1 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
Could you elaborate on the first point? I don't see the relevance in mentioning the occasional decrease in entropy given the fact it's irreversibly generated and can overall only be increased, which is the whole point behind the heat death theory.
Comment by galacticbyte at 07/12/2023 at 02:43 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It's helpful to consider some analogies. Let's imagine say a million dice. If we carefully turn them face up with 1, the entropy is very low.
Imagine we start randomly rolling all of them. Chances are that all the possibilities will show up, so we say the entropy has increased.
However, there is still a non-zero chance that we might just get all 1s again, or other rare possibilities like all 6s...etc.
This is generic for chaotic system. Sure it is likely that the system will be in a generic configuration, however there is still a non-zero (exponentially small) chance that it could be in a "non-generic" state. So entropy increase is only a statistical statement, and not absolute.