Today, balloons are routinely used in scientific investigations of the upper atmosphere. On occasion, specially designed high-altitude balloons have also carried people into the stratosphere; some individuals have performed parachute jumps in the extremely thin air. Balloons have been considered for space missions to Saturn, Venus and Mars, but so far, Earth is the only planet to have hosted these kinds of expeditions. If you add those blue bars up, you'll find they add up to 462. So there are 462 ways to arrange the 6 sheep in this situation. Say we’ve got three sheep. These sheep are shuffling about in a farm, pretty much at random. And this farm is split into three plots of lands.

You should see that as you make things bigger, the graph of arrangements becomes more sharply peaked, centered around the most likely (i.e. the highest entropy) state. About a month later, on Nov. 21, Pilâtre de Rozier and theMarquis d'Arlandes, a French military officer, made the first free ascent in a hot air balloon. The pair flew from the center of Paris to the suburbs, about 5.5 miles (9 km), in 25 minutes. Benjamin Franklinwrote in his journal about witnessing the balloon take off: Just like for the sheep, there’s no new law of physics that ‘tells’ the energy to spread out, or the entropy to go up. There are simply more ways to spread energy out than to keep it contained, so that's what we should expect to see happen. Higher entropy states are more probable than lower entropy ones. We observed it lift off in the most majestic manner. When it reached around 250 feet [76 m] in altitude, the intrepid voyagers lowered their hats to salute the spectators. We could not help feeling a certain mixture of awe and admiration."

Remix

You can see that, as you add more sheep or plots of land, the number of possible sheep arrangements grows exponentially.

The Chimney Balloon is made from plastic, and is designed to be inflated, using a pump or by blowing into a pipe, to fill the chimney and prevent cold air from coming in and warm air from travelling up and out.

Why Big Is Different

Just as when draught proofing a front door or your windows, there are many different products on the market designed to prevent heat loss from the chimney.