how would heat death at the end of the universe work if energy cant be destroyed or created?

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I learned about the energy only changes form recently and was wondering how heat death in the end of the universe would work because “all energy is lost from the universe”

In: Physics

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Energy can’t be created or destroyed (except for nuclear stuff, but let’s not go there). However, for energy to be useful, we need to be able to move it from one place to another. *And* every time we do this, it needs to go from being clustered together to being spread out. It’s this spreading out that is what happens when we ‘use’ energy.

The idea of the heat death of the universe is that all the energy becomes equally spread out. That means there is no way for any of it to be used because we can’t do any more spreading. So, all *useful* energy has gone.

I should add, you *can* clump energy together. For example, charging a battery. But doing this required spreading out more energy somewhere else, e.g. the power plant that gives your home electricity.

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