Is Entropy Increased in a Closed System?

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There's a bit of intuition that i've struggled to develop and not quite succeeded here, when people say that in a closed system, entropy increases. And why? Well, entropy corresponds to the number of ways you can arrange the system so that it looks the same. So there are more ways to be high entropy than o be low entropy. That makes sense to me. Now you're saying that certain arrangements of little sub systems have a better ability to absorb energy. Other people have said, you know, certain complex catalyzed reactions will increase the entropy production rate faster. But i'm missing a bit of intuitions as to why i should caretout thatlight.

Erwin Schrödinger’s famous book What Is Life? highlighted the connections between physics, and thermodynamics in particular, and the nature of living beings. But the exact connections between living organisms and the flow of heat and entropy remains a topic of ongoing research. Jeremy England is a leader in this field, deriving connections between thermodynamic relations and the processes of life. He is also an ordained rabbi who finds resonances between modern science and passages in the Hebrew Bible. We talk about it all, from entropy fluctuation theorems to how scientists should approach religion.

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Jeremy England received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. He is currently Senior Director in the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning group at GlaxoSmithKline. He has been a Rhodes scholar, a Hertz fellow, and was named one of Forbes‘s “30 Under 30 Rising Stars of Science.” His new book is Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things.

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