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But it could.

You’d have to watch countless billions of kitchens for countless billions of years to glimpse even the beginnings of something like that, but – it could happen, in theory.

How would it feel to experience something like that?

The overwhelming sensation would probably be that something magical and impossible had happened – a visit from the fairies. But also, wouldn’t there be a sense that you had somehow travelled back in time?

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ssss1 Our pile of sand is sitting inside a wider closed system (our universe) where entropy can still increase and time can still flow, however. You can walk over and clean up the pile of sand, write your name in it, make a sandcastle out of it, if you want to. But if the whole universe and everything in it (including you) had reached the same maximum entropy state as the pile of sand, then this would be completely impossible. There would be no outside looking in. Entropy could not increase, so there would be no possibility of real, meaningful change, and nothing could or would ever happen. The arrow of time would simply stop.