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St y Alert: Entropy Wants th s Kitch n.

Just before we went to bed one night, I’d plucked the ‘a’, the ‘i’ and the ‘e’ out of their respective words and arranged them at the bottom of the door, making it look like they’d fallen down in a heap. I remember lying in bed the next morning and hearing her call out oh, how we laughed as she opened the door to get milk for her tea.

Question: do you know why time works the way it does?

It’s all down to entropy.

To see why, I’ll need you to imagine that my kitchen is the universe. Or, if you’d rather, you can imagine your own kitchen is the universe – it doesn’t really matter. But pick a kitchen.

So. There are only a relatively small number of ways for this kitchen to be tidy. Only a relatively small number of ways for the boxes to fit in the cupboards, the bowls to fit on top of the plates, the bottles to stand up in the fridge door, all those things. Relatively small, I mean, against the countless billions of different ways the same kitchen can be messy. If the Rice Krispies are anywhere else but in the Rice Krispies box, the kitchen is messy. If the milk bottle is anywhere else but standing upright in the fridge (with the milk still in it), the kitchen is messy. If one or more of the bowls are on the worktop, on the floor, on the table, smashed in the sink, anywhere else but stacked neatly away in a cupboard – then the kitchen is messy.