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Originally Posted by Gerbil94
You might also encounter variants on "static state" cosmologies, where no expansion takes place, and yet the universe is infinitely old (i.e. where the perfect cosmological principle is still held to apply). That model really does have an entropy problem; you can't resort to continous creation because then the average density of the universe would increase (even ignoring gravitational effects), and break the perfect cosmological principle. But without it, you're stuck with an infinitely old closed system, without an external source of low entropy energy. We should be dead in this model.
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Here is where the problem of closed versus open gets confusing to me. Even if the cosmos is closed, in the thermodynamic sense, what if it is infinite in space? Doesn't that mean that there would be an infinite amount of energy? Which would mean that entropy could never wind things down. What I'm a bit unsure of, because of the infinity, is whether entropy would work, making things ever closer to complete entropy but never reaching it, or whether the size being infinite would prevent entropy from even making a dent at all.
Also, with regard to the creation of matter, there is also the possibility I guess of recycling, where matter created somewhere is compensated by a destruction somewhere else.