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We are used to messing things up on their own - on the desk or in the children's room, to name just two examples.
That doesn't surprise anyone.
It is more exciting when something organized spontaneously emerges from disorder.
The emergence of life from dead matter at the very beginning of earthly evolution is a particularly impressive example of the emergence of complexity and order.
But even simple sand dunes result in orderly structures that have arisen from “untidy” sand under the influence of the wind.
Scientists have even defined a quantity to describe the degree of order or disorder: entropy.
Large entropy equates to a lot of disorder.
The smaller the entropy, the greater the order of a system.
Without external influence, the entropy of every system increases “by itself”.
The entropy grows.
That is a law of nature.
But if a system is supplied with energy from outside in a suitable manner, then its entropy can also be reduced.
The order grows.
For example, in order to maintain the orderly state of a living organism, it must absorb energy in the form of food.
Ingo Althöfer in front of his washing machine
Source: Ingo Althöfer
The process of entropy reduction can be illustrated with a simple experiment that everyone can do at home if you own Lego bricks and a washing machine.
A few years ago, the adventurous mathematician Ingo Althöfer from the University of Jena put a handful of Lego bricks in the washing machine for cleaning.
It is not surprising that these were then clean.
But a number of stones had put together "by themselves" to form larger structures.
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"There were structures made of two, three and four Lego bricks, sometimes objects made of five bricks," reports Professor Althöfer, "but there were no structures made of six or more bricks." That fascinated the researcher and he kept repeating the experiment and again and again.
The washing machine supplies the energy that enables the creation of orderly structures.
Althöfer regards this as an analogy to the formation of the first biomolecules, as was modeled in 1953 with Miller's primeval soup experiment.
The experiment can be copied
If you feel like playing a little creator with the help of your washing machine, Althöfer will give you a few tips along the way.
The thing also works if you put the Lego bricks in socks and knot them.
On the one hand, this reduces the volume when washing the stones, which was so big that Althöfer's wife Beate complained about it.
From then on, Althöfer only experimented with Legos in socks.
Althöfer put the Lego bricks in socks for his wife
Source: Prof. Ingo Althöfer
These also protect the surfaces of the stones and the washing machine and prevent the plastic particles from ending up in the fluff filter - this is what Althöfer did.
In addition, washing temperatures higher than 40 degrees should not be selected.
This can lead to small deformations of the stones, which then makes it difficult or impossible to come together.
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"You get the best results", says Althöfer, "if you put a couple of flat Lego plates in the washing machine with the bricks." The bricks seem to like to grow on these plates.
And another tip: with completely new and relatively old Lego bricks that are already worn out, you get the worst results.
"It works best with middle-aged stones," Althöfer found out.
There are 915,103,765 different arrangements of how six Lego bricks of the same color can be put together with eight knobs.
That can be calculated exactly mathematically.
But why do structures made of six Lego bricks not or only extremely seldom in the experiments in the washing machine?
Althöfer has a simple explanation for this.
The stones primarily join together when they fall from top to bottom in the drum.
That is how they grow.
From a certain size, they break apart again when they fall.
Apparently six stones are the critical size.
The experiments are not only didactically suitable for illustrating the physical term entropy.
Althöfer also sees his experiments as a Monte Carlo experiment.
In mathematics, there are so-called Monte Carlo algorithms that repeatedly perform random calculations in order to achieve approximate results for a problem.
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Althöfer did not carry out enough tests to be able to claim with statistically secured significance that blue and white Lego bricks unite with and with one another more frequently.
But his gut feeling tells him that it is.
If you should experiment yourself, pay particular attention to this aspect.
In any case, don't expect too much from the washes.
Althöfer reports about an elderly lady who had heard about his Lego experiments and then cut a larger Lego model into individual bricks and then put it into the drum.
She called him and complained that the stones were by no means used to create the original model.
So she had obviously misunderstood something.
"Middle-aged" stones are best, according to the mathematician
Source: Prof. Ingo Althöfer
Althöfer tries the washing machine at home.
In his office at the university he deals with game theory, whereby in this context "game" has nothing to do with Lego bricks, but rather focuses on the actions of people.
For example, Althöfer has researched how the introduction of a transaction tax on the stock exchange would affect the actions of the players.
His result: if there was a transaction tax, there would be even more gambling on the stock exchange.
"That sounds implausible at first glance," says Althöfer, "but our game theory analyzes have led to precisely this result."
This article was first published in September 2018.