Why can't a broken glass be restored?

In daily life, sometimes we accidentally break a glass, and then we throw away the broken glass instead of repairing it because we know that the glass cannot be repaired.

But we rarely ask: Why can't glass be repaired? If someone asks this, you will definitely think he is crazy.

But it is such a "crazy" idea that has allowed humans to touch upon a cosmic mystery, that is, entropy and the principle of entropy increase.

The great physicist Boltzmann proposed the concept of entropy. Entropy is a physical quantity that measures the degree of disorder of all things. The lower the entropy, the more order, and the higher the entropy, the more disorder. Everything always spontaneously develops in the direction of disorder, that is, entropy will become larger and larger. This is the principle of entropy increase.

The principle of entropy increase is everywhere in our daily lives, but we rarely pay attention to it.

For example, if we tear out a book page by page and then let entropy take over, the pages will not become orderly again, but will become chaotic. Why?

Because there is only one way to make the pages of a book orderly, but there are many ways to make them chaotic, so the possibility is higher, which also shows that everything always tends to be disordered, which is very consistent with our life experience.

For example, if you don't clean your room for a long time, you will find that the room is getting more and more chaotic, that is, the entropy is getting higher and higher. Of course, we can also make it clean and tidy by cleaning the room, and the entropy will be lower. But while cleaning the room, energy will be released, creating greater chaos in other environments. Overall, it is still moving in the direction of chaos.

In life, the phenomenon of entropy increase can be seen everywhere. When an egg is broken, it will fly everywhere. When ice melts, it will lose its orderly and neat shape. When a car ignites gasoline and drives the engine, it will create disordered noise and gas energy. These are all manifestations of entropy increase, and this manifestation also reflects that the arrow of time has only one direction, which is always forward.

If we let time go backwards, entropy would get lower and lower until the Big Bang.

The Big Bang was a highly ordered state, and after the Big Bang, everything developed in the direction of disorder. Everything followed the rule from order to disorder, and what we feel is that from the past to the future, all things are riding on the increasingly chaotic cosmic waves and moving forward continuously, and there is no turning back.

Humans with intelligence can create a short-lived ordered environment in some corner of the universe, but we cannot stop the universe from developing relentlessly towards disorder. What we can do is to extend the time of order as much as possible and create our own ordered environment!

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