[asa] Historical question about steady-state cosmology

I'll get to the history in a minute -- first the motivation.
 
Apparently some apologists are using the Second Law of Thermodynamics, not
in the traditional (and bogus) anti-evolution argument, but as a cosmological
argument. They say that the 2nd Law proves that the universe cannot have
existed forever. It seems to me that this is a totally unnecessary argument,
since the Big Bang is already extraordinarily strong evidence for a finite age
of our universe (and if these apologists don't accept the Big Bang, they
really have no business making use of any science-based cosmological arguments).
 
Unnecessary though this argument might be, it is at least not obviously
wrong to me. While I am a thermodynamicist, my field is chemical thermodynamics,
and I know that thermo gets trickier when one gets into cosmology. So a
suppose a secondary question to any cosmologists out there (George?) would be
whether this argument makes sense.
 
But my main question is this. In the early 1900s, almost everybody believed
the "steady-state" theory of the universe. Yet, the science of
thermodynamics was already well-established by then. Did anybody at that time see the
Second Law as a serious problem for the steady-state universe? If that
criticism was made, it did not seem to carry the day, so how was it dealt with?
 
Allan
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Allan H. Harvey, Boulder, Colorado | SteamDoc@aol.com
"Any opinions expressed here are mine, and should not be
attributed to my employer, my wife, or my cat"

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Received on Sat Jul 7 12:53:58 2007