Yes, entropy I observe, as a burning candle not ever being unburned and so forth, but what about all the living things we see on our planet? It is surely a more structured form of matter than before, and although I have heard explanations I haven’t grasped the explanation of how in spite of the apparent structuring, entropy still increases.
In: Physics
Consider something like an air conditioner.
It takes heat and moves it against the gradient of temperature. Heat wants to flow from hot to cold, but we have somehow made a device that causes heat to flow from cold to hot.
The thing is, it takes energy to make this happen. That’s why you gotta have it plugged into the wall. That energy when used ends up being released as excess heat.
Much like the burnt candle, that excess heat energy cannot be used to perform other actions, or if it can, it can not do so to the extent the original energy was. Heat energy is less usable to us than is the electrical energy it started as.
If the surroundings get too hot, then the heat will have nowhere to go, and will continue to build up. This is what causes overheating, our system is unable to get rid of the excess heat that it creates as a byproduct of doing *work*.
That idea that we can overheat and be unable to perform work *even though* there is still energy in all of that heat, is the main idea of entropy. There is still energy, its just in a state which we cannot make use of that energy.
A low entropy structure is one that you can use to perform a lot of work. Gasoline is low entropy. We can extract a lot of work out of it. Your burnt candle is high entropy – there’s really not much work we can get out of it.
All of us living things are entropy creating beings. We are high complexity, low entropy beings, sustained by creating more than equal amounts of high entropy around us. We consume low entropy food and excrete high entropy waste, and use the difference in those two in order to maintain our low entropy state.
So on the global scale, entropy is always increasing. However locally, you can cause an apparent decrease in entropy in one object by causing an equal to or greater than amount of entropy in another object.
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