Exactly 200 years ago, a French engineer introduced an idea that would quantify the universe’s inexorable slide into decay. But entropy, as it’s currently understood, is less a fact about the world ...

If you start with a very specific state, for example a box full of balls that are sorted exactly by colour, then if you shake the box a little, a higher entropy mixed state will develop over time.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy of an isolated system tends to increase over time. Everything ...

Looking back a variety of distances corresponds to a variety of times since the Big Bang. Entropy has always increased from any moment to the next, but that doesn't mean that the Big Bang began with ...

One of the enormous conceptual ideas that came along with Einstein's theory of relativity was the surprise that time itself, long considered fundamental and universal, is actually relative. Different ...