Argonne researchers posit way to locally circumvent Second Law of Thermodynamics
The second law of thermodynamics isn&#x27;t really a fundamental physical law, but rather a promise based on statistics that says &quot;disorder will increase or stay constant in a closed physical system&quot;.<p>That said, it&#x27;s entirely possible for entropy to spontaneously decrease in a closed system, the probability of this happening is just astronomically small for typical macroscopic systems.<p>Example:<p>If you have a system consisting of two compartments that are separated by a wall, where one of the compartments contains N particles. The system has low entropy because all the particles are on one side of it. Now, if you remove the barrier between the two compartments, particles will distribute evenly on both sides, increasing the entropy of the system. If we assume that the position of the particles is random, the probability of finding all of them on one side of the system is (1&#x2F;2)^N, which quickly converges to zero for most macroscopic systems, which often contain &gt; 10^23 particles.