Getting my nerd glasses on for this.
To preface this, manipulating entropy involves influencing how a system's energy and matter are distributed and arranged, thereby affecting its disorder or randomness. This is distinct from directly altering physical properties through abilities like Matter Manipulation. Entropy, in this case, operates through the inherently chaotic aspects of thermodynamic law (e.g., the gradual increase in disorder and decay of matter and energy over time).
According to the First Law of Thermodynamics, energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. This principle applies to entropy in the sense that entropy itself is a measure of the distribution and transformation of energy within a system. Controlling entropy involves managing how a system's energy and matter are distributed, rather than directly altering their physical properties. For those who aren't science-savvy I'll try to explain this in play as best I can;
Imagine you have a perfectly organized Rubik's Cube with each face showing only one color. This state represents low entropy because the arrangement is highly ordered and there are only a few ways to achieve this specific configuration.
If you start to randomly twist and turn the faces of the Rubik's Cube, the colors on each face become mixed. As the cube becomes more scrambled, the number of possible configurations increases, which represents a higher entropy state because there is greater disorder. As with the case of a Rubiks Cube, this can be presented as disorder of information in a complex structure.
The Rubik's Cube itself (its mass, volume, and shape) doesn't change, as these are its physical properties. However, the entropy of the system (the Rubik's Cube) increases as the arrangement of colors becomes more disordered. Entropy here is a measure of the disorder or randomness of the system's configuration, not a physical property of the cube.
To put it another way, the physical properties of the cube (such as its mass and dimensions) remain constant, but the entropy changes depending on how the colors are arranged. When the cube is fully solved, it has low entropy. When it is scrambled, it has high entropy.
The update looks fine, though the whole “being erased” part I’m a bit unsure. Given the whole common trope on how the beginning of everything they usually refer to chaos, that sounds more like a reversion back to the base roots more than erasing everything from existence.
Rewritten for clarity. The new justification now focuses specifically on accelerating entropy to reach an otherwise natural state of static equilibrium, which is fundamentally different from reversion. While reversion simplifies a system to a less complex state, increasing entropy accelerates the
gradual evolution of a system from higher to lower states of complexity.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in any natural process, entropy tends to increase, leading to greater molecular dispersion and randomness. This law explains how the universe's entropy is perpetually increasing, as entropy of an isolated system will tend to increase over time, leading to greater disorder and randomness.
When entropy is maximized, a system reaches a state of maximum disorder and randomness where no usable energy remains to perform work. This condition is known as thermodynamic equilibrium. In this state, all energy is uniformly distributed, and no gradients exist to drive any processes or changes. This is often referred to as the "heat death" of the universe, where all complex structures and distinctions cease to exist, resulting in an eventual homogeneous and inert state.
