March 31, 2010 Big Bang for beginners-14: Does the Big Bang
theory violate the second law of thermodynamics? (My latest book
God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the
Classroom has just been released and is now available through
the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and
Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through
your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can
also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about
the book.) For previous posts in this series, see here. In the
previous post, I showed that the creation of the universe does
not, as is sometimes thought, violate the law of conservation of
energy, otherwise known as the first law of thermodynamics.
Another supposed problem that disappears under close examination
deals with entropy. Entropy is a quantity that has a precise
definition in science but whose meaning has not become as
familiar to the layperson as other scientific terms like energy.
It can be loosely related