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Lineweaver and Egan 2008,”Life, gravity, and the second law of thermodynamics”

It’s time for a national conversation about entropy production in gravitational collapse. For reasons no one knows, there’s more matter than anti-matter in the universe. This “excess” matter warps the fabric of spacetime and falls in on itself. The gravitational collapse forces energy to hurtle outward; this is the nature of a dissipative system, a category which includes all of the phenomena we find interesting in the universe—stars, planets, bodies. In an otherwise unremarkable solar system at the edge of a commonplace galaxy among several hundred million galaxies in the universe, the availability of free energy from the gravitational collapse of a star has borne a unique kind of dissipative system: life. You couldn’t make this stuff up. Are you ready, my people? If we live, we live to tread on kings. A

Lineweaver, Charles H. and Egan, Chas A. “Life, gravity, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” Physics of Life Reviews 5(4):225-242. doi:10.1016/j.plrev.2008.08.002.

Wallace 2011, “Gravity, entropy, and cosmology: in search of clarity”

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the surest thing in science, as the astronomer Arthur Eddington famously said a century ago. How strange, then, that its relationship with known cosmology remains mysterious. The early universe must have had lower entropy and it must have been a uniform gas, but these two facts don’t fit together well. Wallace offers a simple explanation: uniformity notwithstanding, the early universe was not in equilibrium. In the fifteen billion years since, entropy has increased due to both universal expansion and local clumping, the latter because clumped systems—stars, galaxies, bodies—are dissipative: we disperse more energy than we concentrate, thus following the dictates of the Second Law. Wallace is a philosopher by training, and the master narrative he summarizes here is philosophically stunning. Reality is non-equilibrium, and always has been. A

Wallace, David. 2011. “Gravity, entropy, and cosmology: in search of clarity.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61(3): 513-540. doi: 10.1093/bjps/axp048.