Comment on entropy
vaquedoso@lemmy.world 1 month agoThink of a ball pit filled with balls of different colours. After a session of intense playing in it, presumably all the balls will have been mixed up. It’s now in a state of high entropy, where all of the balls are evenly distributed across the pit. But now, what if I wanted to enter the pit and sort the balls by colour? We would then have a corner of blue balls, a corner of red ball, etc. we have invested energy in the system and sorted the balls by colour, they are now ‘ordered’, and in a low entropy state. We know this state won’t last long though, once we get it and play the balls are gonna end up inevitably mixed up once again, the balls are going to end up in a high entropy equilibrium again.
Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com 1 month ago
That analogy makes more sense. Thanks for sticking with me.
I still don’t get the online people who talk about Entropy as if it is some force that dooms things, but I do better understand the basic physics I think. Thanks.
kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
The reason entropy is a “force” that dooms things is that once maximum entropy is achieved, there is no energy differential, and with no energy differential you can’t perform any work, life cannot exist, electricity cannot be generated, etc.
The idea that entropy unstoppably increases predicts that, eventually, all energy will be “spent” and no life can exist - a timer for all sentience in the universe.
Also, launching probes into space doesn’t increase entropy (to be precise, the act of launching probes uses energy with some inefficiency, so it does increase entropy, just not through the fact that a probe is now in space), because pulling matter away from other matter increases potential gravitational energy. Maximum entropy in this sense would be all matter in the universe clumped together into an inert, uniformly mixed… Clump?
Also, I’m not a physicist, so I probably got some things wrong, especially terminology, so take this with a grain of salt.