Comment Re:Hey, maybe Stephen Hawking was right! (Score 1) 2
You might have missed my previous post, I agree and want to add that to me it is even a bit more than that.
There is a complex interaction when you see a milk jug full of water hit by a bullet, or see the flow of plasma on the sun twisted by gravity and magnetic fields, or the plasma of the big bang as the expansion of the universe pulls it apart.
But they can be summed up as a expanding force vs a force of cohesion in all of them. Gravity is a force of cohesion on a cosmic scale, but so is magnetism. And at the great inflation, the lingering cosmic filaments of stars and galaxies look very similar to the water spreading from a hit from bullet where the cohesion is from more molecular forces.
If there was a "then a miracle occurs" part of cosmology that still existed, it would be the dark energy that continues to accelerate the expansion of the universe.
But it has one other side effect that isn't spoken of much -- creating clean entropy. How did we go from a homogeneous plasma at the big bang to such different hot/cold regions in the universe? Expansion, which has a similar effect on condensing gasses into liquids and even freezing them into solids. Only in this case some of that condensation ignites and creates the starts, pinpoints of very clean entropy to power whole solar systems. Expansion is what winds the clock of entropy, creating the differentials that then re-mix and make work happen.
So I completely agree, and if you ask me the story of creating entropy differentials for the universe to do work is the "then a miracle occurs" part of the story that still remains.