Humpty Dumpty Restored: When Disorder Lurches Into Order

[David Morris]

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/30/science/physical/30ENTR.html

Not all the universe is falling apart all of the time.

An experiment by scientists in Australia has shown that a small patch of 
disorder can momentarily lurch into order, akin to Humpty Dumpty's magically 
putting himself back together again.

That would appear to violate the second law of thermodynamics, which states 
that entropy, a measure of disorder, rises inexorably unless an outside 
energy source maintains things in order. A billow of smoke always disperses, 
never contracts.

The experiment confirms a theory from 1993 that reconciled a longstanding 
paradox, that the laws of physics do not run fine forward and backward in 
everyday life, but they do at the atomic level, where subatomic particles 
collide.





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