Don't forget two things: Life can hold back entropy, but - only locally. All life gets its energy from the sun. It must be included in the system. - only temporarily. The tree will die, and its components will be dispersed. The energy that is has absorbed from the sun will be redistributed as decay products that have less available energy than the original sunlight.
You cannot isolate a single element of a system and then speak meaningfully of its entropy. Increasing entropy is only meaningful in terms of closed systems (i.e. you must include all elements involved).
You could say that, but you'd be categorically wrong: trees don't produce anything in an ordered fractal: nothing does.
I think perhaps you don't understand thermodynamics or entropy or chaos theory very well. If you'd like me to explain anything in posts 3 or 5, let me know.
For a start you are muddling up respiration with photosynthesis. A tree's respiration produces CO2 and water, from glucose and oxygen, just as yours and mine does. Photosynthesis (which produces oxygen) has a different input: sunlight. This is a low entropy form of energy (because it consists of photons from the surface of the sun at >5000K: remember S=Q/T, so high temperature energy has low entropy). So the entropy balance for photosynthesis is a different thing. Respiration releases low temperature (i.e. high entropy) heat to the environment, as well as small molecules which tend to have higher entropy than large ones, per atom. Both processes proceeds with an increase of overall entropy. (I am now wondering if you are some sort of closet creationist. You seem determined to find a cause for everything and now start to question the entropy change in the growth of living things.)
Branches and leaves? Note, I am not demonstrating any fractally ordered oxygen production, which is wholly dependent on exposure to light. In fact energy production is facilitated by "quorum sensing" .
Like every other living thing it is not 100% efficient at converting energy which means trees increase the entropy of the universe.
(Sorry I wasn't clear enough for you. I was assuming Willem was using the word "fractal" with the mainstream definition, and not some custom Write4U-defined version of it.)
Energy is decreased over time. That's entropy. It applies to trees and universes and any closed system.
Energy remains the same Disorder increases Eventually the total Universe will be so disordered and energy so thinly spread, so to speak, it will not be able to organise any form of order Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Agree Eventually Universe will be a uniform temperature so, as I understand such a situation, with no variation, no flow can occur, equals no work able to be performed. Question. With matter down to atom size and, extrapolation from current observations, traveling close to light speed, would a accidental collision with another atom set off a "spark" which, surrounded by a level uniform temperature, send out ripples igniting another atoms to become another explosions becoming another Galaxies? Welcome to Michael345 Cosmology Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Entropy change is energy change divided by temperature: ΔS=ΔQ/T . In effect, low temperature heat has more entropy than the same amount of high temperature heat. What runs down is not the amount of heat, necessarily, but its temperature.
Whoa, good call exchemist! I did not see that coming I thought he was just a regular nutter not a fundy driven nutter.
I can confirm this. In another thread Willem made the argument that having a "causation agent" in an argument automatically lends it credence: http://sciforums.com/threads/erroneous-formula.161756/page-6#post-3572279
