In truest ELI5 fashion “Because we haven’t had enough time to get rid of everything.”.
In slightly more sensible reasoning, because on its way towards eventually having nothing in it, there’s nothing that prevents localized order from arising because on a large enough viewpoint order decayed further.
One way to put it is a freezer. Inside you can lose/halt/etc entropy by dropping the temperature and freezing everything. However this was achieved by basically moving that entropy somewhere else, the heat that radiates out the back of your freezer. Furthermore, because a system can never be perfectly 100% efficient (or ‘worse’ a system can never be MORE than 100% efficient) the act of locally reducing entropy actually increases entropy overall. Terrible example: Your freezer might make a given volume cooler by 1 degree, but when it does that it makes a similar volume hotter by 1.1 degrees.
In reality it’s a lot more complex then that, but overall the universe and it’s gradual march towards entropy doesn’t really care that any given location might be reversing its effects because the overall entropy level is always increasing and the act of reversing entropy in one location ALWAYS increases entropy in another, and effectively always increases the total entropy more than if nothing had happened at all.
Latest Answers