Does everything tend towards entropy and chaos?

Align

A not uncommon statement, I came to wonder about it as I was heading home on my bike.
Take gravity - very basic force that encourages order (if gathering mass into spheres isn't order, I don't know what is).
Or life, which as we all know grows in complexity and abundance, given enough time.

Maybe I just got the quote wrong? Is it just entropy, since energy is perpetually going to waste?

TychoCelchuuu

You're confusing order the way it's thought of in society and order the way it's thought of in science. A big clump of stuff in a sphere is ordered in that it's not flying all over the place, but its measure of entropy is higher than if it were shaped into something spiky with lots of crags and gaps and dips. Entropy (disorder) increases when something turns into a big lump of nothing because entropy is a measure of something's inability to do work. It may appear more ordered to your eyes, and in fact it is more "ordered" when we talk about order in the sense of keeping things in line and not having anything excessive, but in a physics sense it is more disordered. When scientists use order and disorder in this sense, they're talking about things on the molecular level.

lolfighter

Wikipedia's article on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy" target="_blank">entropy</a> may be of assistance.

Faskalia

To put it simple:

The more states a system can have, the higher its entropy.

Easy example:

You have 1 Atom enclosed in a 5cm^3 vacuum tube. This setup has a certain entropy value. Which is the sum of the entropy values of every possible state in this setup.

If you put the same atom in a 10cm^3 vacuum tube the setups entropy is twice as high, cause there are twice as many states now.

And yes, trying to graps entropy with the help of common sense will utterly fail:
Imagine: You have 5ml of red and 5ml of yellow paint. You paint two seperate blobs with each. Now you mix them and paint a big orange blob.

What does common sense tell you here?
Is the heterogeneous setup (red and yellow as seperate blobs) more chaotic or the homogeneous orange blob?

the_x5

Answering the topic's question, I would say yes. That's yes in both the physical and metaphysical "social" aspect.

However, I'd argue the interaction of chaos with laws and forces that makes the universe work. Opposition kindles change.




Good topic question! I look forward to engaging in this discussion and reading what others have written here as time (and the electric utility's availability permit). Thanks Align!