If a person asks you what entropy is, or a person asks you for an example of entropy most people think of the cup of coffee example. That works like that: you got a full cup of black coffee and sip a little bit of milk in it. If you are patient enough with the milk, the coffee and the milk will separate perfectly. If you put your spoon into the cup and start to stir the coffee all the molecules will fly around and spread all around the cup, the milk and the coffee will mix perfectly together. We got a perfect disorder.
Now imagine you would stir the coffee with you spoon for the rest of your life. What will never happen?
- That the coffee and the milk will separate again. And order themselves perfectly. We will always lead to disorder and never order.
Like I said most people understand entropy by something of order and disorder but that is just a basic explanation that does not really explain entropy at all, you will see why.
In his book: “What is Life?” by Erwin Schrödinger he says that life in any form, attract attention by disagreeing the entropy law. Life is continuously passing the construction manual from generation to generation, the completely different what we would expect from entropy.
How is this possible?
Everything that happens in our nature means an increase of entropy in an isolated system (for example our world). A living organism increase its own entropy all the time or with other words its always producing positive entropy and is always heading to the danger zone of maximum entropy – death. The living organism can only keep away from the danger zone (to live) by constantly detracting his environment negative entropy.
With other words, the purpose of life is to destroy (eat) his environment to stay in a steady state until the death.
By extracting the environment substances, the living organism contributes to an always increasing entropy in our world as it says in the second law of thermodynamics.
This little part from Schrödingers book is also an short explanation why we got snowflakes, silicon-structures, molecules bonding together and all the other things that form structure and life.
Knowledge is the payment our time.
Sources:
Wiki: What is Life
Wiki: Entropy and Life
Forum: Why formation of snowflakes not violate entropy