TIL: ELI5

The Second Law of Thermodynamics and Entropy


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The Second Law of Thermodynamics is one of the fundamental laws that govern our universe. But it comes with a complicated little twist, something called 'entropy'. Don't worry, though–I promise to pat it down into bite-sized pieces.

Let’s think of a kid's bedroom. When it's clean and everything's in its place, we could say it's 'ordered'. But give the kid some playtime in there, and soon enough, toys will be everywhere. The room gets messy, or in other words, becomes 'disordered'.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is kind of like that stuffy room. It suggests that in the universe, things tend to flow from an ordered state to a disordered one – from tidiness to messiness. This law is everywhere around us, from the cooling of a hot cup of coffee to why your car won’t start on a freezing morning.
Now, what about this 'entropy' business? Entropy is just a fancy science word for disorder or randomness. It measures how mixed up things get. Take an egg, for example. It's pretty ordered when it’s in the shell. But once you crack it and scramble it, it becomes disordered. We say it has higher entropy.
So, how do these relate? The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in an isolated system (think of our universe), entropy can only stay the same or increase over time – it never reduces. This is why a scrambled egg can't un-scramble itself back into a whole egg in the shell, or why time only moves forward and we age, not backwards.
As a conclusion, the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the concept of entropy together point towards an intriguing tendency of our universe. Just like a room that tends to get messy over time, our universe moves from ordered states to disordered ones - increasing entropy. As much as we might like things to be tidy and structured, nature seems to prefer a bit of a mess!

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TIL: ELI5By TIL