How is disorder/chaos in the universe caused?
In: Planetary Science
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.
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