well they expect you to look it up as a faithful employee

Though my understanding of entropy is somewhat limited, I think I can recreate our general understanding of it along with their argument like this:

Let's say the universe is only my kitchen and I want to make a cup of coffee with the important property of coffee being that it is warmer than its surroundings. To heat water, I have a stove. If I have a hot cup of coffee, its heat will evaporate into the room, heating the room ever so slightly while cooling the cup and the difference in temperature outside and inside my coffee cup will decrease. This represents an increase in entropy. That energy is still in my kitchen, but it won't help me make more coffee. To do that, I need things I can burn in my stove. So over time, as I make more coffee, more of the energy in my kitchen that is tied up in matter instead gets converted into radiation, energy which is not useful to me in terms of coffee production. Eventually, there's no more matter, only evenly distributed raditation.

Their argument then I guess would generally be that something like a plant works to decrease entropy because it takes energy carrier by photons and orders that into building carbohydrates.

So to my dumb kitchen analogy, they argue that while I make cups of coffee, I could also grow plants. The light from the stove will provide them with energy to do photosynthesis. As the plants develop into wood, I get more wood for my stove. This DECREASES entropy in my kitchen. Perhaps I could keep it running indefinitely.

HOWEVER, without going into too much detail, even if the plant can do this and even if I can keep planting them, the best plants can hope to do is slow down entropy in my kitchen ever so slightly. Entropy is still increasing and moving my kitchen towards heat death.

So I'm not sure how good this is.. sorry if I made everyone reading this a little dumber :D

This is certainly true, the rest of your reasoning holds too. I don't really see the link with evolution though :laughing: Or are they just trying to argue that photosynthesis contradicts thermodynamics?

Haha, I edited that part out again and it was the best one :D

They'd say evolution orders energy, not just from photosynthesis/photons, but from inorganic chemicals, into molecules like proteins and DNA, hence reduces entropy in the universe.

Yeah that's just silly. They also should keep in mind that entropy decrease is not 'forbidden' by physics: it just comes at an energy cost, which means that it does actually happen if it is compensated by a higher energy reduction as a consequence

Right? That's what I always say :D

Thanks for your input, Marie :)

So I'm supposed to remember every dumb sht that was asked? https://boxden.com/smilies/FuXR5sT.png

Sophomore year of high school I was asked by a classmate why we couldn't dig to the moon.

Man.. goes to show what sniffing glue does to people.

It was a real wind up too. Three of us are sitting there writing god-knows-what and this woman Emily goes:

"So, guys, you know how we can fly to the moon?"

And the three of us turned around like "where the **** is this going?"

But we were not prepared. I still remember the three of us looking at each other like, "did I hear this wrong?"