Re: Energy - the "hot potato"?

On 2024-06-18 18:25:10 +0000, Stefan Ram said:

  . Here's a quotation from "Quora":
 
|The vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field is just the
|value that we would "expect" it to have when it is in its
|vacuum state, which is the state of lowest energy. It turns
|out that it is a general law of nature that physical systems
|always "want" to be in the state of lowest possible energy.
|The allowed values for the energy are determined by the
|system's potential energy function. In the case of the Higgs
|field, the potential function looks (more or less) like this
 
  . My question is not about Higgs fields, but I'd like to focus
  on this part:
 
|It turns out that it is a general law of nature that physical
|systems always "want" to be in the state of lowest possible
|energy.
 
  . "Want" is not a very appropriate term in physics. But
 
  - is there really such a law? And if so,

Not exactly. The law is that entropy always increases, which means
that energy becomes more evenly distributed. Therefore, when there
is much energy consentrated in one place, that place tends to lose
a part of its energy to places that have less. The result is that
any small part of the unverse is most of its time in its lowest
energy state.

--
Mikko