ELI5-What is entropy?
In: 1763
Brian Cox did a good explanation on one of his shows.
“While left to the elements, mortar crumbles, glass shatters and buildings collapse. A good way to understand how is to think of objects not as single things, but as being made of many constituent parts like the individual grains of sand that make up a pile of sand.
Entropy is a measure of how many ways I can rearrange those grains and still keep the sand pile the same. There are trillions and trillions of ways of doing that. Pretty much anything I do to this sand pile, mess the sand around, move it around, then it doesn’t change the shape or the structure at all. So this sand pile has high entropy.
But creating order in the universe, (using the sand, in a bucket, making a sand castle), there approximately the same amount of sand grains in the castle as there are in the sand pile. But now virtually anything I do to it will mess it up, will remove the order from this structure. Because of that, the sand castle has a low entropy. It is a much more ordered state.”
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