Probably.
The Absolute Mind$%^& of Thermal Physics
My mother has Alzheimer’s, but sometimes she reminds me why the FBI tried to recruit her out of high school.
Last night, I explained entropy to her, and then she explained entropy to me. So, let me start by explaining entropy to you.
Molecules are constantly bumping into each other and passing little packets of energy back and forth. Over time, the energy becomes increasingly evenly distributed among them. Your coffee gets cold, and the air around it gets warm.
Imagine flipping five coins and every one lands heads-up. That would be really surprising and fun. Now imagine flipping ten coins and getting all heads. Now it’s weird. A hundred heads? You would call your psychiatrist.
Now imagine three times as many coins as there are stars in the observable universe. That’s how many molecules there are in a thimble full of coffee, much less a coffee cup. There’s absolutely no way they would all be in exactly the same state, or that only one would be in some special state. If we leave your coffee alone long enough, it will reach the same temperature as the air in the room. Whatever molecular quality we decide to measure, we would expect any differences to be distributed randomly, like heads and tails in a gazillion coin flips.
Entropy is a measure of how many different ways energy can be distributed. Just like there’s only one arrangement of 100 coins that is “all heads,” there’s only one way for all the energy to be over on one side of the coffee cup. There are an unimaginable number of ways for energy to be spread around. Given enough time, the system almost always ends up in equilibrium simply because there are more ways for that to happen.
So, that’s what I told my mom. She stopped me and asked questions along the way. Then she said, “They share with each other.”
Yes.
And I wish I’d said that.
Later, I told my fiancée about this conversation. She asked me, “So where did energy originate?”
She always asks the question that makes me uncomfortable, the one that is impossible to answer. I fell in love with her because she asked me a question like that eight years ago, and I guess that makes me an intellectual masochist. Anyway.
Of course, energy had to be more concentrated before, because it’s less concentrated now. And if you follow that to its natural conclusion… how did the universe get into such a low entropy state?
It’s literally, statistically, the least likely thing to happen that’s ever happened.
What’s more, the universe is an absolute nightmare everywhere else but here, as far as we know. There’s this tiny place, not too hot and not too cold, not too wet and not too dry, this just-right little grain of dust circling a light bulb in the Great Void, where our molecules will stop at nothing to know themselves and where they come from.
I’m glad I get to share it with you. Your fan,
Jonathan Byrd
Okay fiancée 👀
Some brain twists in there... Not so easy to collect my thoughts and keep them there against entropy! Love your mother's summary, umph! And that's part of why you love that woman: she's a contemplator, too, and can connect the dots into sharp questions.