I donât have an answer to your question Mara, but I have this quote from a popular science TV programme called Order and Disorder that is an interesting aside, and may help those without a science background to answer your question. I hope that it is not out of place.
Boltzmann saw what Clausius could not: The real reason why a hot object left alone will always cool down. Imagine a lump of hot metal. The atoms inside it are jostling around. But as they jostle, the atoms at the edge of the object transfer some of their energy to the atoms in the surface of the table. These atoms then bump into their neighbours, and in this way the heat energy slowly and very naturally spreads out and disperses. The whole system has gone from being in a very special âorderedâ state, with all the energy concentrated in one place, to a disordered state, where the same amount of energy is now distributed amongst many more atoms. Boltzmannâs brilliant mind saw that this whole process could be described mathematically.
âBoltzmannâs great contribution, was that, although we can talk in rather, sort of, casual terms about things getting worse and âdisorder increasesâ. The great contribution of Boltzmann is that he could put numbers to it. And so he was able to derive a formula, which enabled you to calculate the disorder of the system.â
S=klogW ⌠This is Boltzmannâs famous equation. It would be his enduring contribution to science. So much so, that it was engraved on his tombstone in Vienna. What this equation means in essence, is that there are many more ways for things to be messy and disordered than there are for them to be tidied and ordered. That is why, left to itself the universe will always get messier. Things will move from order to disorder. Itâs a law that applies to everything. from a dropped jug to a burning star. A hot cup of tea, to the products we consume every day. All of this is an expression of the universes tendency to move from order to disorder. Disorder is the fate of everything. Clausius had shown that something he called entropy was getting bigger all the time. Now Boltzmann had revealed what this really meant. Entropy, was in fact a measure of the disorder of things.
âEnergy is crumbling away, itâs crumbling away now, as we speak. So the 2nd law is about entropy increasing. Which is just a technical way of saying âthings get worseâ.â
In the end, there is no escaping entropy. Itâs the ultimate move from order to decay and disorder that rules us all. Boltzmannâs equation contains within it, the mortality of everything, from a china jug to a human life, to the universe itself. The process of change and degradation is unavoidable. The 2nd law says that the universe itself must reach a point of maximum entropy, maximum disorder. The universe itself must one day die.
If everything degrades; if everything becomes disordered, you might be wondering how it is that we exist. How exactly did the universe manage to create the exquisite complexity and structure of life on earth. Contrary to what you might think, itâs precisely because of the 2nd Law that all this exists. The great disordering of the cosmos gives rise to itâs complexity.
Itâs possible to harness this natural flow from order to disorder; to tap into the process and generate something new. To create new order - new structure. Itâs what the early steam pioneers had hit upon with their engines, and itâs what makes everything that we deem âspecialâ in our world - from this car, to buildings, to works of art - even to life itself.
The engine of my car, like all engines, is designed to exploit the 2nd law. It starts out with something nice and ordered, like this petrol - stuffed full of energy, but when itâs ignited in the engine, it turns this compact liquid into a mixture of gases 2000 times greater in volume, not to mention dumping heat and sound into the environment. Itâs turning order into disorder.
Whatâs so spectacularly clever about my car is that it can harness that dissipating energy. It can syphon off a small bit of it and use it for a more ordered process; like driving the pistons that turn the wheels. Thatâs what engines do, they tap into that flow from order to disorder and do something useful.
But itâs not just cars. Evolution has designed our bodies to work thanks to the very same principle. If I eat this chocolate bar packed full of nice ordered energy, my body processes it and turns it into more disordered energy, but powers itself off the proceeds.
Both cars and humans power themselves by tapping into the great cosmic flow from order to disorder.
âAlthough overall the world is falling apart in disorder; itâs doing it in a seriously interesting way. Itâs like a waterfall that is rushing down, but the waterfall throws up a spray of structure and that spray of structure might be you or me or a daffodil, or whatever. So, you can see this unwinding of the universe - this collapse into disorder can, in fact, be constructive.â
