/sci/ - Science & Math

>>7921889
On a microscopic scale that is what happens.
When your system settles into a low energy state, it doesn't have enough energy to get out. Over time the random jiggling finds itself in such a local minimum of energy and becomes stuck - the thermal motion isn't energetic enough to escape the low energy state. That's why some chemical reactions require heat to get them going - you need to supply energy to get the system out of the slump.
There's more to it that this, especially on the level of individual atoms and molecules since these are quantum objects and classical reasoning does not apply, but the basic idea is that everything happens randomly, and over time this random motions tends to push towards certain states - the low energy ones.