And this form of energy is far more disordered than its previous state stored in our cells, and compensates for the order created by putting the toys back in the box. And even though the entropy of the room appears to go down when he (or more likely one of us) puts them back in the box, the process requires expending physical and mental energy, which generates heat. Going back to my son and his toys, there are far more ways for them to be strewn about than there are for them to be stored in the box. Another way of putting it is that even though energy itself is conserved (the first law of thermodynamics), the forms of energy that tend to become more and more common are more disordered and less useful for doing work. From a statistical perspective, the entropy of a closed system will increase because the number of disordered states far outnumber the ordered ones, so it is far more likely for a physical system to evolve into one of the former than the latter. This famous physical principle simply says that a quantity called entropy within a closed system will tend to stay the same or increase with time, but never decrease.Įntropy is commonly described as a measure of the degree of disorder in a system. That’s the second law of thermodynamics for you. And we usually wind up using more physical effort to clean up a mess than to make one. The latter happens without thinking, but the former requires some serious thought. Putting everything back is harder than spreading it all around. But when my wife or I get sick of the mess and ask him to put everything back, well, so much for the fun part.

But he never plays with them all in the same place, so the house is strewn about with toys.

Spreading toys around several rooms requires nothing more than removing them from their box, taking them to some seemingly random place to play with, quickly losing interest, and then returning to the box to repeat the process. My two-year-old son is quickly learning one of the most basic and frustrating facts of life: it is far easier to make a mess than it is to clean it up.

Universe entropy