Entropy and Order: The Thermodynamic Reason Behind 'Clean Your Room!'
“Clean your room!” says your mom or dad, as you groan and sigh at the thought of having to clean it for the nth time in forever. As you reluctantly begin to pick up the scattered items and put them back in their designated places, you may not realize that you're participating in a timeless battle against a force of nature - entropy.
Entropy, a concept deeply rooted in the laws of thermodynamics, describes the tendency of systems to move from order to disorder over time. When energy is transformed or used, it disperses into the universe in the form of entropy. An easier way to imagine this is energy going from concentrated to scattered, an orderly state to a less orderly state. As time progresses, all the energy in a system gets more and more disorderly or random. The system can be imagined as your room, and how it gets messier and more disorderly over time. Your room in this scenario is a closed system, which can transfer energy with its surroundings, but not matter. This means that all the things in the room can only be moved within the boundaries of your room.
But why does this happen? Can’t energy come together naturally like how matter comes together through gravity? Imagine a box with marbles representing a closed system with a certain amount of energy. When you shake the box, the marbles are more likely to scatter than end up organized when you stop shaking the box. The same applies to energy. It's like trying to gather scattered pieces because there are so many ways it spreads out when we use it. This makes it extremely unlikely for energy to come together naturally, and in real life, we almost never see it happening.
Of course, you can artificially reverse the process and actually decrease the entropy in a system, but that would require the addition of new, usable energy into the system. Doing this would increase the entropy somewhere else outside the system to compensate for the decreased energy in the system. This can be imagined as you needing to spend energy and increase the entropy in your body to make the things in the room more orderly, thereby decreasing the entropy in the things in the room by the same degree.
In a way, cleaning your room becomes an act of rebellion against the cosmos itself, a reminder that in the struggle against entropy, there's satisfaction and accomplishment in restoring harmony to the chaos. As you stack books, fold clothes, and arrange items, you're participating in a dance that defies the very nature of things—a dance that brings a sense of order and control to a universe that constantly seeks to unravel. And while you can rebel against the universe, you shouldn’t rebel against your parents. So, clean your room!
Sources:
https://byjus.com/jee/entropy/
