Luis’ Blog

Entropy can, in fact, go down

From Aatishb’s Entropy explained with sheep (emphasis mine):

There’s something curious here. Although the equal energy state is the most likely, it’s still very possible to find all the energy in one solid (the left or right extremes of the graph). In fact, there’s about a 1 in 8 chance of this happening. So the entropy in this system can fluctuate, sometimes going up, other times going down.

So when we look at really tiny solids, energy doesn’t always flow from a hot object to a cold one. It can go the other way sometimes. And entropy doesn’t always increase. This isn’t just a theoretical issue, entropy decreases have actually been seen in microscopic experiments.

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