RD Thought Experement (wikiversity article)

[dmtr]

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Dc987#Reasonable_Deviations_Thought_Experiment"

Can somebody point out the fallacy of this thought experiment?

-- Dmtr

 

[dmtr]

Not even wrong?

-- Dmtr.
^{// 124F2501. You've just been split.}

 

[xepma]

First of all:
The path of a photon is not dictated because of some "law of increasing entropy". It's the other way around -- increasing entropy follows from (the statistical averaging of) the dynamics of the photon and the rest of the system (or any other system under consideration). You cannot say that a photon _has_ to choose a path or else the entropy doesn't increase. It simply doesn't work that way.

Second:
Why on Earth would the path of a photon depend on the state /system/ ... of the endpoint of one both paths? Not even wrong indeed.

As for the experiment: the photon choosing the upper path will cause a larger increase in entropy than the lower one. So what? Both paths still cause an increasing entropy, although the lower one causes less. But there is no law of "this event causes more entropy gain, therefore it has to happen more often".

So the only logical conclusion here is that, with the time flow, all the photons would chose the path A.

A statement like that just shows you want your answer and reasoning to be true, while you present hardly any proof to support such a "logical statement".