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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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.
MC Hawking taught me that Entropy only thrives in closed systems, but Earth, the solar system, and the universe are open systems, so that’s why everything hasn’t decayed away. 😀
When you first pour milk in your coffee it is in a state of low entropy. If you leave it sit long enough it will eventually mix evenly and be in a state of high entropy. However, in between these two states there are lots of eddies and swirls; there is lots of complexity.
Planets, solar systems, bees, humans etc are the “eddies and swirls” of the universe going from a low entropy state to a high one.
This might help too: [https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/11/03/entropy-and-complexity-cause-and-effect-life-and-time/](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/11/03/entropy-and-complexity-cause-and-effect-life-and-time/)
(The above is adapted from my understanding of Sean Carroll’s explanation I heard at some point.)
The big bang said fuck you to physics and created a very low-entropy universe with shitloads of energy, which we don’t know where it got it from. The entropy of the universe has been steadily increasing since then, but stars have so much energy that they can continually decrease the local entropy of orbiting planets by giving them energy for billions of years.
Physics of low entropy systems probably get you to solar system and planets. The bit about life is interesting. I recommend you to watch this video by Jeremy England. If I remember correctly, it’s also part of the background of Dan Brown’s Origin book.
only answer I can think of is because stars are born somehow
There are stars, they give off energy, eventually that energy runs out until the energy that exists is equally spread out. Takes a while for stars to burn out, and then for some reason there are new ones
Things are tending towards entropy which is a spread of energy equally.
The idea that entropy is chaos isn’t a physics thing, there’s 2 things people mean when they talk about entropy and you’re confusing the two. Humans and bee’s aren’t really creating order, they are slowing disorder, if that makes sense?
Can’t remember where I saw it, but there was a study once of someone trying to create life in a lab using what they believed to be all the essential minerals, conditions, etc. for anything to have sparked into creation. At the end of the day, they were not able to artificially create life, but one of the scientists arrived at the hypothesis that maybe it was because they were going about it all wrong.
They were trying to bring life / order out of disorder, but, in the grand scheme of things, life is one of the most destructive forces around. For as much as we build, we also destroy and consume. That scientist’s experiment failed because his parameters are wrong – life, and humans in particular, are actually the fastest way toward entropy and disorder.
It is a problem that is really one of the biggest mysteries in science. Best possible answer in short is To take first into account 2 things. Space is expanding and gravity. Besides, there is a tendancy of systems To become dissipative structures of entropy. In a way, things gather To create entropy Faster than let alone slowly. For example, a gaz cloud contracting heats up, and stars are great dissipative structures
There are a lot of people who take this question and answer it by pointing to God.
/u/AAVale likely has the best answer you can get, since in the end its impossible to know how we started with any energy at all. There’s a hypothesis out there called the Big Crunch iirc, which tries to give existence a cyclical framing by saying that the universe will eventually stop expanding and begin to contract, bringing everything together for another Big Bang. But really its all speculation, all stories meant to give some kind of answer to something ultimately unknowable.
Localized lowered states of entropy still increase the entropy of the entire system because it takes energy to maintain order.
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