2000 views this week for Granville Sewell’s new vid on YouTube

Unfortunately, its popularity is not matched by the quality of its argument. I've already discussed the problems with his "A Second Look at the Second Law" paper (see here, here, and here), but I'll quickly summarize some of its biggest problems here: - It mathematically analyses entropy changes due to diffusion in a solid, then assumes the same principles apply to all other situations and processes. They don't. - For instance, in the case analysed, entropy can be treated as the opposite of order. But a typical human has far higher entropy than a typical bacterium (see the first link above); does anyone seriously think that the human is less ordered than the bacterium? - Another example: in the case analysed, one form of entropy is never converted into another. Again, this is not true in general; in the first link above, I gave an example of carbon-entropy being converted to thermal entropy, and there are plenty more examples of this happening. Actually, almost any case of freezing, melting, condensing, or evaporating involves this sort of conversion to/from thermal entropy. - He rejects what he calls "the principle of compensation", while at the same time demonstrating it. In his diffusion calculations, as heat flows from some areas to others, the areas heat is flowing from decrease in entropy, compensated by increases where the heat is flowing to. He even derives a formula (the right side of Eq. 5) for the entropy flux across a system's boundary -- that's how compensation works! (Note: if he'd objected to compensation without coupling across the system's boundaries, then he'd have a valid point. But instead he rejects compensation entirely, which is simply wrong.) (Another note: the argument he cites from Isaac Asimov that entropy decreases on Earth can be compensated by entropy increasing in the Sun is also wrong -- heat flows carry entropy, so the heat flow from the Sun to Earth actually carries entropy from the Sun to the Earth, not the other way around. The second law allows entropy to decrease on Earth because of the heat flow from Earth to deep space, which carries far more entropy away than arrives from the Sun. See my calculation here.) This video also repeats many of the same mistakes he made in his earlier video, Evolution is a Movie Running Backward, including thinking that the second law can always tell you which direction a process will run (this is only true for isolated systems and open systems with equilibrium boundary conditions), and that finding something implausible or hard to explain means that it violates the second law. If you want Intelligent Design to be taken seriously as science, you really need to start taking it seriously yourselves and exercise a little quality control. Sewell's work is creationist-grade nonsense, the sort of thing that sounds compelling only if you don't know anything about the subject. (And yes, I do realize the irony of complaining about the quality of a paper that passed peer review, one of the primary quality checks in mainstream science. I don't claim that peer review is perfect, or even anywhere close to it, just that some sort of nonsense filter is needed.)Gordon Davisson

March 5, 2012

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