Statistical-Mechanics – Is a Spontaneous Decrease in Entropy Impossible or Just Extremely Unlikely?

entropystatistical mechanics

I was reading this article from Ethan Siegel and I got some doubts about a sentence about entropy, specifically when Ethan explains the irreversibility of the conditions of the hot-and-cold room, as in this figure:

entropy

In his words:

It's like taking a room with a divider down the middle, where one side is hot and the other is cold, removing the divider, and watching the gas molecules fly around. In the absence of any other inputs, the two halves of the room will mix and equilibrate, reaching the same temperature. No matter what you did to those particles, including reverse all of their momenta, they'd never reach the half-hot and half-cold state ever again.

My question is:

Is the spontaneous evolution from the equilibrium temperature (right side of the image) to the half-hot and half-cold state (left side) physically and theoretically impossible/forbidden, or is it simply so astronomically unlikely (from a statistical perspective) that in reality it never happens? The article seems to suggest the former, but I was under the impression of the latter.

Best Answer

The appropriate mathematical tool to understand this kind of question, and more particularly Dale's and buddy's answers, is large deviation theory. To quote wikipedia, "large deviations theory concerns itself with the exponential decline of the probability measures of certain kinds of extreme or tail events". In this context, "exponential decline" means: probability that decreases exponentially fast with the increase of number of particles.
TL;DR: it can be shown that the probability to observe an evolution path for a system that decreases entropy is non-zero, and it decreases exponentially fast with the number of particles; thanks to a statistical mechanics of "trajectories", based on large deviation theory.

Equilibrium statistics

In equilibrium statistical mechanics, working in the appropriate thermodynamical ensemble, for instance the microcanonical ensemble in this case, one could relate the probability to observe a macrostate $M_N$ for the $N$ particles in the system, to the entropy of the macrostate $S[M_N]$: $\mathbf{P}_{eq}\left(M_N\right)\propto\text{e}^{N\frac{\mathcal{S}[M_N]}{k_{B}}}.$ Naturally, the most probably observed macrostate, is the equilibrium state, the one which maximizes the entropy. And the probability to observe macrostates that are not the equilibrium state decreases exponentially fast as the number of particles goes to infinity, this is why we can see it as a large deviation result, in the large particle numbers limit.

Dynamical fluctuations

Using large deviation theory, we can extend this equilibrium point of view: based on the statistics of the macrostates, to a dynamical perspective based on the statistics of the trajectories. Let me explain.

In your case, you would expect to observe the macrostate of your system $(M_N(t))_{0\leq t\leq T}$, evolving on a time interval $[0,T]$ from an initial configuration $M_N(0)$ with entropy $S_0$ to a final configuration $M_N(T)$ with entropy $S_T$ such as $S_0 \leq S_T$, $S_T$ being the maximal entropy characterizing the equilibrium distribution, and the entropy of the macrostate at a time $t$, $S_t$ being a monotonous increasing function (H-Theorem for the kinetic theory of a dilute gas, for instance).

However, as long as the number of particles is finite (even if it is very large), it is possible to observe different evolutions, particularly if you wait for a very long time, assuming your system is ergodic for instance. By long, I mean large with respect to the number of particles. In particular, it has been recently established that one could formulate a dynamical large deviation result which characterizes the probability of any evolution path for the macrostate of the system (https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.10398). This result allows to evaluate for large but finite number of particles, the probability to observe any evolution path of the macrostate $(M_N(t))_{0\leq t\leq T}$, including evolution paths such as $S_t$, the entropy of the system a time $t$ is non monotonous. This probability will become exponentially small with the number of particles, and the most probable evolution, that increases entropy, will have an exponentially overwhelming probability as the number of particles goes to infinity.

Obviously, for a classical gas, N is very large, such evolution paths that do not increase entropy won't be observed: you would have to wait longer than the age of the universe to observe your system doing this. But one could imagine systems where we use statistical mechanics, where $N$ is large but not enough to "erase" dynamical fluctuations: biological systems, or astrophysical systems for instance, in which it is crucial to quantify fluctuations from the entropic fate.