The Relationship Between Life, Stars, and Entropy

Exploring the most fundamental forces of nature!

The Relationship Between Life, Stars, and Entropy — Illustrative art created by the author

In my previous essay on a tale of entropy and the big bang, I started investigating the big bang with the lens of entropy. The underlying question in this investigation turned out to be as follows:

How does our universe keep increasing its entropy, whilst consistently creating lower entropy phenomena like stars, planets, life, etc., along the way?

In this essay, I will be continuing to investigate answers to this question, uncovering the relationship between orderly phenomena such as stars, planets, life, etc., and the universally increasing entropy that we observe.

Since this journey originally started out with investigating the big bang, let us begin our discussion right there.

Immediately after the Big Bang

In the moment immediately after the big bang (say, 10^(-30) seconds), repulsive gravity exploded a tiny, tiny piece of space into a vast expanse far beyond what we can observe today with our state-of-the-art equipment.

Immediately after this happened, the inflaton field expanded rapidly too. Too fast to sustain the rate of expansion, the inflaton field collapsed, unleashing a wealth of particles.