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Already, messy is a million times more likely than neat – and this is a kitchen with only three objects in it. Three. Now go ahead and put back all the many hundreds of other objects into your ordinary, everyday kitchen and you start to get some sense of just how very unlikely neat is versus messy.

Of course, the universe is a lot bigger than a kitchen, and made of a lot more things. And those things are made up of things, which are also made up of things, all the way down to a basic, atomic level. There’s also an added complication – the universe does not have the benefit of someone coming along once in a while to tidy the place up. Taken together, what all this means is that when a thing – the butter, the butter knife, a brick, a stone, a screw, an atom – happens to move into a new position somewhere in the universe, it is a countless billion times more likely to move into a messy position than into a neat position.

Without someone around to tidy and fix it up from time to time, the kitchen and the house around it would progressively get messier until the whole thing fell apart. Everyone knows this happens to old houses because they’ve seen it – uncared-for structures fall into disrepair and eventually collapse. This is common sense. Why it happens is simple: because there are countless billions of messy situations for all the things that make up the house – bricks, beams, nails, lintels, joists and all their atoms – to be in, any of which would cause it to fall down, and only a handful of neat situations where the house stays standing.