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

This concept is called “entropy” by people who study physics, and your example of mixing ingredients is actually a classic example used to describe the concept.

It takes more energy to move from something that is chaotic and disordered to something that is organized or “ordered”. It takes a few stirs to shuffle your ingredients together, but to return them back to being all on one side you’d have to pick through each individual piece and carefully move them from one side to the other.

Another way to look at this is that there are only a few combinations of locations of the parts that are an ‘ordered’ arrangement (all the broccoli on one side, all the carrot on the other), and comparatively huge number of combinations of locations of the parts where they aren’t. So, if you pick a random combination of all the part locations in the pan, there is a much higher chance of it being mixed together.

If one ingredient is heavier than another, then if left alone the heavier one will settle to the bottom, because there is a force (gravity) acting on different masses.

Anonymous 0 Comments

This concept is called “entropy” by people who study physics, and your example of mixing ingredients is actually a classic example used to describe the concept.

It takes more energy to move from something that is chaotic and disordered to something that is organized or “ordered”. It takes a few stirs to shuffle your ingredients together, but to return them back to being all on one side you’d have to pick through each individual piece and carefully move them from one side to the other.

Another way to look at this is that there are only a few combinations of locations of the parts that are an ‘ordered’ arrangement (all the broccoli on one side, all the carrot on the other), and comparatively huge number of combinations of locations of the parts where they aren’t. So, if you pick a random combination of all the part locations in the pan, there is a much higher chance of it being mixed together.

If one ingredient is heavier than another, then if left alone the heavier one will settle to the bottom, because there is a force (gravity) acting on different masses.