Question?
Started by Midnight Sun, 12/01/2002 08:14AM
Posted 12/01/2002 08:14AM
Opening Post
Posted 12/02/2002 04:45AM
#1
Order, and not chaos?
Just from looking around I'd say there is plenty of both order AND chaos. In fact, the Universe seems to be quite a mix of both sides of this existential coin. You have intersteller and intergalactic space, with free particles, atoms, random EM radiation being dispersed from all directions as well as a few random gravitons flying around, along with the fabric of space-time fluctuating quite chaotically at a quantum scale. This is chaos, and there's plenty of it, everywhere in fact.
Order is not actually forbidden by physics. It's just that as time progresses the ratio of chaos to order steadily increases, until stars burn out, and eventually even matter itself dissolves. And there may be universes where it's all chaos from the get-go.
Of course, such a universe wouldn't give rise to us and so we wouldn't find ourselves asking 'why is there chaos and not order'? We naturally find ourselves in one of the ordered universes asking the opposite question. The question itself is rooted in two biases, one of observation and one of logic, the first being the assumption that what we see is all there is, i.e. that there are no 'chaotic' zones or semi-chaotic other 'universes' beyond our grasp, the second being that 'order' is unnatural, even impossible, and that 'chaos' is the original fixed, and presumably immutable state of everything.
Of course some would argue that an eternal Supreme Being would imply a very high level of order at least within that being, so that atheistic or protheistic, one must always admit to some possibility of order as being able to come into existence or simply 'existing' primordially. To deny the possibility of some order to either occur or to exist outright would deny the existence of both Universe and God.
Just from looking around I'd say there is plenty of both order AND chaos. In fact, the Universe seems to be quite a mix of both sides of this existential coin. You have intersteller and intergalactic space, with free particles, atoms, random EM radiation being dispersed from all directions as well as a few random gravitons flying around, along with the fabric of space-time fluctuating quite chaotically at a quantum scale. This is chaos, and there's plenty of it, everywhere in fact.
Order is not actually forbidden by physics. It's just that as time progresses the ratio of chaos to order steadily increases, until stars burn out, and eventually even matter itself dissolves. And there may be universes where it's all chaos from the get-go.
Of course, such a universe wouldn't give rise to us and so we wouldn't find ourselves asking 'why is there chaos and not order'? We naturally find ourselves in one of the ordered universes asking the opposite question. The question itself is rooted in two biases, one of observation and one of logic, the first being the assumption that what we see is all there is, i.e. that there are no 'chaotic' zones or semi-chaotic other 'universes' beyond our grasp, the second being that 'order' is unnatural, even impossible, and that 'chaos' is the original fixed, and presumably immutable state of everything.
Of course some would argue that an eternal Supreme Being would imply a very high level of order at least within that being, so that atheistic or protheistic, one must always admit to some possibility of order as being able to come into existence or simply 'existing' primordially. To deny the possibility of some order to either occur or to exist outright would deny the existence of both Universe and God.
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