{"id":1273,"date":"2018-08-08T05:06:44","date_gmt":"2018-08-08T05:06:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kellyfish.me\/?p=1273"},"modified":"2018-11-04T21:13:04","modified_gmt":"2018-11-04T21:13:04","slug":"what-happens-if-nature-prefers-order","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kellyfish.me\/index.php\/2018\/08\/08\/what-happens-if-nature-prefers-order\/","title":{"rendered":"What Happens if Nature Prefers Order?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagine a person jumps into a swimming pool. The energy of impact splashes water around and dissipates as heat. What happens if, by some chance, those water molecules collect their energy together and push the person back to the ground? Why didn’t nature do that?<\/span><\/p>\n

According to Law of Conservation of Energy, the energy is never lost, but instead converted from one form to another. So, if water molecules push a person back, the law still holds. After all, the energy is still stored in water molecules as heat. However, another physical law called the Second Law of Thermodynamics actually prohibits that. The Second Law states that the total entropy of a system is always increasing. Entropy is related to the concept of randomness. So essentially, when left alone, any system will become more random internally, and have greater entropy. This explains why it is impossible for the water molecules to collect their energy together and push the person back to the ground. That would require the molecules to organize themselves into a predetermined order, which violates the Second Law. It also conforms to our daily experience. When ink is dropped into a glass of water, we notice how it quickly diffuses.<\/span><\/p>\n

This actually means that nature prefers randomness. But, what happens if Nature prefers order? What happens if the Second Law is not true, and the entropy decreases in an isolated system?<\/span><\/p>\n

The world as we know will be very different. It is entirely possible to stand in the pool and wait for the water molecules to push you to the ground. It will also mean that dirt will not spread in our room, but stay in a single place \u2013 no more vacuuming or cleaning is needed. It means decay and erosion of nature will not occur automatically – there will be no more rotten food in the fridge.<\/span><\/p>\n

If nature prefers order, our world would be substantially more orderly. Mountains would be in precise cone shapes, clouds would look spherical, and the coastline would extend in a straight line. In fact, the continents of the Earth will be in some type of regular polygon, like a hexagon. Our lives would be vastly different.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Imagine a person jumps into a swimming pool. The energy of impact splashes water around and dissipates as heat. What happens if, by some chance, those water molecules collect their energy together and push the person back to the ground? Why didn’t nature do that? According to Law of Conservation of Energy, the energy is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kellyfish.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kellyfish.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kellyfish.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kellyfish.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kellyfish.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1273"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/kellyfish.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1323,"href":"https:\/\/kellyfish.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1273\/revisions\/1323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kellyfish.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kellyfish.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kellyfish.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}