That entropy occurs in our macroscopic world, despite its being comprised solely of submicroscopic entities and their exclusively reversible interactions, is the lie that academics tell themselves and those of us who listen. Perhaps it’s because of the belief that Einstein made only one notable error in his mastery of physics. Does his having acknowledged that error as egregious leave the rest of his work untarnished. Maybe. It’s somehow like the great racehorse Secretariat—who remained the undefeatable ‘Iron Horse’ despite suffering five defeats. Or Muhamed Ali. The comparison probably seems frivolous to academics, but it isn’t. What is inappropriate is to celebrate excellence based exclusively on how few one’s defeats rather than how significant the achievements.
Boltzmann thought he had discovered the origin of entropy in the elastic collisions of submicroscopic particles in thermodynamic systems with his H theorem. But he didn’t; it characterized systems already in equilibrium, having nothing to do with the thermalization process that results in that stability.
It was Einstein’s significant omission—a failure to take a key aspect of his own relativity theory into account—that allowed irreversible interactions at the submicroscopic level of reality to go undiscovered for another century. He failed to use relativistic Doppler in his most magnificent paper “On the Quantum Theory of Radiation,” originally published March 3, 1917, just over one century ago.
Or maybe the academics think that since most all derivations of physical theories tend to ignore terms of second order, it was adequate to show that the equipartition of energy between the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution and the Planck distribution of radiant energy was sufficiently balanced by the classical Doppler effect on interactions without taking relativistic transverse Doppler effects on photons into account. Why over complicate things?
Rejecting ‘unnecessary complications’, we are offered the explanation that entropy is an ‘emergent’ phenomenon that comes about mysteriously when things get too complicated for an individual accounting of interactions. Statistics. Like supposing that it is possible that all the molecules in the air in this room could find themselves in the upper left corner of the room and I would be left gasping for air—but “Rest assured,” they say, “it is highly unlikely.” No, it’s not unlikely—it is categorically impossible! Whatever happened to the conservation of momentum?
Next we will look at the ‘complications’ which drive thermalization and entropy.
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