Like why planet? Why sphere? Why is there a solar system? Why system instead of no system? How did entropy create anti-entropy agents? Bees, humans, anything that builds non-random structures?
Sorry if this is a bad question, it just popped into my head and it won’t go away.
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Two things to explain:
1) Entropy is the measure of *usable* energy in a system. You can think of it like the energy contained in unspent fuel, or the heat difference that powers a thermocouple. It’s also irreversible–like you can put a hot brick and a cold brick against a cold brick, and the heat will flow from hot to cold until the heat balances out, but you can’t put two room-temperature bricks together and get one to steal all the heat from the other.
2) You can see structure in just about *any* flow of energy. Look at setting a pot of water on a stove: as the hotter water rises, cooler water sinks, and you end up with patterns of rising and falling currents. Patterns from chaos…but in the end, it’s just the water trying to balance hot and cold.
Now scale that up. As far as we can tell, the entire visible universe started off by expanding outward with so much heat and energy that even atoms didn’t exist. We’re in a universe-sized “pot of boiling water”: until all the energy balances out, we’re in for a *whole bunch* of patterns out of chaos.
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