A book sliding across a table will slow to a stop, but a book at rest will never spontaneously start sliding. A falling egg will break apart, but shards of egg never spontaneously reform. And in our own lives, we all age in one direction only. Physicists describe such irreversible processes with the idea of “entropy,” a measure of how disordered a system is. Roughly speaking, disorder always grows over time. In this talk, I’ll describe how we can scientifically quantify “disorder,” and what this concept of entropy tells us about what physical processes are possible, limits on the efficiencies of our devices, and even the nature of time itself.
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