Pretty much every person I've dialogued with comes to the eventual question: What drives centropy?
I'm afraid my answer, though satisfactory to me, won't please the reader...
This question sits right up there with Sir Isaac's famous words "I fein no hypotheses."
Some more kindred questions and soundbites that haunt physicists:
-- If everything started with a big bang, what started the big bang?
-- Where did matter come from?
-- What is energy? [Fd is an abstraction, as are W, .5mv^2, and other attempts to handle it]
-- How do forces act across a distance? [There's always some space between interacting objects -- various aether theories exist to try to fill in the "uncomfortable silence."]
-- Which came/comes first, Impulse or Momentum? [in the standard equation I = P, ie. Ft = mv]
-- The universe is held together by "dark matter" but kept from collapsing by "dark energy." ??
-- If the universe is infinite, why is it "sticky"?
-- If the universe is finite, what is beyond it?
-- Did God create the universe? [Often accompanied with the question, Where did God come from?]
-- Is there anything "supernatural"* in the universe? [*supernatural = beyond nature as we study it scientifically --Ie. is this a "superverse?"]
-- Add your own list of unanswerable/unanswered questions...
So here is my crack at understanding the Origin of Centropy:
One must pick one of 2 paradigms as a fundamental premise for any understanding of physics:
1. The universe is infinite [and then try to define "infinite" in physical terms, or not].
2. The universe is finite [and then try to explain its boundaries, or not].
The parenthetic notes infer that either premise is a matter of faith, belief, philosophy, acceptance, presupposition, assumption... We don't like to discuss this in physics class, so we sometimes pretend the question doesn't matter. One can say "turtles all the way down", but this only avoids the question, which again is standard physics dogma.
The sheer immensity of the universe is staggering to the mind no matter how big we envision it to be, so that cannot logically determine which paradigm we choose.
I choose "finite" because every observable and measurable experience [ie. everything in physics] is in fact observable and measurable -- finite. Why should we imagine otherwise if there is no way to discern it or describe it physically? Here's how I envision this to work:
Choose a smaller realm if you can or wish, but for convenience I will pick the atomic realm as a starter for understanding "the smallest particle" which we can conclude is indeed finite [size, shape, mass, etc.]. Consider the atomic nucleus of any given atom. Expand it to say the size of a city, and as far as we know it is still an expanse of space surrounding some [probably still invisible] locus. The defined locus is surrounded by an undefined yet active spacial domain [I'll call that its "field"]. Let's jump to the bigger hierarchy of the solar system. You can choose other realms in between, this is just for illustration. The sun, immense as it is, is barely a speck compared to the spacial realm that defines it's influence, or rather what influences it, ie. its field. At the galactic or supergalactic level the problem is equal or greater. Finite objects are contained in fields that are undefinedly greater, which I will simplify by saying "infinite". The crux of it is this -- by definition a finite universe is contained, and in unification I have to conclude the addendum "by an infinite [undefined] field." If you could hold an atom between your thumb and forefinger, this image becomes the model for the finitude of the universe. It doesn't really matter [or does it?] what name you give to the greater operant field, it is beyond physical measure or observation. What does matter for sure is that we live in what some term a "sticky" universe. The universal observation is that stuff is held together, and in physics we go from there. We look for culpable corpuscles to "carry" our forces, the search for "gravitons" for example. When we find none satisfactory, we turn to amorphous waves, and incur the various forms of "energy" to explain how they work. While of course physical waves exist in a medium, there are only imaginary waves at work in the invisible realms of the cosmos both large and small. Believe them or not, I just understand them to be imaginary, or in scientific jargon, "hypothetical". What I need not believe, because I can see it at work and measure its effects, is
pressure. From this base is constructed the centropic pressure field theory.
Nuff said for this post, more questions and objections surely to follow!