Hal Finney wrote:
>
> This would seem to indicate that the early universe, despite being
> exceedingly hot and dense by our standards, was not a good environment
> for evolution.
> Without energy differences there is no way for life to exist.
I don't believe this is true. Our kind of life requires energy differences, yes. But the laws of thermodynamics aren't really laws; they're statistical guidelines. There is no physical reason why you can't take tap water and produce electricity and ice cubes; it's just very very improbable. The laws of physics are time-symmetrical (except for state-vector reduction); if the atoms are in the right places with the right velocities, a glass of water can leap from the floor and unshatter.
Energy differentials are a human convention for encoding computations into large ordered groups of particles. But I am ignorant of a reason why computations can't be encoded into single particles bouncing around in a system of uniform temperature. The thermodynamic (as opposed to statistical) definition of entropy is not "complete disorder"; it means "not 'ordered' in the sense of 'having different average temperatures in different places'". In fact, information is directly proportional to entropy. The more information it takes to encode a system, the more mathematically random ("normal") that system is, the more entropy that system has. Ergo, maximally efficient information-processing takes place at uniform temperature.
-- sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://pobox.com/~sentience/AI_design.temp.html http://pobox.com/~sentience/sing_analysis.html Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you everything I think I know.