How is disorder/chaos in the universe caused?
In: Planetary Science
It isn’t necessarily caused. Entropy is a central law. It HAS to happen that way or else things DON’T happen. This is easier to conceptualize when considering the following thought experiment:
You are trying to cool down hot chocolate/tea/any hot beverage of your choosing with an ice cube. You put the ice cube in the drink. There are a multitude of different ways energy can be conserved. How about the following?
The ice cube gives thermal energy to the drink and the cube gets colder and the drink gets hotter.
That makes no sense right? But it DOES conserve energy. It’s theoretically possible. However, the odds of it happening are essentially zero. That’s because that scenario would be highly entropically unfavorable. The entropy of the universe increases most by the system moving to thermal equilibrium, melting the ice and cooling the beverage. This is not a definition of entropy per se, but it’s an easy thought experiment for a process that generates entropy. The ice is more rigid, so moving the entire system to a liquid generates entropy because there’s more ability for the molecules to move around. So the amount of disorder in the universe increases slightly
You can’t get something for nothing, or you can’t create something from nothing, you can only change things from one form to another and can only ever get nearly equal or less than what you put in. Tending towards chaos is not a way to consider energy and useful work.
The best explanation I’ve heard is based on particles and statistical mechanics. Imagine you have a bunch of particles in a box. They all move around randomly, bumping into each other and flying around in totally random brownian motion. Now, think about all the ways these particles could be arranged in an orderly fashion. It’s a lot. But consider all the ways the particles could be arranged in *disorder,* and its orders and orders of magnitude more ways.
The particles move randomly. They could arrange themselves in *any* possible combination, totally spontaneously. They could all fly into one corner, or arrange themselves in perfect hexagons, or a perfect picture of Elvis Presley. But the number of disordered, random states is so much more vast than ordered states, that it’s a near-guarantee that after enough time, no matter how they started, the particles will end up in disorder. Your room will get messy, because there are more “messy” states than “clean” states. Your headphones will get tangled, because there are more “tangled” configurations than “untangled.”
Now apply this to the whole universe. The universe started perfectly orderly, with everything packed together into a tiny, singular point. Then it exploded, and it has been tending towards disorder ever since. There are eddies and turbulence, patches of order and patterns as energy swirls and flows from one place to another, but ultimately, inevitably, everything tends towards maximum disorder. That is the Heat Death of the universe, when all the energy is spread out and expended, entropy is at maximum, there is no order and all is dust and formless chaos, and nothing ever happens ever again.
What you are talking about is entropy. Using words like chaos and disorder is not a very good way to look at it, although for some reason people use these words all the time to explain it.
In thermodynamics there is a law that the entropy of a closed system will always go up. It is a fundamental law of nature and there’s no way to get around it.
One way of viewing entropy is a difference in energy density, if you have a system of 2 bodies, one is hot and one is cold. This is a low entropy system because you have a high energy difference. As time goes on you know from experience that the two bodies will even out in temperature, this means that entropy is increasing. Imagine the opposite, a cup of coffee taking energy from the air and start boiling out of nowhere. This would be a decrease in entropy and it just doesn’t happen. It is impossible.
Some like to view it as statics, and that’s also totally valid, say the energy of the system becomes more and more random as time goes on, there are an infinite more situations where the energy is spread out, versus a very few situations where all energy is stored locally.
Think of it this way. There are more ways for the universe to be disordered than it is to be ordered.
Imagine asking a group of people to stand in a line. There are 2 arrangements that might be considered ordered:
1. lined up shortest to tallest, or
2. lined up tallest to shortest.
There are MANY others ways to be lined up NOT in order.
Disorder is just much more likely.
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