the.com/irreversibility
The universe's one-way sign: entropy reads the terms and conditions, you don't.
means The property of a process that cannot be undone to restore the original state — once it happens, there's no running the film backward.
from Built from reversible (Latin revertere, 'to turn back') plus the negating ir- and the noun suffix -ity. The word itself is a modern, workmanlike coinage from physics and philosophy, rising with 19th-century thermodynamics when scientists needed a precise way to say that heat, entropy, and time all insist on moving in a single direction — no matter how badly you'd like to turn back.
- origin
- Second law of thermodynamics makes time have a direction
- microscopic truth
- individual particle collisions are actually reversible
- real culprit
- statistical odds, not physics, favor disorder increasing
- everyday proof
- you can scramble eggs, never unscramble them