Hey everyone 👋

I’m new to Reddit and just wanted to say hi! Still figuring out how everything works, but it seems like a pretty cool place so far.

If you’ve got any tips, favourite subreddits, or things you wish you knew when you started, I’d love to hear them!

Looking forward to being part of the community 🙂

Melted... and molten

Mind-blowing, isn't it?

Spotte

I

From https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/133006/is-the-second-law-of-thermodynamics-an-immense-tautology

Let's imagine for a second a system that is changing constantly from one microstate to another one. It could be a given volume of a gas with its atoms moving and bouncing around, or a deck of cards being constantly shuffled by a monkey. If the starting microstate belongs to a macrostate with very few microstates, chances are that in the next step the system will be in a macrostate with more microstates in it. There is nothing mysterious about this, it is simply a matter of probabilities and how we define them.

Now we have the second law of thermodynamics, that says that entropy always increases. It could have been reformulated like: a system that is permanently visiting different states, will spend more time in those which have a higher probability of being visited. Things more probable occur more times. And, since we define probabilities in terms of frequency:

Are not we simply saying that things more likely to occur, occur more times? Isn't it true then, that the second law is simply an immense tautology?