A few days ago I was confronted by my mother to do something that every teen hates to do. Cleaning my room. Well, to be honest, I was really irritated by the continuous naggings of my mother, but that’s how life is, mothers always get their way. While I was busy cleaning my room I realized that no matter how much I clean my room after a while the room will slowly return to its state of disorder. This is what the second law of thermodynamics states. “A system will slowly fall into disorder if external energy is not supplied to it to maintain its current state.” Taking the same room analogy for disorder we can say that the current state of the room is the initial state of the system. After, let’s say 15 days the room falls into the situation when your mom comes and tells you to clean the room. We will consider this situation to be the final state of the system. The amount of disorder in a system is known as the system’s entropy. In the initial state, the system has the least entropy. Slowly as the days go by, you take out books, use your laptops, wear clothes and throw them, etc. the entropy in the system goes on increasing until a point when it can’t exceed further at this point your mom comes and scolds you. From this point onwards you either clean your room or you leave it be because you are used to the current state of the room. Now the dirty room represents a state where the entropy of a system is maximum and cannot increase further. To clean the room we need to put in a lot of effort. Similarly, in a system, a lot of energy is required to bring it back to its original state. Once energy is expended to bring it to a state of order the amount of entropy outside a system is more than that inside, therefore to equalize this condition the amount of entropy in the starts increasing thus falling into the loop over and over again.
Comments