but Linda realizes that they are not all destined to remain so). A final or-
der is imposed when she sorts them by color. I haven’t figured out what
her color sorting strategy is; if somebody compelled me to do it, I would
probably go with ROY G BIV (an acronym long ago committed to memory
for the colors of the spectrum in the order they appear in a rainbow: red,
orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). However, I have a friend who
sorts his books by color and does so alphabetically; he would sort the
above colors in the order blue, green, indigo, orange, red, violet, yellow).
I, on the other hand, have a total disregard for such niceties. If the
clothes are on hangers, it’s fine with me. So it takes me a little extra time
to find the right shirt and pants. Big deal. Linda scrutinizes the closet
every few months, and her reaction is always the same: I’ve messed
things up again. There is only one right order in which to hang the
clothes, and all other orders are characterized by the phrase “messed up.”
For her, there are only two macrostates: the correct order (and there’s only
one microstate corresponding to the “correct order” macrostate) and
messed up (and she believes that I’ve generated every possible microstate
corresponding to the “messed-up” macrostate).
Nature and my closet have this in common: there are considerably more
microstates corresponding to a disordered macrostate than to an ordered
one. For a quantitative demonstration of this, suppose that we have two
pairs of shoes: sneakers (what I wear most of the time) and loafers (what
I wear on formal occasions), and two boxes in which to put the shoes.
These boxes are large enough for all four shoes to fit, but one box is for
the sneakers, and one for the loafers. The following is a table of all the
different ways to put the four shoes in the two boxes. There is an obvious
quantitative criterion for what constitutes order in this situation: the
number of pairs of shoes in the proper box. The abbreviation LB stands
for loafer box, and SB is for sneaker box.
Left Right Left Right # Pairs in
Loafer Loafer Sneaker Sneaker Correct Box
LB LB LB LB 1
LB LB LB SB 1
LB LB SB LB 1
LB LB SB SB 2
LB SB LB LB 0
LB SB LB SB 0
LB SB SB LB 0The Raw Materials 193