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The second law of thermodynamics states that "the entropy of an isolated system does not decrease". This is often taken to mean that "disorder always increases" and is frequently misinterpreted. Another way of putting it is "An isolated system's ability to do work decreases over time".

It is a law of statistical mechanics, rather than a fundamental law of nature. As such, it is not entirely impossible to be violated; however, its violation is extremely unlikely. But because its violation is not impossible, only extremely unlikely, it turns out that over extremely long timeframes, its violation may eventually occur. For example, a classical system which exhibits the second law of thermodynamics over reasonable timespans, may nonetheless violate the law over times on the order of its Poincaré recurrence time - when Poincaré recurrence occurs, the entropy of the system will decrease to its original value. However, given the Poincaré recurrence time is going to be greatly longer than the age of the universe so far, this is a purely theoretical consideration.