A Reboot of the Maxwell’s Demon Thought Experiment—in Real Life

In addition, the second law of thermodynamics signifies the statistical nature of the universe. Its building blocks are not stars, planets, humans, or bacteria—they’re the atoms and molecules that make us up. You can think of the atoms in the universe as a deck of cards, constantly being shuffled and reshuffled. By the end of the reshuffling, the deck will have no semblance of order. But instead of dealing with a deck of 52 cards, the universe has a deck on the order of 1082 atoms.

Or if you want to be more manageable, consider the 1024 molecules in a cup of coffee. If you drop a sugar cube into

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