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Comment by cwharris | Hacker News Reader

This seems backwards. Entropy is a dispersive force — it favors distribution and disorder. But the universe clumps. Planets, stars, galaxies — all of them are low-entropy configurations.

So how did scattered dust particles form the planet we’re standing on… through entropy?

If gravity is just emergent from entropy, then it should be fighting against planet formation, not causing it. There’s a missing piece here — maybe coherence, resonance, or field attraction. But “just entropy”? That doesn’t explain formation. It explains dissolution.

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Entropy isn't a force. It doesn't "favor" anything. Its a property of statistics, information, and distributions.

Also why does this have that particular ChatGPT social media post rhythm to it? Please, Lord, tell me we haven't reached the point where people are writing HN comments w/ AI.

We’ve definitely reached that point. I’ve seen responses that are essentially,

Well, here’s what ChatGPt has to say:

If folks are doing that, then I assume they are also quoting it without citation—although, I have no idea about this case. It looks sort of rambling for ChatGPT, doesn’t it?

You’re right. the cadence is written by ChatGPT. I’m pretty terrible at keeping my thoughts cohesive, so I often use it as a post processor. I’ll try not to do that.

Because you had the decency to respond, I’ll spent some more time thinking about this and see if I can come up with a more well rounded response that incorporates more of the traditional language of physics. But to your point about entropy not being a “force”, you’re probably right. Someone got to choose what that word means, and I’m probably not using their definition. But let me ask you this… would you rather have a book that explains everything and not know how to read it, or trust your own eyes ears and hands, and not be able to share it?

> would you rather have a book that explains everything and not know how to read it, or trust your own eyes ears and hands, and not be able to share it?

Maybe use AI to help you understand TFA instead of writing gut reactions to the title.

I... Do... With quite a lot of articles... And I build semiconductors in my garage using what I learn.

I just don't see how this particular article would be beneficial, even if it _were_ correct.

Are these the very same semiconductors writing your comments? NGL, a 9 year old account with 0 posts that suddenly starts posting AI-assisted comments is very suspicious.

The problems I wanted to solve couldn't be solved with software, so I started researching ceramic semiconductors, starting with positive temperature coefficient ceramics as fail-safe heating elements. The geometry I needed to manufacture for that project wasn't scalable in a way that solved the problem for enough people, so I switched to working on DC cold atmospheric plasma. Saw enough progress there to convince myself it's possible, but wasn't happy with the current HV supplies on the market, so I'm working on making my own based on converting compressed argon in to a high voltage source that self-regulates based on plasma generation in an attempt to not exceed metastable argon charge levels, which would produce NOx and Ozone at completely harmless levels (unless maybe you're using it during surgery) but are heavily regulated.

It's uhh... been a ride.

But yes, posting to hacker news is a new thing. Because I'm seeing the limitations of the world we live in through the lens of someone who's gone through industry long enough to know how slowly controlled progress is, and beginning to see what happens when you apply semiconductors to more than just microprocessors on your own terms. The world is stagnating, not because we don't have what it takes to bring about the future... but because 1) we do, 2) the people in control don't care to make it happen, and 3) everyone has their hands tied up in corperate profits while we wait for someone to make a move that makes things better.

I'm just... done waiting.

Words have meanings. You can look them up and learn them.

If you're not willing to do that, then you should probably not try to participate in a technical discussion where the meaning of words is arguably paramount.

Because it has emdashes and ellipses that Chrome, Firefox, Mac, Linux, and Android text input controls do not natively produce.

I don't know about iPhone.

If you see these artifacts, it was authored in some other software (be it an editor or LLM) and pasted over.

iPhone definitely turns `--` into `—`, at least sometimes.

Android does let you produce em dashes. I'm typing this with Google Keyboard right now.

If you hold the hyphen button, you get options for an underscore, an em dash (—) an en dash (–), and the dot symbol (·). The ellipsis (…) can be written by holding the period button.

But yeah, the commenter admitted it was authored by AI. But even if you converted all the em dashes to "--", it would still have a ChatGPT cadence.

> There’s a missing piece here — maybe coherence, resonance, or field attraction. But “just entropy”? That doesn’t explain formation. It explains dissolution.

Even ignoring the em dash, it just screams ChatGPT.

I like how people are recognizing "OH THIS IS TOKEN OUTPUT", and that's like... the only thing you can come up with to refute the argument?

Like not the actual content or meaning of the text, which I chose to post, but the mere fact that it wasn't typed in to a keyboard directly in a hacker news text box, but rather pasted after using a tool to refine the verbiage.

Honestly? Great test for most posts. We live in a world surrounded by people who are just copy and pasting ChatGPT answers like a magic 8 ball, and I respect your instinct to try to avoid those.

But that's not how I use ChatGPT, because I understand how language models work and choose to use them intentionally to help me nagivate ideas and learn new concepts (as well as write memos after-the-fact). Not just take a hollow "sounds good" response and post it to take up people time.

:shrug:

I come to HN because the caliber of poster here is above and beyond what you can find basically anywhere on the web.

If we wanted to debate ChatGPT, we can go do that on our own.

Here's the non-ChatGPT rant that I was attempting to not spew all over the internet.

> “There’s some kind of gas or some thermal system out there that we can’t see directly,” >

Posit that there’s something we don’t know about, and we’re supposing it’s gas-like. This is what I like to refer to as “imagination”, and it’s a great way to start thinking about problems. The fact that it’s showing up in an article suggests they didn’t get much further than imagination, but I’ll keep reading…

> “But it’s randomly interacting with masses in some way, such that on average you see all the normal gravity things that you know about: The Earth orbits the sun, and so forth.” >

Cool. We’re back on everything being “random” again. Modern interpretations of quantum mechanics has really torn a hole in the idea of causality by replacing it with the idea that we can’t explain why things happen, but we CAN model it statistically, so we’ll assume the model is right and stop looking for causal relationships entirely.” It’s lazy pessimistic psuedo-science, and I don’t buy it. I don’t outright REFUTE it, but I’m not basing my understanding of nature on it just because a bunch of smart people decided to stop looking.

On the paper the article refers to:

> Consider a pair of massive pistons with a non-interacting gas between them, as in Fig. 1. >

Cool. Happy to consider it. But I am curious… Are there existing examples of particles that do not interact with particles of like kind? Neutrinos and Photons come to mind. But has anyone proven that they don’t interact, or are we just assuming they don’t interact because we haven’t put the effort in to try and detect interactions? But sure, let’s consider the possibility.

> What this exercise demonstrates is that the two pistons feel an effective force between them, namely the pressure, which is mediated by the gas rather than some fundamental quantized field. >

Honestly? I love this. I don’t care about “fields” at all, personally. I feel like it’s more intuitive to think of fields as reinforcement of particle interactions over time and space. An electon moves? So do all of the others. A lot of them move the same way? The others feel that combined movement at distance according to C. Magnetic flux? Interplay of electron inertia reinforcment delayed by the time it takes for the repulsive forces to make their way around a coil (or whatever other medium according to it’s influence) and allow spin to align. Falsifiable? Yes. Relevant intuitive observation? Yes. Taken the time to write out the math myself in languages I don’t know? No.

> <… lot’s of math that proves individual hypothetical (sorry, theoretical) particle interactions can explain how gravity emerges…> >

Cool. I’m almost certain that if I took the time to check their math, it would be meaningfully accurate and absolutely show that this is a way you can view gravity.

But let me ask you… Why the hell would anyone want to think about gravity like that, and why are we trying to explain things in terms of entropy when it clearly has no applications outside of “well, I guess everything is left up to chance, and there’s nothing left to be discovered.” I reject this hypothesis. I reject the idea that everything we see, feel, hear, and know was at one point non-existant, and somehow emerged at this level of complexity such that we are capable of not only cognition but also direct observation of physical phenomena while simultaneously being physical phenomena ourselves. There is something else. And no, it’s not “God”. But it sure as hell isn’t “everything’s just falling apart in interesting ways”. And I get that that’s not the “full idea” behind entropy, but it is entropy’s brand identity, and it is the implication behind entropy as the driving force of nature (sorry, I used force again. I forget we're not allowed to say that about the thing we're using to explain how all of the real forces emerge. my bad). Heat death of the universe as a result of entropy? I’m onboard. Red shift? I get it. Entropy is a great “welp I guess that’s the reason again”, but the mental gymnastics it takes to represent gravity as a result of this? Give me a freaking break.

There’s a simpler explanation for all of this that models well across domains, and nobody is willing to admit it because it doesn’t fit the narrative. Phase-lock. Waveforms that mesh together in torsional space time reinforce each other, sometimes purely locally through identity changes (fusion), and sometimes via interdependant standing waves (non-fundamental particles, atoms, molecules, etc etc). Entropy is just what happens when coherence fails to resolve locally and must resolve non-locally (chemical interactions, fission, dielectric breakdown, photoelectric effect). Most things can be modelled this way: as stable geometric configurations of quantum wave functions representing self-reinforcing torsional spacetime harmonics. And if you take a second to consider it, maybe this single paragraph _is_ a more intuitive explanation of gravity, too.

There is a whole article explaining it... if you don't read the article, how do you expect to know the idea?

Actually Roger Penrose also had this line of thinking if my memory serves right.

You have it backwards. The lowest entropy state of the universe would be if there were no attractive forces, only repellent forces, as then all particles would be forced into something of an expanding lattice, but with all particles equidistant from all nearest neighbors (of the same type).

It is gravity which disrupts this and causes clumping, and that _increases_ entropy.

I know it's confusing because normally one would think of a cloud of gas as more disordered than the star it might collapse into, but that is not so. For one the star would be much hotter, and the motions of every particle in the star much more chaotic.

If everything must be constrained to the lattice points, yes. However, empty space has high Boltzmann entropy: you can cut a patch of empty space from here and swap it for the same volume of empty space from there, and the two coarse grain macrostates will be indistinguishable.

Expanding de Sitter quasi-vacuum has tremendous growth in entropy. Gibbons and Hawking gives this (for 3+1d de Sitter) as a quarter of the horizon area: S_H = \frac{Area_{H}}{4} \sim H^{-2} with the "quasi-" giving us increasing growth in the horizon area as DoFs exit the horizon compared to classical pure de Sitter vacuum.

I'm not sure how confining some species of matter to expanding lattice is different from quasi-vacuum in the limit where the lattice spacing is large. I guess you have to abolish continuum spacetime in favour of a taxicab geometry with an analogue of dark energy? Otherwise, how does it differ from an isotropic homogeneous FLRW dust?

If you consider a universe with only protons in it initially clearly they would all be forced into a low-entropy lattice and space would expand. Eventually the space between them would grow to be sufficiently large and empty that its own entropy would be enormous. But that doesn't deny that gravitational collapse is an entropy-increasing mechanism.

Oh, and by the way, entropy is the evolution of a system given the forces in it. So yes, in a universe with only repellent forces at first it would have low entropy (like ours did) and then as the particles get forced into an ever emptier lattice the universe would have more entropy. It's the forces -attractive or repellent- that make the system evolutions possible that lead to higher entropy over time.

This is not a philosophical discussion

This paper is literally physical philosophy. To be science, it would require recursive experimentation, observation, and adjustment to hypothesis, until the model it proposes becomes a stable, reliable, and (most importantly) useful interpretation.

It does none of that, and so I have no responsibility to do so prior to discussing it.

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