The increase of entropy is just how a scientist talks about the fact that the universe tends to do the most likely thing. For example, if you throw a bucket of dice you’ll find that about a sixth of them will be 1, about a sixth will be 2, and so on. This has the most ways of happening, so it’s the most likely outcome, and for the same reason it’s the outcome with the highest entropy.

In contrast, you wouldn’t expect all of the dice to be 4 at the same time, or otherwise assume one particular pattern. That would be a very unlikely and low entropy outcome.

“Entropy” is just a mathematical tool for extending the idea down to atomic interactions, where we don’t have a nice idea like “dice” to work with.

One of the things that increasing entropy does is to spread out heat as much as possible. If you have a hot object next to a cold object, then the heat will spread so that the cooler object heats up, and the hotter object cools down, until the two are at the same temperature. The idea (the math) behind that is the same as the idea behind mixing fluids or sands together. There are more ways for things to be mixed than sorted.

The same thing happens on a much larger scale. The Sun, and every other star, is radiating heat into the universe. But they can’t do it forever. Eventually the heat will have spread out so much that there won’t be warmer objects and cooler objects. Everything will be the same temperature. The same, very cold, temperature. The vast majority of the universe is already screaming cold, so the heat death of the universe is just about burning what fuel there is and mixing the heat so created into the ever-expansive, cold, and unyielding cosmos. Both the burning of fuel (mostly through fusion in stars) and the distribution of heat are processes which increase entropy.

Once everything is the same temperature, the universe attains a “steady state”. With no energy differences, there’s no reason for anything to change what it’s doing (all forces can be expressed as an energy imbalance or “potential gradient“). Heat death is the point at which the universe has finally settled down completely (or almost completely), and nothing interesting ever happens again.

Which is depressing, but it is a fantastically long time away. There are a hell of a lot of other bad things that’ll probably happen first.

The eminent philosophers Flanders and Swann have a more up beat take on the heat death of the universe:

“Heat is work, and work’s a curse,

and all the heat in the universe,

is gonna cool down. ‘Cause it can’t increase,

then there’ll be no more work, and there’ll be perfect peace.

That’s entropy, man.”

Posted on December 13, 2011 by The Physicist

Why do you claim that entropy does not increase? It does. The total entropy of the Universe is clearly increasing, as the Universe is expanding. The only problem that we don't understand is what happens to entropy if (and when) the Universe shrinks back to its initial state - what happens to the total entropy then? This is a topic of several recent papers in theoretical physics.

There is no point at which a universe will be ending.Thus Entropy will be increasing as far as universe increases.

@ Tapio Ali-Nissila

Sir i think u misconstrued my explanation. I never did claim that entropy doesn't increase. Infact, that is what my question is based on. Every actual process ( i.e. constituting irreversibility of some form) is associated with entropy generation. Thus, it is veritable that entropy of universe is continuously increasing.

Thus, I am willing to learn that what does this continuous increase indicate? Astronomically, philosophically, or scientifically.....does it suggest anyhow that universe would annihilate eventually? Or any such implication...?

Wasnt there a theory about the Heat Death of the universe? , at that state there is no diference in temperatures so there can be no heat exchange and no work and entropy is at its maximum .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

@ George Megas

Thanks 4 the link.....i had never heard of it before. The cosmological point of view is quite interesting ..!!

maybe the Universe expansion and collapse based on Friedmann's equation is the solution for your question, even though entropy is not directly stated.

Up to the point where the entropy will attain its maximum value and exergy will attain its minimum or zero value, then will be the end of the universe and god promises to recreate it.

If we end up with the ever expanding universe the entropy will increase until all materia is evenly spread, very thin by the way! If we on the other hand end up in the big crunch, as in a pulsating universe, it may well be that the universe goes through a "system reset" and the entropy is restored to its original state and the next heart-beat of the universe starts and entropy is again reduced until the next reset.

Please do not ask me to explain the physics behind the entropy reset :-)

The increase of entropy is just how a scientist talks about the fact that the universe tends to do the most likely thing. For example, if you throw a bucket of dice you’ll find that about a sixth of them will be 1, about a sixth will be 2, and so on. This has the most ways of happening, so it’s the most likely outcome, and for the same reason it’s the outcome with the highest entropy.

In contrast, you wouldn’t expect all of the dice to be 4 at the same time, or otherwise assume one particular pattern. That would be a very unlikely and low entropy outcome.

“Entropy” is just a mathematical tool for extending the idea down to atomic interactions, where we don’t have a nice idea like “dice” to work with.

One of the things that increasing entropy does is to spread out heat as much as possible. If you have a hot object next to a cold object, then the heat will spread so that the cooler object heats up, and the hotter object cools down, until the two are at the same temperature. The idea (the math) behind that is the same as the idea behind mixing fluids or sands together. There are more ways for things to be mixed than sorted.

The same thing happens on a much larger scale. The Sun, and every other star, is radiating heat into the universe. But they can’t do it forever. Eventually the heat will have spread out so much that there won’t be warmer objects and cooler objects. Everything will be the same temperature. The same, very cold, temperature. The vast majority of the universe is already screaming cold, so the heat death of the universe is just about burning what fuel there is and mixing the heat so created into the ever-expansive, cold, and unyielding cosmos. Both the burning of fuel (mostly through fusion in stars) and the distribution of heat are processes which increase entropy.

Once everything is the same temperature, the universe attains a “steady state”. With no energy differences, there’s no reason for anything to change what it’s doing (all forces can be expressed as an energy imbalance or “potential gradient“). Heat death is the point at which the universe has finally settled down completely (or almost completely), and nothing interesting ever happens again.

Which is depressing, but it is a fantastically long time away. There are a hell of a lot of other bad things that’ll probably happen first.

The eminent philosophers Flanders and Swann have a more up beat take on the heat death of the universe:

“Heat is work, and work’s a curse,

and all the heat in the universe,

is gonna cool down. ‘Cause it can’t increase,

then there’ll be no more work, and there’ll be perfect peace.

That’s entropy, man.”

Posted on December 13, 2011 by The Physicist

Dear colleagues,

it is right that, when considering e.g. a gas in a box, maximum entropy is attained when the gas has occupied homogeneously all the volume: this is the equilibrium point of the system.

On a cosmological scale things are different, because one has to take into account also degrees of freedom coming from the gravitational field! In attaining "thermal equilibrium", all degrees of freedom exchange energy in order to be in equilibrium with each others. The only peculiarity is that, while a gas in a small box spreads in the whole volume, equilibrium for a gravitational system is reached when all the particles collapse in "lumps": if you leave lots of particles in a box in space and you take into account their mutual gravitational interaction, after some time you will naturally find them "aggregated". That's how clusters and galaxy groups have supposedly formed.

Roger Penrose made some interesting considerations in this view. See for example http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.1989.tb50513.x/abstract

So, in order to find the point of maximum entropy for the whole universe, you should mediate between two different behaviours: the tendency of bodies to spread out (because of statistics and mutual interactions) and their tendency to be attracted towards each other (because they have mass/energy and gravitational interaction is only attractive).

I wouldn't be surprised if the equilibrium stage of a gravitational system turned out to be a massive black hole: in that case you could attain a maximum entropy without further possibilities of increasing.

Greetings,

Giovanni

I believe  that the entropy in Cosmology is the most unexplained study yet. Lot of work is needed to overcome the explanation in the entropy studies. however we have found that in the initial state of galaxy clusters the entropy first slows down but shoots then to its higher values with the increasing rate of galaxy clustering phenomena. We have recently found that the entropy change study leads to an important phenomena of Gravitational phase transitions in an expanding universe.   

When we calculate the entropy of the universe we say that we have to take the following entropies into consideration:

1.  Early entropy (Thermal gas)= 10 88

2. Todays entropy (Black holes) = 10 100

3. desitter space (Future Universe) = 10 120

As we see that the entropy goes on increasing by an appropriate factor so we will first of all have to calculate the expansion rate of the universe which can be calculated by taking the expansion rate expression into consideration. Kindly go through my review paper titled " A Thermodynamic model of Universe by Naseer Iqbal et all (2012).