Editing Openai/693be8fb-8f0c-8010-93ea-5b83ef553357 (section)

=== Assistant: The heat death of the universe is a maximum-entropy state — the highest entropy the universe can reach. ===
The heat death of the universe is a ''maximum-entropy'' state — the highest entropy the universe can reach.

==== Entropy is a measure of how many microscopic configurations correspond to a macroscopic state — equivalently, how “spread out” or “disordered” energy is. ====

===== - All stars burn out. =====
* All temperature differences vanish.
* All usable free energy is exhausted.
* Matter (if it still exists) is evenly distributed.
* No gravitational clumping or chemical gradients remain.
* Nothing interesting can happen because there are no gradients to exploit.

That is exactly the definition of thermal equilibrium.

And thermal equilibrium is the state of maximum entropy, subject to whatever global constraints remain (e.g., total mass, total energy, expansion dynamics).

==== It is tempting to say “but everything is frozen, that seems ordered!” — but macroscopic “simplicity” is not the same as low entropy. ====

The heat-death universe is “simple” at the large scale, but that simplicity corresponds to an enormous number of microscopic states:
* All photons, particles, etc. are distributed uniformly.
* Every region looks statistically like every other region.
* This is the most probable configuration.

Hence entropy is maximal.

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So:

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