I found it hard to word but like for example when shaking choccy milk how does the chocolate syrup know to spread evenly in the milk, and like other stuff to like when mixing alcohol with stuff. So like how does stuff already evenly or does it not and we dont know?
In: Chemistry
If you put oil in water and shake it you get little bubbles of oil inside the water. These oil bubbles don’t want to mix with the water, but they do want to combine with other oil bubbles. But if there is water between the oil bubbles, it keeps them from combining.
The more you shake it, the smaller the bubbles of oil become. The smaller the bubbles are the more of them can fit in the water. It also becomes harder to see the bubbles of oil when they are small, so the water looks different and the oil seems to be ‘spread out.’ There comes a point where you can make the oil bubbles smaller and fit more of them inside the water, but you won’t be able to see a difference.
If you were to look with a magnifying glass you’d still see the oil bubbles not really mixing with the water. They are just floating around, and the water makes it hard for the little bubbles to combine with each other.
If you let it sit long enough, though, the oil bubbles will separate back out.
It’s because “heat” (even “normal temperature” heat), you feel it as a temperature, but at the atomic level it’s atoms having energy and [bouncing off each other](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion) like a vat of agitated tennis balls. So when you’re adding chocolate syrup it’s like adding volleyball balls to agitated tennis balls; all the balls pick up this energy and basically “shake themselves” into an even distribution throughout the vat.
So, TLDR, atoms in solids look [like this](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0b/03/68/0b0368f4d6e909a6c0d31c4bfb07c7cc.gif), atoms in liquids look [like this](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/51/Brownianmotion5particles150frame.gif/220px-Brownianmotion5particles150frame.gif), and atoms in gases are even more agitated and spaced out than in liquids.
And pressure, volume, and temperature [are related](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_laws) because they’re caused by atoms bouncing around at the microscopic level.
Particles of syrup and particles of milk scatter at random, without “knowing” anything, and yet, as a result, they end all mixed up really well. Why is that, you ask? It’s just that possible configurations where milk particles are all on one side and syrup particles are all on the other are few, while configurations where they are all mixed are plenty. **There is nothing more to it.**
See it for yourself, by simplyfing things a bit. Say you have a cup with just 4 particles (2 milk and 2 syrup):
X : *syrup particle*
O : *milk particle*
[ – – – – ] : *the cup, with 4 slots for a particle*
Let’s list *every* possible configuration for the particles to be in the cup:
1: [ X X O O ]
2: [ X O X O ]
3: [ X O O X ]
4: [ O X O X ]
5: [ O X X O ]
6: [ O O X X ]
See? out of 6 possible configurations, only in 2 (n.1 and n.6) the milk and the syrup are well separated. In all the others, they are pretty much all mixed up.
If you repeat this with 6 particles (3 O and 3 X), you’ll see that the disproportion gets bigger. There are 20 configurations now in the list of possibilities, and in only about 4 of them the milk and the syrup are more or less separated (like [XXXOOO] or [OOXOXX]). In all others, they are mixed up pretty well (like [OXXOXO] or [XOXXOO] or [XOXOXO]).
Try 8 particles next. The list of different configurations gets quite longer (they are 70), but only maybe 6-8 of them are well sepatated (depending on how you count them exacly).
And so on. The more particles you use, the more configurations are possible, and, proportionally, fewer and fewer of them are *not* all mixed up.
Your *real* milk and syrup cup is a bit more complex, but the exact same principle applies. It has many many many particles (it takes around 25 digits to write down that number), and the number of possible configurations is unimaginably large (don’t even *try* to write it down in the normal way). The important point is, only in a unimaginably tiny proportion of them the milk and sirup are well separated: in all the others, they are all mixed.
So, it is absurdly unlikely that you just end up in one of the incredibly rare well-separated configurations. Note that there’s no “real” physic law against these configurations. They can legitimately happen, just as much as any other configuration. It’s just that there’s so few of them, compared to the total number, that it’s basically impossible that you ever stumble upon one.
This is what is called the principle of *increasing entropy*, and it shapes the universe. Believe it or not, it even determines that time flows in a direction (“past” is not the same directon as “future”).
It doesn’t. If u shake stuff Ure just basically randomizing all positions of the molecules, the more u do that the closer you come to an equilibrium (See Law of big numbers)
The word you’re looking for is diffusion, which happens to natural molecular movement (heat)
Latest Answers