The second law is the most mysterious and most profound. It states that the total amount of entropy (chaos or disorder) in the universe always increases. In other words, everything must eventually age and run down. The burning of forests, the rusting of machines, the fall of empires, and the aging of the human body all represent the increase of entropy in the universe. It is easy, for example, to burn a piece of paper. This represents a net increase in total chaos. However, it is impossible to reassemble the smoke back into paper. (Entropy can be made to decrease with the addition of
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