Thermodynamics is the physics of heat, work, and temperature, and their relationship to energy, entropy, and the physical properties of matter and radiation. In broad terms, thermodynamics deals with the transfer of energy from one place to another and from one form to another. The four laws of thermodynamics – zeroth through third – describe the behaviour of these measurable macroscopic physical quantities which may also be explained in terms of microscopic constituents by statistical mechanics.
The etymology of the word ‘thermo-dynamics’ consists of two parts derived from Ancient Greek roots. The first part ‘thermo’ is derived from the root θέρμη therme, meaning ‘heat’. And the second part ‘dynamics’ is derived from the root δύναμις dynamis, meaning ‘power’.
You’ll notice below that I have also included another alleged law – the fourth law – thus the fifth in the list because the four actual laws begin with the zeroth law that was added much later than the first three.
Creation
God the Creator created the substance, the cosmic substratum, from which He made all the matter and energy of the universe. This is described in the beginning of the Genesis account.
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
Genesis 1:1 AKJV
The phrase “heaven and earth” in Hebrew is a merism, a figure of speech that combines two parts to make a whole. A merism is an example of synecdoche in which totality is expressed by contrasting parts.
Another example of a merism is found in Genesis 1 in each creation day where God uses “evening” and “morning” to refer to “one day” that is one 24-hour day. In reference to these days the text uses ordinal numbers – first day, second day etc. Therefore the Author’s intention was that all 6 days of creation were to be understood as 24-hour days
In Genesis 1 “heaven” and “earth” are contrasted to make a whole. The whole in the case here is everything, all that exists. There are no other spaces, no multiverse, no other universes, no parallel spatial dimensions, nothing that has mass or energy that can exist and not be part of the universe God initially created.
The universe also includes all the physical laws by which the matter and energy in it are governed.
Now I want to discuss the four most important well-established physical laws – the 4 laws of thermodynamics. All were created at the same time that God created space and time, and the matter and energy of the universe. I list them in numerical order, and not in the order they were discovered.
The Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics is a fundamental physical law that states that if two thermodynamic systems are both in thermal equilibrium with a third system, then the two systems are in thermal equilibrium with each other. Two systems are said to be in thermal equilibrium if they are linked by a wall permeable only to heat, and they do not change over time. James Clerk Maxwell stated it as “All heat is of the same kind”.
The earth is one thermodynamic system and the universe is another. The earth also has within it separate thermodynamic systems that were created at different temperatures and this meant that heat flow was initiated. It also means the initiation of the water cycle, which is essential to life. (I will discuss the water cycle in a future article.)
The earth’s surface was created at about the same average temperature it is today, around 300 K (27 °C) at the equator at sea level. The earth was initially created as a massive ball of water. Even if that was initially at a lower temperature on Day 1 and totally covered in ice, the surface warmed on Day 2 from the creation of the core, mantle and crust. Heat moved energy from the inner mantle to warm the oceans and the crustal rocks of the land mass. Each layer in the planet is in permeable contact with the adjacent layers and so heat flows from hotter layer to the colder layer.
At lower latitudes land surface temperatures roughly equilibrated around 300 K making an environment ideal for the first living organisms created by God on Day 3, all plants, on Day 5, all birds and flying creatures, all fish and marine creatures and on Day 6, humans and all land dwelling air breathing animals.
Different surface regions of the planet are at different temperatures and this fact drives the global winds moving cold air from the poles to the equator. If all regions were at the same temperature and they don’t change then they are all dead systems. No work and therefore no energy can be derived from them. The planet was not all at one constant temperature as some biblical creationists have claimed.
It is possible that at creation the axial tilt of the planet was less than it is today. Currently the Earth’s rotation axis is tilted at 23.4° from the normal to the orbital plane of the planets around the sun. It has been suggested that changed during the global flood in Noah’s time, which God used to judge the world. As a result the seasons were much milder in the pre-flood world. However the thermodynamics of the planet meant rainfall, ice and snow would occur at the appropriate latitudes. In the region of Eden the weather was obviously mild enough to have no need of clothing, initially anyway. Besides God’s sustaining power was in full operation up until the Curse.
The heavens, meaning the universe, has a background temperature of about 3 K. You could call that the temperature of space. But the stars are extremely hot, 3,000 K to 10,000 K is common, and thus they emit energy in the form of thermal radiation and other electromagnetic radiation into the surrounding space. If they were all at 3 K the universe would be cold and dark.
The very fact that the heaven and the earth were created at different temperatures, and that the subsystems in them are at different temperatures, means that work can be derived from them. It means we have a dynamic living system, just what you would expect from the Creator of life.
Thus it is clear that the Creator made the contents of the universe in a non-equilibrium state. Thermal equilibration has not yet occurred. God provided a timescale of billions of years for that to occur assuming nothing happens to reverse the process.
This means no catastrophic earth changes like boiling oceans are to be expected any time soon. The climate change cult is crying wolf in all their prophecies of global cooling then global warming or boiling oceans and climate catastrophe.
The First Law of Thermodynamics (the 1st Law) is a fundamental physical law that states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form into another form. The total energy of an isolated system remains constant, even if energy is converted from one form to another.
This law is also known as the law of conservation of energy. And this applies to the whole universe.
All the energy (including all the matter) that God created on the first day of creation is still with us today. It may not be in the same form it started out as but none is destroyed. It may be converted to another form in nuclear reactions, but the total mass-energy content is unchanged.
The equation for the 1st Law of thermodynamics is ΔU = Q + W, where ΔU is the change in internal energy of the system, Q is the heat transferred to the system, and W is the work done by the system. And the reverse, if work is done on the system then heat must be generated from that system. No matter what process does work, heat is always involved in any real system.
For example on the second creation day God created the foundations of the planet, the core, mantle and crust. But on the first day He only created water. So He must have converted some of that water into rock. That means God used nuclear physics, fusing the hydrogen and oxygen atoms from water into heavier elements.
Such a process would generate a lot of heat and perhaps He used that to melt the rocks all the way down to the inner core. Much of the mantle rocks are radioactive and carry radio-isotopes as signatures of the creative acts of God.
The biggest problem for the big bang origin of the universe is this 1st Law. Energy cannot come from nothing. The big bang is alleged to have spontaneously resulted from some fluctuation in a metastable false vacuum. Whatever that nonsense means it had to have the energy content of the whole universe of more than a hundred trillion galaxies containing somewhere between 100 million to 100 billion stars each.
For the big bang believers the laws of physics are their Creator. Well, the 1st Law tells us that there is no free lunch. You cannot get something from nothing where nothing means no space, no time and no energy.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics (the 2nd Law) is a fundamental physical law, that, based on universal empirical observation, it may be simply stated that heat always flows spontaneously from hotter to colder regions of matter (or ‘downhill’ in terms of the temperature gradient).
Another way to state it is: “Not all heat can be converted into work in a cyclic process.” Each cycle of a process some energy is lost due to less than perfect efficiency. In the same way, all natural processes as well as natural cycles in the environment run down and decay.
Similarly, all living systems lose genetic information and become less fit. This sets limits to growth which is what we observe. Quite obviously it runs counter to the claims of spontaneous origin of life from a pool of chemicals, and the claimed increase of coded information in the genomes via neo-Darwinian evolution.
The 2nd Law of thermodynamics establishes the concept of entropy as a physical property of a thermodynamic system. It predicts whether processes are forbidden despite obeying the requirement of conservation of energy as expressed in the 1st Law and provides necessary criteria for spontaneous processes.
For example, the 1st Law allows for a glass falling to the floor and shattering into pieces, but it also allows the reverse process of the glass spontaneously reassembling itself as if time were reversed and ‘falling up’ onto the table. The 2nd Law allows the glass shattering but prohibits the reassembling process. Spontaneous order cannot result no matter how long you wait.
From observation the 2nd Law absolutely requires that the entropy (randomness) of isolated systems left to spontaneous evolution (i.e. free to change) cannot decrease. They always tend toward a state of thermodynamic equilibrium where the entropy is highest at the given internal energy. That means the end state is always more randomised than the initial state. See example of ice cubes melting in picture above.
An increase in the combined entropy of a system and its surroundings accounts for the irreversibility of natural processes. This defines the concept of the arrow of time. This is a concept we are familiar with, like the glass breaking or the ice melting in surroundings at temperatures greater than 0 °C (pictured above). We do not expect it to ever spontaneously reverse and reassemble or refreeze.
Creation is then not a process determined merely by the matter and energy in the system alone. It must be imposed on the system by an Intelligent Mind.
Only one exception to the 2nd Law has ever been found, and that is described by the fluctuation theorem, which deals with the relative probability that the entropy of a system which is currently away from thermodynamic equilibrium (i.e. from maximum entropy) will increase or decrease over a given amount of time.
On very short timescales it might appear that time flows backwards as a disordered internal state of a system is reordered. There is a small statistical probability that a system decreases entropy of the internal states for a short time. Yet over longer timescales entropy of the system and its surroundings always tends to increase; always tends to maximum.
One observed example of the fluctuation theorem is the cellular repair of DNA after a copying error occurred. The reversal there occurs on very short times scales, hence a fluctuation in the entropy of the internal state. This is a fluctuation integrated into the cells repair mechanism, which only fails to correct a very small number of errors, called point mutations.
The 2nd Law and the Curse are often mentioned in the same sentence by biblical creationists. It is quite wrong to assume God started the operation of the 2nd Law when He cursed the creation because of Adam and Eve’s sin of rebellion. I deal with this issue in The Sustaining Power of the Creator. The Creator has a sustaining power that under normal conditions we do not notice. This sustaining power acts in opposition to the 2nd Law.
Prior to the Curse the sustaining power of God was on full throttle and no decay, no increase in the destructive effects of the randomisation of internal states of a system were apparent. Yet the 2nd Law continued to operate as normal and where it was needed, for example in digestion in Adam’s stomach, it provided the necessary function to the living.
After the Curse God withdrew some of that sustaining power and the levels of decay and random destructive effects of entropy increase became real. Possibly thorns and thistles were a result of mutations (DNA copying errors) in pre-existing plant species. Definitely different structures and functions were changed by God in line with His reduction in His sustaining power over creation. All negative effects of the Curse may be interpreted this way.
The Third Law of Thermodynamics (the 3rd Law) is a fundamental principle in thermodynamics that describes the behaviour of systems as they approach absolute zero temperature (0 K). It states that the entropy of a closed system at thermodynamic equilibrium approaches a constant value when its temperature approaches absolute zero.
The 3rd Law has important implications for the behaviour of systems at very low temperatures, including the idea that it is impossible to reach absolute zero by any finite number of processes.
Entropy at absolute zero is defined by the quantum degeneracy of the ground state of the system (meaning multiple states of the same energy). Non-zero entropy exists with zero point energy because the vacuum is degenerate with particle-antiparticle pairs of virtual particles. Virtual particles flash in and out of existence on very short time scales. One is the antiparticle of the other. They form from a quantum of energy and then self-annihilate back into that energy. This is the quantum foam near absolute zero. In actual practice it is impossible to reach absolute zero temperature.
Ultra-cold atoms have their atomic energy levels shifted due to the vacuum energy (Lamb shift) as you approach absolute zero. But the idea of extracting work and hence usable energy from the zero point energy in the seething foam of those particle-antiparticle pairs is total fiction. Entropy of the system approaches a constant value and hence cannot change. No work can be extracted as the system is all near absolute zero (0 K).
Notwithstanding a mislabelling or a misrepresentation by some inventor with a so-called free energy device, when he claims energy is extracted from the zero point energy of the quantum foam, there may be as yet undiscovered improvements in a motor’s efficiency that are thermodynamically valid. But it will never be free energy, and it will never be from the quantum foam or the quantum vacuum of space like the alleged big bang’s free lunch.
The Fourth Law of Thermodynamics is a completely hypothetical concept that has been proposed and debated by various scientists and researchers over the years. It is not a universally accepted law, and its definition and scope are still changing.
It has also been linked to the concept of self-organization, where systems exhibit emergent behaviour and complex patterns without explicit direction. I believe this is a round-about attempt to overcome the 2nd Law in regards to the alleged naturalistic increase in complexity in the coded information in the DNA of living organisms via the bogus theory of neo-Darwinian evolution involving mutations and natural selection.
Information in any living plant or animal is either conserved or degraded with every copying event. Natural selection is a real mechanism but it can only selects from existing information, which tends to accumulate random errors – an increase in genetic entropy. These deleterious mutations accumulate and as a result the fitness of the organisms is always degraded. See COVID Bioweapon Shots: Deliberately Designed Destruction of the Human Genome.
There is no universal empirical 4th law of thermodynamics. In my opinion the whole concept is bogus. It is used in some other fields though, like in economics to justify contentious Keynesian theories. But again it is based on the false idea that something of real substance can arise by random processes. No amount of fait money stimulus into an economy can create real wealth. The opposite is in fact true. In the same way no amount of theorising that new information arises when the DNA of genes are copied in normal cell division. The opposite is in fact true.
Information only ever comes from an Intelligent Mind. The 2nd Law applies to all genomes and they are all decaying with time, accumulating a load of deleterious genes.
The intention in all these fraudulent ideas is that no intelligence is needed! That new information can arise by random chance and if one fiddles enough with the genome the scientists can create supermen.
Only the Creator can create living organisms, be they bacteria, earthworms, lizards, birds, fish, dinosaurs or humans. Yet they all will eventually go to dust. It is basic thermodynamics!
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