heat death
Noun
Meaning
heat death (countable and uncountable, plural heat deaths)
(physics) The state of a thermodynamic system having reached a maximum entropy; temperature is uniform throughout, and no energy is available to do work.
Examples
According to Reed Richards, the ultimate fate of the Multiverse is to perish in an all-encompassing heat death.
It has been speculated, since the 19th century, that the universe is fated to a heat death in which all the energy ends up as a homogeneous distribution of thermal energy, so that no more work can be extracted from any source.
Hermann von Helmholtz puts forward the idea of the heat death of the universe in 1854, the same year that Clausius established the importance of dQ/T ( Clausius's theorem ) (though he did not yet name the quantity).
Recent work has cast some doubt on the heat death hypothesis and the applicability of any simple thermodynamic model to the universe in general.
Sharlin (1979) p.169 He contended that the laws of thermodynamics operated from the birth of the universe and envisaged a dynamic process that saw the organisation and evolution of the solar system and other structures, followed by a gradual "heat death".
This introduces an instability, a feedback loop that pushes the hidden variables out of "sub-quantal heat death".