Saturday, May 17, 2008

THE HIDDEN TRUTHS OF NATURE alias GOD

Now its almost a century since the atomic theory was formulated and accepted. It states that every matter is made up of atoms. This theory had to go through hell lot of criticism before getting accepted. Now its a thing given for granted. The laws of thermodynamics were well established before the atomic hypothesis came into picture.Even though all the manifestations of any system is b'coz of the atomic interactions,the laws of thermodynamics were developed without this knowledge. Clasius was one of the first persons to view any system as being composed of atoms and he developed the subject of statistical mechanics. Since every macroscopic property of a system is b'coz of the atomic interactions averaged over a large number of atoms people tried to derive the laws of thermodynamics by assuming atoms to be rigid balls undergoing elastic collisions with the other atoms and by using the Newton's laws of motion.To their surprise they found that the second law of thermodynamics cannot be explained from this point of view,it has to be taken as a matter of experimental observation. The second law talks abt the direction in which a particular process can occur.First law is just a statement of conservation of energy. Hot coffee placed in a room eventually gets cooled but the reverse process never happens.The reverse process does not violate first law but it violates second.So second law is given by nature and it cannot be proved rigorously using statistical mechanics.Its an hidden truth.People just know this as an experimental fact.So every thing going around us cannot be explained.There are a few things which are beyond human brains.....this argument creates in me the belief that there is something beyond our perception and we are controlled by that.A few people call it the God and a few the hidden truths of nature........

1 comment:

Sagittarius said...

"So second law is given by nature and it cannot be proved rigorously using statistical mechanics"...Boltzmann's eqn. governing the evolution of probability distribution in phase space talks about the presence of entropy in any real system of the universe and He (the caps for the respect I have for Boltzmann)calculated the probability that a real macroscopic system (consisting of a large number of particles/atoms/molecules)will return to its initial state (this turned out to be not a significant number - I don't remember the exact value, though!)...this gives a sense of directionality to the system's evolution (direction of entropy increase)...and hence I feel that the second law of thermodynamics (giving the direction of evolution of real macroscopic systems)has been proved already! But, still, breath-taking debates like the ones regarding the time-reversibility of classical mechanical systems have not found any conclusion, I guess!