Entropy: Why Life Always Seems to Get More Complicated | Hacker News Reader

Entropy: Why Life Always Seems to Get More Complicated

jamesclear.com

Why is this place always a mess?

I can’t help it, it’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics!

There are rules in the world. I describe it this way: scatter a bunch of small magnets in a pizza box. Close the lid. Shake it (add energy). Open it. What do you see?

Why, the magnets all lined up in stacks! What divine hand must have been at work to create order out of chaos...

Particles, molecules, organic chemistry - thousands of rules. Add energy, and they do amazing things.

I'd hesitate to call it a divine hand, but there was the pizza-greased paw that decided to pop some magnets in a box and then give them a shake.

If you're going to argue against intelligent design, it's probably best done without a designed experiment :-)

The hand is irrelevant here from a design perspective. The hand crafted a closed system (pizza box) which is analogous to any real closed system (ie. an ocean) and added random energy to it. The result is a perfect stack every time, not due to design but structural determinism.

Reminded me of Steve Mould's explanation of Entropy (using the example of a Sterling Engine). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2iTCm0xpDc

Nitpick: Entropy is not a force, especially not fundamental force.

Not in a literal physical sense. The word is used in a more general sense of "propensity", "tendency".

Consider, while all in the universe tends towards higher entropy - more chaos, less structure, less energy differential - life and other forms of structure (planets, planetary systems, star systems, galaxies, galaxy clusters and super clusters) exist and persist.

Parts of nature conspire to create and maintain structures and organization, fighting against entropy.

I like the concept of the chemical potential from statistical mechanics.

The thermal potential (also due to entropy) causes temperature to spread outwards, hot to cold. This can be seen by solving the heat equation.

The chemical potential is that if you have a bunch of “stuff” (particles molecules etc) in one place, they will tend to spread out in space to maximize the entropy.

There’s no force or impulse making it happen, it’s just that you are far more likely to observe a system with “stuff” spread out than concentrated.

That’s why I love entropy. It’s not a force or even something super tangible. It’s more like the interface between the physical world and the abstract world of probabilities. The realest abstraction of them all.

> There is only one combination of sand particles that looks like your sand castle

This is very wrong. Each grain of sand is interchangeable for a start, and you can change the sandcastle in an infinite number of ways that would be imperceptible to an onlooker. Same with the puzzle example.

Time only exists because of the change in entropy. Interesting summary https://blog.12min.com/the-order-of-time-pdf-summary/

Every time i hear "Second Law of Thermodynamics" i think about crystals, carbon, water, plants, animals, and that systems always seem to want balance

Space = gravity, time = entropy ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com