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erronis

(18,618 posts)
Sat Mar 15, 2025, 10:11 AM Mar 15

Why does nature love spirals? The link to entropy

https://phys.org/news/2025-03-nature-spirals-link-entropy.html



There are moments in the history of human thought when a simple realization transforms our understanding of reality. A moment when chaos reveals itself as structure, when disorder folds into meaning, and when what seemed like an arbitrary universe unveils itself as a system governed by hidden symmetries.

The Bekenstein bound was one such revelation—an idea that whispered to us that entropy, information and gravity are not separate but rather deeply intertwined aspects of the cosmos. Jacob Bekenstein, in one of the most profound insights of modern physics, proposed that the entropy of any physical system is not limitless; it is constrained by its energy and the smallest sphere that can enclose it.

This revelation was radical: Entropy—long regarded as an abstract measure of disorder—was, in fact, a quantity deeply bound to the fabric of space and time. His bound, expressed in its simplest form, suggested that the total information that could be stored in a region of space was proportional to its energy and its size.

In the years that followed, attempts were made to generalize this bound and to frame it in a more universal language. Raphael Bousso, in an elegant reformulation, argued that the entropy bound should be directly linked to the enclosing sphere's area rather than the energy. He arrived at this by invoking the gravitational stability condition, which ensures that the Schwarzschild radius of a system does not exceed the enclosing sphere's radius.

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