Thermodynamics Thought Experiment: I Hurt My Brain. Help!

[Cheebs]

Alright, help me find the flaw in my logic here. There must be one. It's killing me.

Imagine two boxes totally enclosed except for a passage connecting them. The opening to the passage is a wide funnel into one box that narrows down to a thin tube into the other box. The passage is extremely long such that the funnel walls are almost perpendicular. The enclosed system contains bouncy balls sparsely and evenly distributed throughout. The volume enclosed by the two boxes is significantly larger than the volume in the connecting tunnel. Shake the whole system vigorously for a significant amount of time and what would you expect at the end? I'm guessing the box with the wide opening would contain less balls than the box with the narrow opening. Right?

Now scale the whole thing down so the bouncy balls are air molecules. You don't have to shake the system anymore. They're bouncing around constantly on their own. After time passes, wouldn't one box contain more air molecules than the other? If that's the case, the increase in density on one side with no corresponding volume change would heat the air. Conversely, the drop in density on the other side would cool the air. And if that's the case, we just created order from disorder without expending any work and broke the second rule of thermodynamics.

So it can't be right.

It's like Maxwell's Demon without the demon. In Maxwell's case you could point to the work being done by the demon and say "there's your entropy". In this case there is no demon.

Help.

[Opaque]

Atoms disperse based on concentration not container size, so while the larger box would have more oxygen molecules it would have the same concentration of them and there would be no density difference.

It's like you're retarded.

[Cheebs]

Larger box? What? I don't think you understood the setup.

Doesn't mean I'm not retarded 'tho. The smooth funnel wall wouldn't scale down in a way that remained smooth to the air molecule. That should have been immediately obvious to me. Fail.

[Opaque]

Same size box, doesn't matter. Gaseous atoms would diffuse in that environment to reach equilibrium, it has nothing to do with how smooth or funneled your connector is.

Why are you doing thought experiments about the second rule of thermodynamics if you don't even understand concentration gradients and diffusion?

[icarusfall]

Do any of you ever think?

[Joust Williams]

Air molecules don't behave like a shaken box of balls.

[A Robot Bit Me]

Y'all laugh at Cheebs all you want, but while you suckers are paying your gas bills, I'm heating my entire apartment with a flower vase I covered with an Us Weekly.

[Yoshi]

I can't believe this isn't a buttplant26 thread.

[Thief Silver]

Air moves to where there is the least amount of pressure, if there's more pressure in one box they will shift until they equalize. It's pretty simple.

[Mman]

Science, how does it work!?