Entropy

Entropy | Exploring entropy

Entropy! Entropy! Entropy! What is entropy?
Let's break it out with BringMeKnowledge. Let's take an easy example, if you place a hot bowl of soup on the dining table, the soup will eventually cool down to room temperature. The concentrated, ordered heat within the bowl will eventually spread out into a more disordered state where the heat has spread throughout the room. This happens, as Ludwig Boltzmann enabled us to understand, because of the building blocks of matter that we call atoms. The more heat within the atoms, the faster they move. They then share this energy with their surroundings, transferring it from the soup to the dish to the table, and throughout the rest of the room. And while it is possible for a hot object to spontaneously grow hotter, the chances of this happening are so small that it’s never been observed. This is where the statistical nature of entropy comes into play — higher entropy is the most likely outcome for a system. Higher entropy means higher disorder because disorder has a higher chance of occurring.

Energy is much more likely to be disordered and evenly distributed within a system than it is for it to be concentrated and orderly. Once this energy has been dispersed, the process cannot be reversed (the soup will not once again heat up unless an outside force acts upon it). This is the law that permeates the entire universe. All things with heat and energy are interconnected and this heat and energy will continue to disperse throughout the system that is space. This is why time cannot go backwards. In order for time to go backwards, entropy would have to decrease. In this way, the flow of time which is usually irrelevant in laws of motion becomes much more rigid and less malleable than we’d perhaps hope.