I was trying to explain this to my sister – or at least, the concept that everything is finite (we have *very* strange conversations), but I cannot explain it to save my life. What’s a good way of explaining entropy and the basics of thermodynamics to a layperson?
In: Physics
Imagine a bathtub. You fill it with hot water, it slowly cools down as heat radiates into the environment where it’s not as hot. The water becomes cold, then if left long enough the water evaporates into gas, given enough time that gas loses it’s internal heat on the atomic level, the energy holding individual bonds of H2O gas “cool off” and molecules break apart, then individual hydrogen atoms do the same thing, electrons lose their own “heat” and slowly stop moving. Basically this happens to all things in the universe on an insanely long timescale. There’s tons of simplification here, but it’s sort of an abstract way of how it works.
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