"Let me explain with an example: Say I have four coins and four people. How many different ways can I share these coins? Well, two extreme cases would be that everyone gets one coin or that all four coins go to one person. Altogether, there are 35 possible distributions. These are the microstates ( Ω). So you can think of them as possible arrangements of energy among particles while keeping the total energy the same."
"If I drop a basketball, its gravitational potential energy declines as it falls and its kinetic energy increases-total energy is conserved. But it doesn't bounce as high as it started. That's because some energy leaks away as heat on impact. The ball warms up a little bit. When we take that thermal energy into account, we find that energy is still conserved. But the entropy is higher."
"Ulitimately, this leads to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the total entropy of a closed system can only increase over time, or at least it can never decrease. So, like, your desk will only get messier and messier, unless you open that "system" and do some "work"-which, remember, means adding energy. Unfortunately the universe is a truly isolated system, so it can only end one way-in the total loss of all structure a"
Boltzmann's formula relates entropy to the logarithm of the number of microstates, with k being the Boltzmann constant and Ω the count of microstates. A simple example: four coins distributed among four people yield 35 possible microstates, representing different energy arrangements at fixed total energy. Energy conversions, such as a falling basketball converting potential to kinetic energy, can produce heat on impact, increasing entropy even while energy remains conserved. Reverse decreases in entropy are physically possible but vanishingly improbable. The second law states total entropy of a closed system cannot decrease, driving isolated systems toward loss of structure.
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