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Order being born from disorder?



On 16 May 1997 Leigh Palmer wrote:

Surface tension is likely responsible for the initial spreading.
I think each hair makes a little oily raft on which it floats initially,
and these oily rafts each spread out as far as possible.

That may be part of the explanation. After watching fine grains of pepper
on water for more than an hour today (not over the toilet bowl this time)
I came to the following hypothesis. It is the combination of Brownian
motion and surface tension. (Undetectable vibrations of the building may
also be involved.) Small pieces move randomly till they meet and link
permanently by molecular forces. The irreversibility of linking is the
mechanism by which "order is born from disorder". I am using these strong
words without any evidence that the entropy of a clustered pattern is
lower than the entropy of a really random distribution for a given number
of particles. Any idea how to calculate the entropy of a pattern?

Ludwik Kowalski

P.S. I was also watching Monte Carlo simulated (pseudo-random) patterns
on the computer screen. They also some show clustering but nothing
comparable with what happens to small particles on the surface of water.