Saturday, December 25, 2010

What is entropy and how to fight with it?

Take the assembled Rubik's cube and start randomly turning its face. After a few turns it will be completely dismantled. Now continue randomly rotate the cube faces as long as they will not meet again.
Pretty soon you will realize, that nothing you do succeeded, but do not worry: you have not collected the Rubik's cube, but it illustrated the second law of thermodynamics:

The entropy of an isolated system can not decrease.

Entropy - a measure of disorder and chaos. You have invited friends for a Christmas party, tidied up, washed the floor, spread out on the table, snacks and drinks. In short, you  removed as much chaos as you could. It is a system with a small entropy.
You all probably imagine what happens to the apartment, if the party finished: total chaos. This morning you have your apartments as the disposal system with a large entropy.
In order to bring the apartment in correct order, we must tide up, spend a lot of energy. Entropy of the system decreased, but there is no contradiction with thesecond law of thermodynamics- you add the energy from the outside, and system is not isolated.
In nature all ordered things are tend to chaos, to destruction. But what to do with life on Earth? All living organisms are incredibly complexed and ordered, and somehow all their life is struggling with the entropy. 
Living organisms are in the process of redistributing the entropy of life around himthat is, transfer of entropy around. For example, when we eat a sandwich, then ordered a nice bread and butter, we make becomes disordered mass which we will easily throw in the toilet. It turns out that  we gave entropy to sandwich, but in the overall system entropy is not decreased.
Now I start to understand that all those chaos we (me&you)  have in our flats and houses, in our wardrobes and on the tables is just entropy which we gave to those things around to make balance inside of ourselves.
I decided to make this post, after reading some nice information at http://theoryandpractice.ru/posts/983-chto-takoe-entropiya-i-kak-s-ney-borotsya

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