• 0 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 29th, 2023

help-circle








  • Vaquedoso@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzentropy
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    6 months ago

    Think 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.


  • Vaquedoso@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzentropy
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    6 months ago

    It’s not a ‘scary cosmic horror’, it’s not even a force. It’s a principle, a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. In any isolated system, its energy will always strive towards balance, (eg, in a isolated room where one corner is hot and another cold, the temperature eventually will balance in a equilibrium). From this process of homogenization is where we derive the term entropy. Any homogeneous system has high entropy, for instance, as it is the tendency in any system for its components to be uniform. As a descriptor, one can measure in any system its level of entropy.
    In regards to your question, entropy doesn’t have a will of its own, so it wouldn’t have set out to stop the formation of the solar system. But eventually, the solar system WILL reach a state of high entropy, once the sun (the one providing the energy that keeps the solar system going) runs out of fuel and goes supernovae