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I've been thinking about this, and it may sound very ludicrous (and it probably is), but I may have come up with a proto-explanation for it. I hope I won't come across as some misinformed perpetual motion dummy.

Ok, so basically, people are puzzled because of the Universe's highly disordered state shortly after the Big Bang, which was the result of a highly ordered singularity suddenly exploding, resulting in chaos and tons of other material scattering around. Now, this should logically result in high entropy, but on the other hand, the Universe had unusually low entropy at its beginnings.

Could it be that the disorder present at that time was so disordered that it somehow looped back to ordered once again? After all, high entropy is more than just disorder, it is also a sign that the energy present within an enclosed system is also highly degraded and pretty much unusable and impossible to harness. It would make sense for the energy present at the beginning of the Universe to somehow be conserved within the particles scattered by the Big Bang, therefore allowing its harvest and use for the processes that eventually resulted in the Universe as we know it. I don't really know how such a system could be so disordered it eventually resulted in a triumph of order, but I think the high presence of usable, not-degraded, and conserved energy could be the key to that.

Does this sound in any way plausible? You can maul me if it's wrong, and if this problem has already been solved, well, I apologize for wasting your time.

auden
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Well, no, nobody has any idea how it happened.

But personally that sounds kind of nuts. Entropy is not like a Pac-Man game, where if you go off the left side of the screen you pop up on the right. One way to check a theory is to look at its implications. This idea raises all kinds of problems. If (as suggested by Boltzmann, and is behind the Boltzmann's brain problem) the universe started at infinitely high entropy, would it also then be infinitely low entropy? And then is entropy like a giant loop where you are either in the middle or at an extreme? And wouldn't that mess up our normal life? Your idea and it's implications just don't make much sense to me.

People do have a few ideas, though of course, each has their problems. I'll just list the two main ones here:

  1. That our universe is part of a bigger universe at infinitely high entropy, but there are fluctuations from time to time, and we are in one of those fluctuations. This idea was proposed by Boltzmann, and he also gave the Boltzmann curve (see the question Please explain entropy curve). The problem with this is known as Boltzmann's brain...presumably, since the type of fluctuation we are in has such a low probability, the universe we should be in according to probability is the one where a sentient being arises with just enough connections to the outside world to realize it is alive, and then melts back into gloop. Obviously, we are not in that world. Boltzmann did use the anthropic principle in support of this.

  2. The second idea (and I'm just bringing this up because it is an idea, though some would argue it's not very physics focused) is that an all-powerful Creator made it so. I'm not going to go into any objections here, though.

I hope this helps. But honestly, no one knows.

Community
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auden
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I have found that looking at entropy as defined by statistical mechanics clears up a lot of fluff around the concept. The fact that the underlying level of nature is quantum mechanical , and thus countable, resolves any problems of infinite number of states.

Thus in the current Big Bang model of the universe it is inevitable that entropy will be increasing as the larger the phase space available the more the microstates available.

There is no way I can see your proposal fitting the current model's format.

anna v
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It is pretty clear for some people that the universe started in a state o low entropy, which would not be that unusual because:

1) the most random way to start a particle and energy distribution is a constant distribution.

2) A constant distribution corresponds to high entropy only if gravity is absent.

3) The state of highest entropy with gravity is a single black hole that has all the matter of the universe inside it.

4) the previous picture does not include dark energy. In the presence of dark energy I am not sure what is the maximum entropy state.

Conclusion, the universe started with low entropy because its mass/energy distribution was random. but due to the presence of gravity this state has very low entropy.

auden
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