Reply #208: Complexity is just a word with no scientific meaning. [View All]

[jwcomer]

The degrees of freedom of a star is a truly stupefying number. Put another way, the star has an enormous entropy. What you are trying to say is that from a macroscopic perspective the system may be reduced to a relatively benign system of equations of state in equilibrium set by statistical mechanics. From a macroscopic perspective, the system is relatively un-complex. But this is because we have removed an enormous sum of approximately redundant degrees of freedom and considered them equivalent and thus irrelevant. If the sun actually had very few degrees of freedom, then it would have very little entropy, and would have very little thermal temperature, and we would be frozen solid. That we are not frozen solid is evidence enough to show that the sun is quite complex.