The entropy of a closed system doesn’t always increase

<p>Imagine you&rsquo;ve got a glass high up on a counter, and it falls down to the floor. Physics tells you what&rsquo;s going to happen: your glass is going to hit the floor with a specific velocity, and with a certain calculable amount of kinetic energy. That impact can easily result in the glass shattering: a spontaneous process that results from the conversion of one form of energy into others. However, the reverse process &mdash; of shattered glass shards spontaneously reassembling and leaping the fully assembled glass back onto the counter &mdash; never spontaneously occurs. This can be simply explained by&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">the laws of thermodynamics</a>, and in particular by the&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">second law</a>.</p> <p>A great many of us, particularly in the United States, learn about the second law in terms of entropy: a physical property of all thermodynamic systems. The second law can be expressed in terms of:</p> <p><a href="https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-entropy-of-a-closed-system-doesnt-always-increase-25251c02e4e7"><strong>Read More</strong></a></p>