"But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
- Arthur Eddington
Another great quote:
"A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression that classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown, within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts."
The second law will always be true in any universe that shares your concept of time, because your concept of evolution is essentially just an interpretation of the thermodynamic temporal arrow in a somewhat tautological fashion.
If you had to simulate such a universe in a computer program, how would you do it? What would it look like?
Perhaps instead of Brownian motion you'd have something more directed. Scientists inhabiting the universe would observe a "force" that brings elements of like kind together into nice orderly structures instead of random soups. It would be as if time ran in reverse. Perhaps instead of a big bang, the initial state would be a flat universe with just the minutest of perturbations in the energy gradient that would gradually evolve into a state of maximum order.
Once you take into account the force, you will still have the second law. Or you are just looking at the universe in reverse and once you look at the arrow of time it's all normal again.
In order for it to be useful/predictive, you need the microscopic dynamics to preserve phase-space area, which is actually pretty special. I think you're also going to need something like ergodicity for "generic" systems.
- Arthur Eddington
Another great quote:
"A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression that classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown, within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts."
- Albert Einstein