My brain can’t understand this at all. In an isolated system with cold molecules on one side and hot molecules on the other, I understand how the heat of this system balances with time, but it’s confusing to me that a system with a more evenly distributed temperature has increased randomness when it appears that there’s more order.
This feels like it should be simple, but my brain simply isn’t getting it, no matter how many analogies or examples I read. I’ve got to be missing something very simple, and that’s why it’s so frustrating that I don’t understand it. This is seriously stressing me out.
In: Physics
Stop thinking about entropy as order and disorder, it confuses more than it helps.
Entropy can be described as a difference in energy. High energy differences are low entropy and even energies are high entropy. You need an energy difference to do work and doing that works spreads out the energy to be more even
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