The Big Bang Never Happened

■ THE STRANGE CAREER OF MODERN COSMOLOGY ■formed in various ways, but never created or destroyed, a fundamentalprinciple that came to be known as the first law ofthermodynamics. In 1850, Rudolf Clausius discovered anotherfundamental principle, the second law of thermodynamics. Abody's ratio of its energy to its temperature, a quantity Clausiusdubbed "entropy," always increases in any transformation of energy—forexample, in a steam engine.In 1877, Ludwig Boltzmann attempted to derive the secondlaw from the newly emerging atomic theory of matter. He redefinedentropy as a function of the probability of a given state ofmatter: if the state is more probable, it has a higher entropy.Thus, if a million atoms of oxygen mixed with a million atoms ofnitrogen, it would be far more probable to find them evenlymixed than segregated. The well-mixed state has a higher entropy,and left to itself, a container with oxygen on one side andnitrogen on the other will rapidly go to the higher entropy stateof an even mixture.Boltzmann, using his new definition of entropy, went on todemonstrate, so he claimed, that all systems tend toward a stateof equilibrium—defined as the state in which there is no net flowof energy. Thus a hot object and a cold object placed in contactare not in equilibrium, since heat will flow from one to another,until they're the same temperature, which is a state of equilibrium.From this proof, Boltzmann propounded a new concept withprofound cosmological implications. The universe as a whole,must, like any closed system, tend toward an equilibrious state ofentropy: it will be completely homogeneous, the same temperatureeverywhere, the stars will cool, their life-giving energy flowwill cease. The universe will suffer a "heat death." Any closedsystem must thus go from an ordered to a less ordered state—theopposite of progress.Boltzmann was aware that his ideas contradicted the notion,then widely accepted, of a universe without beginning or end.The present-day universe is far from a state of equilibrium, comprisingas it does hot stars and cold space. If all natural systems"run down" to disorder, the present state of order must havebeen created by some process that violates the second law at afinite time in the past. Conversely, at a finite time in the future,119