue of information paradoxes, as I believe Information is supposed to be convserved by a different law. I'm not certain, though. Either way, it's reassuring.

As far as the hypercomputation, I'm probably not going to deal with that in the setting. I am pulling a lot of Sci-Fi into the Fantasy, but I don't think it's gonna go as high-concept Sci-Fi as computational paradoxes. I think you are right about it being abusable, as I've heard a bit about it in Jumpchain discussions on SB.

 

[linkhyrule5]

By the information definition of Entropy, though, there's also the issue of information paradoxes, as I believe Information is supposed to be convserved by a different law. I'm not certain, though. Either way, it's reassuring.

Click to shrink...

Information is conserved on the micro-scale by the time-reversability of quantum mechanics; since you can always reverse a quantum process, you can't possibly lose information either.

However, it's naturally snapped in half at the macroscale by, well, basically the same old argument: sure, technically the information about all the pages of the book you just burnt is still available in the trajectories of the carbon dioxide and water vapor molecules it became, but good fucking luck getting it back out...

Anyway, no, just breaking the Second Law alone won't get automatically get you information paradoxes, at least to first order as it were.

 

[Max Sinister]

Yeah, entropy is probabilistic - it's just that there are more possible states where the energy is distributed equally than unequally, just as there are more states where milk is distributed equally in your coffee than states where coffee and milk are in the same cup, but separate.

Theoretically things might change, if given enough time...