You might’ve heard an explanation that goes like this: whenever you drop an egg, or melt an ice cube, or shatter a wine glass, you’ve increased the entropy of the world. But when we get to large collections of atoms, a one-way street emerges for the direction in which events take place. The atomic world is a two-way street.Īnd yet, for some reason, when we get to large collections of atoms, a one-way street emerges for the direction in which events take place, even though this wasn’t present at the microscopic level. At the level of microscopic particles, nature doesn’t have a preference for doing things in one direction versus doing them in reverse. So there’s a deep mystery lurking behind our seemingly simple ice-melting puzzle. The movement of every atom in this time-reversed egg would still be perfectly consistent with the laws of physics. The pieces of the egg could theoretically start on the floor, hurtle towards each other, reforming into an egg as it lifts off the ground, travel up through the air, and arrive gently in your hand. Every atomic motion taking place in this messy event could have happened in reverse. So why is the first gif an everyday occurrence, while the reverse one impossible? The movements of the atoms and molecules in the first gif are every bit as ‘legal’ (in the court of physical law) as those in the second gif. If you could film the motion of any particle, and then play that film back in reverse, what you’d see would still be perfectly consistent with the laws of physics. Imagine you could zoom in and see the atoms and molecules in a melting cube of ice. Ice melts on a warm day, but a glass of water left out will never morph into neatly-stacked cubes of ice.īut here’s the weird thing. But something about it immediately seems off. The second gif is just the first one played in reverse. Entropy Explained, With Sheep From Melting Ice Cubes to a Mystery About Time By Aatish Bhatia
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