The trick is that the more closely you model things the more energy you need to expend to compute the model, and a computer can not perfectly model itself (it’s a data compression limit + zeno-like process overhead), so therefore you still increase unmodeled unknown entropy somewhere even if you have one closed system carefully controlled

I’m not sure how to answer exactly, so here’s a brain dump of my understanding of entropy

Entropy is basically the tendency of energy to equalize into a lower energy state, converting a portion of the difference into heat, a portion of which escapes into the universe. It’s a statistical thing - it’s a general tendency that becomes predictable at the huge number of particles involved in anything near the human scale. Like compressed air - every atom is moving at a certain speed in a random direction (we model this with temperature)

If you pop a balloon, the air rushes out because there’s more stuff to bounce off in the area of the balloon being popped, and less in the less dense surroundings. So, on average, the air bounces outwards, and the pressure (another model describing density + kinetic energy) equalizes.

Now, if you have liquid air that is being actively cooled, air molecules bouncing in are going to transfer energy into the liquid, and be captured. The liquid is also going to heat up a bit, and the hotter it is, the more molecules are going to fly out. We usually model this with temperature + pressure, but gravity plays a big role too.

So normally, entropy likes to average things out and prefers randomness - it applies to all sorts of things, like how potential chemical energy likes to be released into kinetic energy over time.

But then look at the Earth - we have pressure waves in the air constantly. We say that’s because energy is being added to the system via heat from the sun, and it can even create these systems that turn these pressure waves into vortexes that can make ice in a hot place

And then you look at stars - diffusion finally clicked for me after I sat in on a physics class explaining pulsars. They pulse out through this random diffusion, then pulse in due to gravity pulling them back in.

Then we can look even further - stars pour out energy through fusion, and scatter themselves far and wide, seeding the next generation of stars. We thought that was just the initial energy of the big bang converting to lower energy states, but then you have dark matter and energy that we invented to explain the gap in the models… Now we think maybe the laws of physics might be less universal than we thought, or maybe higher dimensions are interacting with the universe

Entropy is just another model - things generally transition to lower energy states, and convert their energy to heat… But there’s endless cycles that do the opposite. Entropy is a pretty compelling tendency in a closed system, but those don’t actually exist - it could be that there’re larger and larger cycles that oscillate between local entropy and the generation of local regions of higher energy

Entropy doesn’t disappear if we can nail it down the subatomic - it’s just statistical behavior of. It might disappear if we go the other direction - what if every black hole spawns a new universe? Can you just go down the rabbit hole infinitely, creating smaller and smaller energy differentials through new universes? Maybe if we get deeper into quantum mechanics we’ll find that infrared energy spontaneously transitions into hydrogen, which forms into new stars, keeping the cycle going forever

Entropy is a very useful model though, maybe it disappears over large enough scales, but ultimately it most certainly exists on a local level - complex, dynamic things will break down to form simpler things, and energy temporarily reverses this process, but in doing so a portion is converted to heat, and a differential is required to turn heat energy into something more complex like electricity or chemical energy

So practically, I’d say the answer to your question is no, entropy is a very useful model regardless of what more we might learn, but in a truer sense who knows? We don’t understand physics nearly as well as we think.

I think there’s a new wave of physics that will break a lot of our assumptions over the coming decades - we’re finding more and more gaps in our models, which is a very exciting thing

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I think inverse square laws are so common because they apply to situations where the distance of one object from another (a one dimensional line) is used to calculate the force potentially felt at any point across the surface of a sphere (a TWO dimensional surface) at that distance.

But then you also have the strength of magnetic fields that follows an inverse CUBE relationship. The simple way I model this in my head is that magnetic dipole fields kind of fill a three dimensional volume with curved field lines, as opposed to gravity or electric charge where the “lines” go straight out, and at any specific distance the total strength of the omnidirectional field is spread throughout that two dimensional surface of a sphere of the same radius.

The Wikipedia page is a good start. In a nutshell:

Since the surface area of a sphere (which is 4πr2) is proportional to the square of the radius, as the emitted radiation gets farther from the source, it is spread out over an area that is increasing in proportion to the square of the distance from the source. Hence, the intensity of radiation passing through any unit area (directly facing the point source) is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the point source.

There’s a good visualisation of that explanation which is the banner picture on the Wikipedia page.

I don’t have any better theories than the existing ones, for sure! But there is an underlying pattern that goes deeper even than that law - the principle that physical objects follow the path of least resistance links these laws and many many others.

It’s the same for the beginnings of life. We know loads about the conditions before in happened and after it happened, but nothing about that all important instant when it happened.

Fur the big bang’s genesis, I like the thinking that small pockets of potential started to form, since a pair of opposed charges is sort of the same as nothing. But that does go along the lines of “nature abhors a vacuum” type of thinking, which has been comprehensively proven wrong since it was popular. Also it doesn’t explain one of physics greatest mysteries: why is there so much matter and no antimatter. If things came into existence in opposing pairs, we should see equal amounts of both

You ever wonder if human minds just biologically aren’t equipped to understand or comprehend this stuff? Same way ants can’t possibly fathom the existence of radio waves or apes can’t understand trigonometry or how it works?

I’m disinclined to believe that if for no other reason than I’m sure similar things have been said many times throughout human history about any number of subjects that were then much more fully explored and understood. Anatomy, biology, genetics, etc. all seemed to be fields that were “mysteries too far beyond human comprehension”…until they weren’t.

Absolutely. I am completely convinced of the fact that there is knowledge that we can never possess simply because our minds aren’t capable of understanding it. I mean nobody understands quantum theory. Some people can do the maths and make the right predictions etc, but they have absolutely no idea what’s really going on. I think that’s at the boundary of our understanding. Which means there’s other stuff being the boundary, and other stuff way way beyond the boundary. But, I think that in the same way you can explain general relativity to a child in simple terms, if we produce AI that can grasp higher concepts, it could explain it to us.

That’s why it’s interesting that inverse square is in electrostatic and gravitational forces only. Weak and strong force don’t follow inverse square. And we don’t see the highly complex organization inside the nucleus that we see outside it (otherwise we’d have stable orbits inside the nucleus as well)

Oh nice. It’s some combination of you being awesome and me being stupid for not figuring that out.