Reverse Entropy

[USS Triumphant]

I'm working on a short story and I need a science question answered: Suppose aliens showed up one day and, for whatever reason (it's a weapon, it makes the area more comfortable for them, whatever) they surround the Earth - let's say out to a radius of just past the Moon - with a sphere of devices that when they activate them, they flip all entropy to anti-entropy inside the sphere.

What would be the effect? What would happen first, second, etc.? I know the question is presented as sci-fi, but I'm mainly interested right now in the hard science of what would happen.

 

[Kemaiku]

The closest thing would likey be the anti-time anomaly in All Good Things.

Or given that entropy is the tendency for matter to try to occupy the lowest, most stable energy state over time, suddenly reversing the basic law on entropy would cause all matter to try and raise to higher energy levels/greater chaotic behaviour.

Mainly, nothing good, or survivable.

 

[USS Triumphant]

The closest thing would likey be the anti-time anomaly in All Good Things.

Or given that entropy is the tendency for matter to try to occupy the lowest, most stable energy state over time, suddenly reversing the basic law on entropy would cause all matter to try and raise to higher energy levels/greater chaotic behaviour.

Mainly, nothing good, or survivable.

Alright. But I'm looking for a timeline of sorts for actual effects. Would the oceans boil away, the moon go careening out of orbit, the crust begin to melt into the mantle, etc and so forth? And which first? Second? ...

 

[Lindley]

I don't have any idea about order, but one of the things that would happen is the hydrophobic effect would stop working....meaning that every cell membrane in every living creature on the planet would dissolve.

 

[USS Triumphant]

I don't have any idea about order, but one of the things that would happen is the hydrophobic effect would stop working....meaning that every cell membrane in every living creature on the planet would dissolve.

This is still very much more along the lines of the sort of effects I'm looking for. Thanks. Keep 'em coming, everyone.

 

[Dryson]

Wouldn't employing reverse entropy cause the Earth to explode? Or am I thinking of something different?

 

[USS Triumphant]

Wouldn't employing reverse entropy cause the Earth to explode? Or am I thinking of something different?

Why would it? (I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong. I'm just looking for the actual mechanism that would lead from reversed entropy to the planet flying apart.)

 

[Kemaiku]

It depends how it would affect electrostatic interactions, photon interactions, gravitational fields, magentic fields etc

I'm not sure how it would work with everything being anti-thermodynamic, following a reverse entropic path. If the basic concept of time moved forwards with regards to human perception but all light matter began to undo itself or something like that.

But life would suffer fastest, no one would be alive to observe the effects after that. But I do wonder now what a solar system de-aging by anti-entropy would look like.

Would nuclear fusion simply stop if the nulcei no longer fused to form larger more stable ones, or would they fiss into their smaller elements again, causing a fission star temporarily until the interaction collapsed it, or would gravity work in reverse too?

My head hurts now.

 

[Lindley]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_force

 

[intrinsical]

The problem I'm having is that entropy is a measurable parameter, a number that describes how chaotic (stable or unstable) a system is. Entropy isn't one of the four fundamental forces in Physics. There are no subatomic particles, whether empirically observed or purely theoretical constructs, that creates entropy.

Thus, there is no "anti-entropy" particle that increases entropy. If you want to increase a system's entropy, you simply have to add energy to the system. For example, applying heat to a kettle of water essentially adds energy to the water molecules, causing them to go from a low entropy state of liquid water to a high entropy state of gaseous water vapor.

So I would imagine an "anti-entropy" device would simply be one that simply adds energy randomly to everything nearby using all possible means. ie, it randomly creates electromagnetic fields, changes gravity, emits radiation. It would also do weird things using strong force and weak force (I'm not a physicist, so I don't know how or what sort of effects that would create).