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
Latest Answers