Question

When a box of beakers was dropped, the beakers broke into many pieces. Dropping the box a second time could not cause the pieces to reform into the original beakers because this would require entropy to _____________________ .

Answer 1

The pieces of a dropped beaker will not spontaneously reassemble because this would require a decrease in entropy, which goes against the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy measures the disorder in a system and it naturally tends to increase, making spontaneous decreases in entropy highly improbable in macroscopic systems.

Step-by-step explanation:

When a box of beakers was dropped, the beakers broke into many pieces. Dropping the box a second time could not cause the pieces to reform into the original beakers because this would require entropy to decrease. Entropy is a thermodynamic property that measures the degree of disorder within a system. The second law of thermodynamics states that the overall entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time. Thus, it's far more likely for systems to become disordered spontaneously than to become ordered.

The concept of entropy explains why certain processes are irreversible, like the breaking of a beaker or the melting of ice. For example, once ice melts, the molecules move from an ordered structure to a more disordered state, increasing entropy. Such an increase in entropy indicates a transition to a less orderly situation, making it statistically improbable for the process to spontaneously reverse. This explains why the broken pieces of a beaker will not spontaneously reassemble.