Cosmology in Rome

One of the joys of writing on the Church in Rome is that almost every important subject known to mankind forms part of everyday life. It makes living in this great city immensely stimulating, even if discussion on these issues isn't perhaps as lively as it would be in somewhere like Oxford.

Last week, the Pontifical Lateran University held a conference on Galileo and cosmology. Interesting in itself, speakers also touched on entropy - the theory that the universe is possibly heading towards 'heat death' and possibly leading to a second Big Bang.

For an article in Zenit on the conference, I report on what the latest is on the theory according to Prof. George F. Smoot, an American Nobel Prize winner for Physics who addressed the conference last week. Here's the relevant excerpt:

As an interesting aside, Professor Smoot had said in his talk that the universe is "extremely ordered" and appears to be becoming even more ordered.

This prompted a member of the audience to question the professor's observation, asking whether, as is commonly thought, the universe is expanding and cooling to a uniform temperature and therefore becoming more disordered, a process known in thermodynamics as increasing entropy.

The logical conclusion is that, if this is so, then the universe is heading toward eventual death, or what astrophysicists call "heat death" whereby all the energy of the cosmos ends up as a homogeneous distribution of thermal energy, so that no more work can be extracted from any source.

Professor Smoot replied first of all by saying that the very early part of the universe had low entropy. He then continued: "Entropy is greatest where there are black holes, and our present understanding is that most of the entropy of the universe is in large black holes.

"Specific entropy is still quite low, and although the universe started extremely ordered, it has gotten less ordered. Even though it looks more ordered, if you look at how galaxies and dark matter is distributed, it is actually more disordered than the almost uniform distribution it had to start with.

"This disorder is increasing, and one of the major arguments today is whether this entropy will keep increasing forever, or whether at some time that information is lost and erased and you get a new Big Bang.

"That's one of the interesting questions in cosmology now: that even though it appears we're getting more ordered, we're not."

Professor Smoot doesn't break new ground with what he says, but fascinating all the same.