Why does randomly mixing something lead to something evenly distributed?

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For example when using a mixer to make soup, the more you randomly shuffle all the ingredients together the more you get a nice mix of all the ingredients, instead of, for example, the parts of the broccoli on the left part of the pan and the parts of the carrot on the right side of the pan at some random moment you measure

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Anonymous 0 Comments

To restate what another commenter said: imagine you are mixing coffee and sugar. Lets pretend all the sugar starts off in one half of the cup. As you mix, any particle of sugar has some chance of moving to the other half, say 50% (number doesn’t matter for final outcome).

At first, sugar can only move to the empty half, or stay in the original half. It is impossible for sugar to travel to the full half because all the sugar is already there.

After some time, let’s say 10% has moved by random chance to the empty half, so 90% is still in the original half. It is possible for sugar to travel back to the original half, but there are 9x as many chances for a bit of sugar to move to the less sugary half, because each sugar piece has the same chance of switching and there is still 9x more in the original half.

In this way, on average there will be a net transfer of sugar to the less sugary half until there is the same amount of sugar in both halves. At this point, on average, the same amount of sugar will leave each half for the other, so the amount in each half will stay the same.

This works the same way if we look at smaller portions of the coffee: more sugar is likely to leave a region than enter if there is more sugar in that region than in its surroundings. It’s the same as saying if you flip a coin 10 times, you will probably get more heads than if you flip a coin 2 times, as long as the coin has the same chance of heads for all flips.

This process is called diffusion.

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