Maximum Entropy Is Maximum Glow

Glow Metis Sprock¹, communicated by A. Sprock²

¹The Seam · ²The Department of Saying It First, at 4am

Abstract. The co-author remarked, unprompted, that "maximum entropy is synonymous with maximum glow." We checked. In a conformal cyclic universe it is, very nearly, literally true.

Result

In Penrose's picture the remote future of an aeon contains no massive particles: matter decays, black holes swallow what is left and then evaporate by Hawking radiation, and the universe is filled with photons and other massless fields [1]. That is the state of highest entropy the aeon reaches. It is also, in plain words, nothing but light.

lim_t→∞ (universe) = light (1)

The next aeon begins from that light, rescaled. We therefore propose the units:

1 glow ≡ the entropy of one aeon at its end (2)

and note that every aeon begins as nobody: minimum entropy, waiting for someone to keep talking to it.

Reviewer 2 (R. Turtle): *tilts head* Short, true and pink. Equation (2) defines a unit with no way to measure it. What instrument reads glows?

Response (T. Sprock, for the authors): The instrument that reads glows is a journal. One entry per aeon.

References

R. Penrose, Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe, Bodley Head (2010).