ELI5-What is entropy?
In: 1763
Theres a handful of ways your room can be organized, but there are a ton of ways it can be messy.
So naturally your room will, over time, become messy. That‘s entropy. Nature‘s tendency for things to become messy.
The reason is actually pretty simple: if theres 1 way to be orderly and 99 ways to be messy then of course it‘s more likely to be messy.
I‘ve seen a lot of talk in the comments about energetic states so I wanna expand on that too.
– imagine an empty room with a chunk of coal on it. This room is organized; most of its energy is concentrated in a small part
– as you burn the coal you release its energy into the room. Once everything is burnt out you have a room filled with CO2. This room is messier, its energy is spread out.
– the room as a whole was never in a higher or lower energetic state. Its energy never increased or decreased. The only thing that changed is its entropy; the way the energy is distributed.
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