h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Boy, great article...really detailed yet easy to understand!

My only quibble is the last bit 'Relative Truth' If truth changes depending on whose looking at it its certainly not 'ultimate truth'! Its indeed relative or subjective truth. I dont think the subjectivity in thermodynamics says anything about truth in general - only about truth in thermodynamics.

Any way we could redefine things to state everything objectively like this:

Given an observer that is looking at a particular high level property of a sytem x, the system has z entropy.

All observers would then come up with very similar values for z.

It just means that "ultimate truth", if such a thing exists, has to be based on something other than thermodynamics, as thermodynamical truth is relative. Of course, in the quantum age, nobody believes in ultimate truth any more anyway, so it's something of a moot point...

I believe in 'ultimate truth'

Unfortunately the declaration of faith or belief necessarily encompasses the decision either to no longer examine evidence, or to deny the existence of evidence, however blatantly it may be displayed. A common form of this is denial of alcoholism in the alcoholic, who is often able to spread his faith to the near and dear. Something is wrong but not THAT. The best part of ultimate truth is that everybody's is different. It reminds me of people telling what they finally realized about the universe after an acid trip. For me, the ultimate truth is that one's view of ultimate truth is best kept to oneself. A maxim that I just violated...

I once had a roommate who liked to explain at length his revelation that if you were to gather enough information you would eventually transform into a black hole, and from that point you would continue to suck in everything nearby until you had infinite knowledge. To avoid this predicament, he rarely attended the one class that he had enrolled in - "Claymation".

On a more serious note, interested parties might like to check out "Chaos: Making a new Science" by J. Gleick - the last 70 pages or so gives a wonderful insight to entropy and its relationship to information theory. The best part is a discussion on redundancy in language that in theory should allow someone with a working knowledge of english to guess the missing last word in a.

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