🧵 Heat Death Doomerism

Anonymous at Mon, 13 May 2024 03:21:59 UTC No. 16173252

Tell me if I've got this correct /sci/. Some who say that the heat death won't really be the end point of quantum fluctuations and say that means things will continue, maybe even spawning new life eventually.

To prove quantum fluctuations, they make a vague gesture at (more often "talk about a YouTube video by some guy who heard something from somebody about) the formula for a quantum oscillator.

...But as the heat death approaches, the energy to oscillate even at the quantum level will dissipate as well.

So isn't this circular reasoning that amounts to "if oscillators exist then the energy for oscillation exists", when the entire point is that the energy for oscillation is going to go away?

I want to make sure I'm not misunderstanding this since this is an easy area to misunderstand. (See: the number of people who think virtual particles are "particles with the property of being virtual", even those who really should know better.)