Читать книгу Maxwell's Demon онлайн

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You get the idea. Messy is more likely than tidy. But in order to see the full picture, we need to understand just how much more likely messy really is.

To get a good look at the massive improbability of tidiness compared to messiness, let’s empty all the plates, cups, bowls, food, drinks, cutlery, cloths, sponges, towels, powders and cleaning products out of our kitchen, then put just a single item back in – the butter. Now. Let’s say the butter can be in maybe five hundred different places around the empty kitchen that we would call messy and maybe five places we would call neat. So there’s a one in a hundred chance that the butter is somewhere we would describe as neat. Let’s move up to two items – the butter and a butter knife. Assuming the butter knife has the same number of messy and neat positions as the butter, the chances of them both being in a place we could call neat goes from one in one hundred to one in ten thousand. At three items – the butter, the butter knife and a slice of bread – the chances of all three being in a place we would describe as neat are now one in a million.