Why can't the process of cooking an egg be reversed?

Question

please help explain

p.s. proteins are affected by environmental conditions such as heat and pH.

Answer 1

That would be an entropy problem.

Which is to say, it CAN be reversed, but it's going to take at least the same amount of energy that it took in the first place, and a proper manufacturing facility. If you like to think of things in that way, you might feed the egg to a chicken, who would then gain the nutrients and energy to produce a new egg. Viola! You've reversed the process.

But to get more back to the point, the reason you can throw energy randomly at an egg and turn it into goo, but not throw energy randomly at goo and turn it into an egg has to do with the second law of thermodynamics. This says that in a closed system, the amount of disorder always increases. Thus your bedroom just naturally gets messy, but it only becomes clean if you expend energy to make it so.

As you heat the egg, you damage all the consituents and the break into pieces. That's a favorable thing to happen. Getting all the pieces back is like assembling a puzzle. Dig?

Answer 2

Biological and natural processes can not be reversed and the chnages that take place are irreversible . A tree can not be made into a seed by reversal even of the time .you can not get back yeaterday or go to yesterday. Butter can be made gheee and ghee can not be revered into butter.Milk can b emade butter milk and buter milk can not be revered into milk. you cannot become a baby though you grew inot an adult from the stage of a baby.Teh natural process ar moving forward just as tree growing from a seed . and they can not bge made into a seed . The dead man can not be brought back to life . Time that has gone will not come back.We are alsoi not seeing the same sky all the days aabd all the time . We are moving in space so fast that we are never in the same spot even when we complet one round of our orbit around the sun. Vbecasue the galaxy itself is moving . Even if we can trael faster than the light we can onot catch of the last time and days .So time is precious and should not be wasted too.
Nature does not allow reversal and allows forward movement by change .and mutation. evey element in the world is subject ot natural decay and all substances and matter being made of elements should be suject to change / decay.nature can not be conquered just as the space can not be seen in its totality

Answer 3

Some good responses!

Proteins have 3 structures: primary is what amino acids their made of; secondary is their sequence ; third is the shape that the protein is bent/coiled into.

Cooking does not necessarily affect the first two structures of a protein - that's why we have to have proteases in our gut - to chop up the protein chains that are still there into smaller parts. But the activity & characteristics of a protein molecule are as dependent on the tertiary structure as on the other two structures.

Proteins are big molecules. Imagine a long, pretzel-looking thing with lots of twists & bends. Now imagine that as you heat it up, it starts to unravel. That's what happens in the cooking process to proteins (& also one of the things that happens to live tissue when it is burned badly) Ditto for exposure to strong acids & strong bases effect on proteins.

Unraveled proteins can't "fix" themselves - they did not self assemble in the first place. And, they not longer have the same properties as before. This process of unraveling is called denaturing.

(I do not know why the same word is used for alcohol)

;-)

Answer 4

Water in the egg evaporates, and the remaining portion of the egg undergoes chemical changes. Those chemical changes are irreversible, because they resulted in the consumption of the heat that was supplied during cooking, and the resulting compounds are more stable than the material of the raw egg. The laws of thermodynamics prevent the cooked egg from spontaneously releasing the energy of cooking and combining with ambient water to go back to the uncooking state.

Answer 5

The procees is irreversible just as a child can never return to embryonic stage in mother's womb.

Answer 6

That is caused by the 1st law of thermodynamics.

Answer 7

because once the proteins are denatured, it cannot be reverted to its original state

Answer 8

Because it's cooked?