eli5 – Basic Thermodynamics : The universe tends towards chaos and disorder

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How is disorder/chaos in the universe caused?

In: Planetary Science

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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