The Second Law of Cleanliness
In the last section, we presented a general overview of
the similarities between the laws of thermodynamics and room
tidiness. In this section, we will attempt to study in more
detail, the differences between the second law of
cleanliness when compared to its thermodynamical
counter-part. We will also examine some of the differences
between the two.
In the first section, what we considered to be a related problem regarding mathematical probabilities and room cleanliness. In said problem, we wished to study a completely random problem in order find what sorts of ping-pong ball distributions we might expect. The original problem however, is definitely not random like we first assumed in the ping-pong problem. While it was assumed that the ping-pong balls fall pretty much randomly, for the most part, the distribution of items lining the floor will not be entirely random. Since human beings (in general) are not random, the item distributions will likely display observable patterns. For the following arguments, we will assume that the child present in said closed room is uniquely random. We will later on, consider the case when there are patterns in the untidiness of the room.
According to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy
of a closed system always increases or stays the same. One
possible interpretation of this law is that closed systems
tend to get more disordered. While this interpretation may
not be entirely correct, it is close enough for our
purposes. This is very similar to our problem we showed
previously involving randomly thrown ping-pong balls.