Let me start by saying that I have no scientific background whatsoever. I am very interested in science though and I'm currently enjoying Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos. I'm at chapter 7 and so far I understand most of general ideas he has talked about. Or at least, I think I understand them 🙂
There is however one part, at the end of chapter 6 that I can't grasp.
It is about entropy and the state of the universe a few minutes after the big bang.
On page 171 he says:
Our most refined theories of the origin of the universe -our most refined cosmological theories- tell us that by the time the universe was a couple of minutes old, it was filled with a nearly uniform hot gas composed of roughly 75 percent hydrogen, 23 percent helium, and small amounts of deuterium and lithium. The essential point is that this gas filling the universe had extraordinarily low entropy.
And on page 173-174:
We have now come to the place where the buck finally stops. The ultimate source of order, of low entropy, must be the big bang itself. In its earliest moments, rather than being filled with gargantuan containers of entropy such as black holes, as we would expect from probabilistic considerations, for some reason the nascent universe was filled with a hot,
uniform, gaseous mixture of hydrogen and helium. Although this configuration has high entropy when densities are so low that we can ignore gravity, the situation is otherwise when gravity can't be ignored; then, such a uniform gas has extremely low entropy. In comparison with black holes, the diffuse, nearly uniform gas was in an extraordinarily low-entropy state.
In the first part of the chapter Brian Greene explains the concept of entropy with tossing the 693 pages of War and Peace in the air.
At first, the pages are ordered. The specific order they are in make sense and are required to recognize the pages as a readable book called War and Peace. This is low entropy. It is very highly ordered and there is no chaos.
Now, when you throw the pages in the air, let them fall and then pick them up one by one and put them on top of each other, the chances you get the exact same order as the initial state are extremely small. The chance you get another order (no matter what order, just not the one from the beginning) is extremely big. When the pages are in the wrong order, there is high entropy and a high amount of chaos. The pages are not ordered and when they are not ordered you would not notice the difference between one unordered state and another one.
However, should you swap two pages in the ordered, low entropy version, you would notice the difference.
So I understand low entropy as a highly ordered state with low chaos in which a reordering of the elements would be noticeable.
I hope I'm still correct here 🙂
Now, what I don't understand is how a uniform mixture of hydrogen and helium can by highly ordered? I'd say you wouldn't notice it if some particles traded places. I'd say that a uniform mixture is actually in a state of high entropy because you wouldn't notice it if you swapped some hydrogen atoms.
Brian Greene explains this would indeed be the case when gravity plays no important role, but that things change when gravity does play a role; and in the universe right after the big bang, gravity plays a big role.
Is that because a reordering of the particles would change the effects of gravity? Or is there something else that I'm missing here?
Best Answer
Your specific question is about why uniform gas is a low entropy state for the universe. The reason is that you make entropy by allowing the gas to self-gravitate and compress, releasing heat to the environment in the process. The end result is a black hole where the gas is compressed maximally, and these are the maximum entropy gravitational states.
But the uniform gas comes from a nearly uniform inflaton field shaking over all space after inflation. This inflaton produces uniform denisty of matter, which then becomes uniform baryons and hydrogen. Ultimately, it is the uniformity of the energy density in the inflaton field which is responsible for the low entropy of the initial conditions, and this is linked to the dynamics of inflation.
The dynamics of inflation produce low entropy initial conditions without fine tuning. This seems like a paradox, because low entropy is fine tuning by definition, don't you need to choose a special state to have low entropy? The answer in inflation is that the state is only special in that there is a large positive cosmological constant, but it is otherwise generic, in that it is a maximum entropy state given the large cosmological constant.
The theory of inflation explains the specialness of the initial conditions completely. This was proposed by Davies in 1983, but it is rejected by cosmologists. The rest of this answer discusses arguments that support Davies' position.
deSitter space
If you consider a deSitter space with some mass density added, and you look in a causal patch (meaning what one observer can see), the mass density gives an additional curvature without (significant) pressure and turns deSitter into more like a sphere. There is a continuous deformation of deSitter space into the Einstein static universe, which is obtained by making the density of matter as large as possible.
Any matter you add reduces the horizon area of the cosmological horizon, and this is true for black holes as well. If you consider the ds-Schwartschild exact solution, for example, you can have an isolated black hole in deSitter space:
$$ \rm ds^2 = - f(r) \rm dt^2 + {\rm dr^2\over f(r) } + r^2 \rm d\Omega^2 $$ $$ f(r) = 1 - {2m\over r} - {\Lambda r^2\over 3} $$
but there are two horizons, and the causal patch is the region between the black hole and the cosmological horizon. It is easy to check that the total horizon area, cosmological plus black-hole is maximum for m=0. It is also easy to check that there is a certain value of m where the black hole radius and the cosmological radius degenerate. At this degeneration, the distance between the black hole and cosmological horizon stays constant, they do not collide except in the bad r coordinate, and the space turns into AdS_2 x S_2.
Nariai dynamics
Imagine starting near a Nariai solution with additional matter between the two horizons. These are both still black holes, neither is a cosmological horizon, as you can see by adding more matter with a uniform density, until you approach the limit of the Einstein static universe with two antipodal black holes.
This is a physical configuration of the static cosmology. So you can start with an Einstein static universe, and evolve it forward in time, you will produce black holes, and they will merge and grow.
If you take all the matter in the static universe and push it into one of the black holes, this black hole area will increase past the Nariai limit and it will become the cosmological horizon. At this point, the singularity runs away to infinity. If you push the matter into another black hole, the other black hole will be the cosmological horizon. It's up to you.
So if you start with the Einstein static universe, the black holes compete for mattter, until eventually the biggest black hole will surround all the others, and become the cosmological horizon.
The lessons are the following:
Inflation Produces Low Entropy Initial Conditions
The second point answers your question, because the early universe is in a deSitter phase. So given a large positive value of the cosmological constant in the early universe, the maximum entropy state is a deSitter space with a cosmological horizon of small area, and this is necessarily a low entropy initial condition for later times, during which the cosmological horizon grows.
There is no further explanation required for the low-entropy initial conditions. This is the same explanation as for all the other miracles of inflation, the killing of fluctuations, the flatness condition, the monopole problem. The whole point of inflation is to produce a theory of low entropy initial conditions, including gravity, and it does so naturally, because deSitter space is the only low entropy maximal entropy gravitational state. This answer was first given by Davies, and it is just plain correct.
This plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face idea is not accepted despite the nearly thirty years since Davies' paper. I should add that Tom Banks and Leonard Susskind both now say similar things, although I don't want to put words in their mouths.