Got that lesson on entropy from yesterday? Well, go re-read it because the test is next cleaning day.
Now let’s talk about dirt, disorder, and entropy. I don’t know about you, but my household has a good working relationship with the Forces of Disorder (FoD). A strong relationship. A frequently disgusting relationship. Now here’s the cool part: you can harness those forces to help keep your house clean! Yeah, no kiddin’. Listen up.
So let’s define the “temperature” of a patch of floor as the amount of dirt per unit area (square foot, square inch, square meter, doesn’t matter), and dirt is kind of like heat energy. So a dirty patch of floor will have a higher dirt density – or “temperature” – than a clean patch of floor. Now suppose the whole kitchen floor is dirty, but you don’t want to move appliances around to sweep under them. So just sweep whatever’s easy, whatever you can get to, and harness the FoD to take care of the rest. How? Well, say that random wind and scuttling rats will redistribute whatever dirt is on the floor until it’s pretty much random, i.e., sort of even. So you’ve swept the middle of the floor, but not under the fridge. The entropy equation for any further random motion will look like:
dS = dH/T(clean floor) - dH/T(under the fridge)
Under the fridge is “hotter” – that is, it has a higher dust bunny density. So for the disorder to increase (and we KNOW that is going to happen, given all those random breezes and scurrying rats), dirt will have to move out from under the fridge onto the clean floor. Where it is easily swept up, with no appliance moving required. Viola. You’ve just harnessed disorder to help you keep house.
You may have heard the old saying “a clean house stays clean.” Well, there may be a psychological aspect to that (aka broken window theory), but the real truth of the matter is that it’s just thermodynamics (dirtodynamics?) at work to increase disorder.
Next time: Doing your laundry like a supercomputer.
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