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by Jensson 1431 days ago
> The thing I don't fully understand yet is heat entropy. Apparently when you take heat into account for everything, the disordered intuition suddenly becomes applicable. So if you have a system becoming more ordered with time, heat must be increasing somewhere to offset this increase in order. Maybe someone can explain this part to me?

You can extract work from order, and can create order with work. Consider this scenario:

We have two kinds of particles and two rooms. If we have one kind of particle per room it is pretty ordered, if we mix everything then it isn't ordered. Now, lets say we have two filters, filter 1 lets particle 1 through and filter 2 lets particle 2 through, but not the others. So we have a wall between the rooms made of these two filters. Particle 1 will just put pressure on filter 1 and vice versa. This way we can let particle 1 push their filter through room 2, which creates work, thus mixing particles a bit. Do the same with particle 2 and now we have mixed both and extracted the work from mixing the particles. We can reverse this process by moving the filters the opposite direction, dividing the particles again and this process will require work to perform.

Exactly how the filter work doesn't matter, as long as it lets through the other particles then the other particles will stabilize and eventually even out the pressure on the sides. It could be slow but it would work. Doesn't have to be perfect either, if probability isn't exactly the same for both particles you can do it over and over until you get the purity on each side you want. We already uses this to enrich uranium for example, so we can make filters for basically anything in theory.