Platinum Standard

Platinum Ore

When I put together the most recent reddit Gallery for this blog, I looked at the platinum ore pictured and wondered how nature can aggregate oodles the platinum atoms in one place? Common sense suggests that the randomness at the start of things would create and/or distribute element atoms in a rather random and unspecific way ... an example of entropy. However, some natural forces such as gravity and magnetism did help to arrange certain elements, like iron, cobalt, nickel and the lighter gasses, together. But platinum? What subtle natural process gathered untold numbers of platinum atoms together to form the lump of ore pictured?

For the sake of argument let's assume that, during the Earth's formation, 37 of every 100,000 atoms were platinum atoms ...  see: Periodic Table Facts. What conceivable process could cause them to find each other to form the metal contained in an ore? Certainly when the Earth's crust was molten, over a billion years ago, there was a possibility of platinum atoms migrating towards one anther.  But how? Are there factors in the weak or strong atomic forces in physics that cause like atoms to seek out their likes in liquids or gasses? If there are, then nature has once again served mankind with a gratuitous benefit. Otherwise, we never could assemble enough disparate atoms of almost any element to utilize them the way we so effectively do today.

Just one more example of entropy not living up to its ballyhooed threat reputation.

Entropy

I am taking a sidetrack today and dipping into one of my other blogs ... Junkier Science ... to present another take on science.  I hope you enjoy it.

Many scientists predict that the universe will eventually wind down into a permanent state of entropy. That is, all forms of energy (or activity) will have decentralized themselves and all semblance of cosmic (and maybe even atomic) order will have disappeared. A scientific internet website’s definition of entropy is: “Energy spontaneously disperses from being localized to becoming spread out if it is not hindered from doing so.” (Remember, energy doesn’t really disappear. There is still the thermodynamic law that states that all energy is preserved either in its kinetic form, its potential form, or as electromagnetic radiation.)

Therefore entropy is a complete state of chaos where electromagnetic radiation and energy still exist but are so dispersed as to be effectively non-existent at a singular point. Eventually (billions and billions of years hence), all suns will have burned out … all planetary motion will have ceased … and all knowledge will have been lost. Thus, the antonym for entropy could be (and often is) stated as “organized information”. But, I have a somewhat different take on entropy’s antonym -- I think it is “evolution”. If entropy is the ultimate winding down of information … then evolution is the spontaneous winding up of order … encoded into the billions of DNA chemical pairs of millions of species on this earth (and perhaps on millions of other earth-like planets.) This is complimented by the quadrillions of bytes of information that is stored in our printed and electronic libraries – all enabled by the information encoded in the DNA of humans.

This makes evolution even more unique and, yes, precious – it is a guppy swimming upstream against the tsunami of ever-growing entropy. Thus, there is a race to the death, albeit a multi-billion year race, between physical entropy and biological evolution. I have no idea which one will win this race, but I suspect that our eventual fate is not as predetermined as many today predict.