I'm in the mood to publicly embarrass myself today so I'm gonna take a stab at the thermodynamic stuff. Hopefully, Sailor and/or Alice can correct me where I'm wrong.
From what I was taught...looooooooooonnnng time ago.
1st Law:
Ultimately says nothing is every destroyed, nothing. Scientists have recognized that things change form, but nothing is ever destroyed. Furthermore, nothing is being created. That which has already been created can be rearranged into other shapes and forms, but nothing is being created. Science knows that. Matter is static in the sense that it's never destroyed and it's never being created. Nothing new and nothing going out of existence (kind of like what the Bible says). Science calls it conservation of mass and energy, right?
2nd Law:
This states that although mass and energy are always conserved, they are also breaking down and going from order to disorder. In other words, while you never destroy matter, and it's never created, it is disintegrating, breaking down. It goes from order to disorder, from cosmos to chaos, from system to non-system. Matter breaks down and as it breaks down its energy dissipates and ultimately the world and the universe as we know it will become dead because of the total breakdown of energy. It'll be unable to reproduce itself and it'll become a dead universe.
This is the opposite of the Theory of Evolution which says that somehow matter is in the process of going upward...it's always improving and it goes from the one celled amoeba to complex man. That's not what science and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says.
You are referring to what is known as the heat death of the universe. Energy would not become dead, it would just approach a state where it is evenly distributed, thereby allowing no work to performed. That is one of the most common views. There are plenty of folks who think differently about that. They are of the mind that entropy cannot be applied to the universe for reasons such as if the universe has never been in equilibrium, how can entropy apply to it?
I like the fact that you took the time to write down what you did.
