A law of physics that reveals desperate truths, says scientist: I'd rather it hadn't been discovered

Marx once said that "technology" is a real productive force that not only drives human cultural progress and civilization forward but is also the material force that transforms the world.

In fact, in the course of tens of thousands of years of human development, science and technology have, as Marx said, occupied an irreplaceable and important position.

The invention of technology in ancient times liberated mankind from the obscurity of drinking hair and blood and being unclothed. The birth of natural science and the rise of the industrial revolution in modern times have, in turn, enabled mankind to move from a backward agricultural society to a relatively developed industrial one.

It is fair to say that as civilization developed, science and technology became an increasingly important part of the overall economy, and its dominant and decisive role became more pronounced.

However, as we continue to explore the world and the unknown, science has helped and led us in the direction of development, but it has also taught us many theoretical laws that have overturned our perceptions and even caused us to despair, such as the one that many scientists say outright: they would rather not have discovered it - the "law of entropy The Law of Incremental Growth".

Why are some scientists so terrified of this law of physics? And what is it about it that makes people despair? To find out the answer to these questions, we need to know what the Law of Entropy is.

Also known as the 'second law of thermodynamics, the law of increasing entropy was developed by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius in the 19th century to describe the irreversible flow of heat from a high object to a low object in an isolated system.

From a thermodynamic perspective, 'entropy' is a measure of the degree of disorder in a system. Simply put, the more disorganized a system is, the higher its entropy value.

As mentioned above, in an isolated system, 'entropy' is constantly increasing and irreversible, and when it reaches its maximum value, the system becomes severely disordered and then dies.

So what is the maximum level of disorder? The answer is - macroscopic equilibrium. In layman's terms, this is the point at which all of the infrastructures of the system have let themselves go.

Like an underground carriage in the evening rush hour, when all the passengers have their place in the car, that is when macro-equilibrium is reached.

To give a more graphic and intuitive example, an unoccupied empty room will get dirtier and dirtier because every speck of dust will spontaneously fall to the floor and then accumulate and eventually spread out into a whole layer, at which point the entropy reaches its maximum, i.e. macro-equilibrium.

Many of you may say if all the dust in the room is cleaned up at this point, wouldn't the entropy in the room be reduced? Why is it still said that entropy increase is an irreversible process?

The fact that you have this doubt proves that you still do not understand the law of entropy increase. In the isolated system of a room, the action of 'cleaning' requires energy to drive it, and the conversion of energy inevitably generates excess heat, which, together with the 'work' done by cleaning, is greater than the reduction in disorder caused by cleaning the dust. This excess heat, together with the 'work' done by cleaning, is greater than the reduction in disorder caused by cleaning the dust so the entropy of the room as a whole has increased.

The law of entropy was not only difficult for ordinary people to understand, but also for some of the greatest scientists to understand at the very beginning.

In 1871, for example, the famous physicist Maxwell conceived a very interesting experiment to prove that there was a 'loophole' in the law of entropy: a box was divided into two areas by a wooden board with a trapdoor, and a genie guarded the trapdoor and used his gift to measure the speed of molecular motion.

For molecules coming from the right, if they were fast, the elf would let them go, and if they were slow, he would close the flap and prevent them from entering the box. The opposite is true for molecules coming from the left: the slower ones are released and the faster ones are blocked.

After some time, the molecules on the left will be moving very fast and on the right very slowly, which also creates a temperature difference, and this in turn shows that the disorder inside the box is decreasing and entropy is decreasing, thus proving that the entropy increase is not irreversible.

Although many people knew that Maxwell's experiment was implausible, no one could give evidence that it was implausible, so it left many scientists scratching their heads.

It was only 60 years later that this experiment, known as Maxwell's Demon, was cracked by Hungarian nuclear physicist Leo Sillard.

The genie observed that the movement of molecules must consume energy and that energy consumption must cause an increase in entropy that is no less than the decrease in entropy from the movement of molecules, so this seemingly infallible isolated system still obeys the second law of thermodynamics.

Returning at this point to the question at the beginning of the article, why does the law of increasing entropy strike fear into the hearts of people? It is actually because everything on Earth, and indeed in the universe, is constantly consuming energy.

The universe is an isolated system, so to speak, and the consumption of energy means that the "entropy" of the system is increasing, and so is the degree of disorder.

According to the law of entropy, when a system reaches its maximum level of disorder, that is when it will die out. So this means that the universe will one day die out (thermal silence theory), and as creatures living in the universe, of course, they will feel fear and despair - after all, no one wants to become a pile of disordered particles.

If we look at it from a smaller perspective, human civilization is a closed system, so according to the entropy theory, it will one day die out too.

Even if we could "anti-entropy" by doing something, it would be futile, but it would only slow down the rate of extinction and would not change the end.

Of course, even if the law of entropy were to apply to the universe now, or everything around us, it remains to be seen whether it will still apply in the future.

One day it will be found to be "flawed" and forgotten, just as the centuries-old view of space-time was kicked into the dustbin by the theory of relativity, after all, the universe has so many "surprises" for mankind.