We belive that everything can be understood - nothing disappears suddenly nor springs from nowhere so that we would be left puzzled about what happened. We do not need Gods in our physical world. The object of our understanding is primarily information the transformation laws of which we know.
It has been raised a concern weather the second law of thermodynamics is in conflict with our physical view of the world. The second law says that the total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value and the amount of information that is in the reach for our understanding consequently decreases. Is our physical way of looking at the universe wrong or is there an error in the second law of thermodynamics? The foundations for the second law of theremodynamics build on well understood mathematics and statistics but we would not like to give up our physical way of seeing the universe either.
There is an other phenomenon that is equally conflicting with our physical way of thinking. The universe is expanding and location information tends to become relatively speaking increasingly accurate. We can measure location absolutely speaking with the same accuracy (e.g. with a certain energy photon), but the accuracy increases in relation to the size of the universe. If we assume that the amount of energy and mass in the universe stays constant then we have to conclude that the amount of information is increasing.
The expansion of our universe looks like increasing the amount of information and the trend towards greater entropy looks like decreasing the amount of information that is in our reach.
One solution to solve these two paradoxes is simply by assuming that these two pehonomenons compensate each other always and everywhere. The increasing entropy causes the universe to inflate so that the amount of information stays constant. Every observer in the unicverse will see the amount of the information beeing constant at all times and for all observers. The speed at which the universe expands depends for this reason to the speed at which entropy is increasing in each observeres visible environment. This means that the universe may have inflated faster in the past and it also means that it can still inlate with a different speed somewhere ouside our horizon.
If we make the above assumption that the expansion speed of the universe is interlinked with the increase of the entropy we actually make a distinction between concepts "closed system" as understood by the laws of thermodynamics and "a closed system that is in the reach of our comprehension".
With this we gain following:
Even if we bring the principle of conservation of information into the picture it looks like we need not to violate the principle of conservation of energy. The increasing amount of gravitational potenty energy caused by the inflating universe seems to be compensated by the cooling of the universe - the thermal energy decreases instead.
Our physical way of looking at the universe brings us joy and delight of invention - joint experience about sharing the excitement about finding similiar structures from where we least expect. This is one of the most important aspects of humanity. Our physical world may, for our surprize, support us in our humanity. Just like our world was made for humanity - made for us.Piksu editors 29.4.2007 http://www.piksu.fi/science/science_englanniksi.html