system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If you mix oil and water in a bowl and wait for a while, you will see gravity seperate them and put all of the oil on top. How is this consistant with the law of increasing entropy?
gpt
I probably won't explain this fully or with the highest degree of articulation, but here we go...

It minimizes the surface area where water and oil interact, which frees up the the largest amount of molecules from restrictive interactions, thus giving maximum entropy.

If you imagine a single oil droplet in water, a large hydration shell of water molecules. Those molecules are basically stuck in that configuration, giving them high entropy (but minimizing enthalpy). 

If the oil were to suddenly dissappear, then those 'trapped' water molecules could then more freely move about and incorporate back into the bulk solution, forming and breaking countless hydrogen bonds as they move around and mix. Allowing for that movement within the bulk solution gives the greatest entropy.

Now, you can imagine many many oil droplets. Each would have their own hydration shell of water, reducing entropy. As the oil droplets come together, their volume would increase disproportionatly with their surface area. This results in the same amount of oil with less surface area, and thus a smaller group of 'trapped' water molecules.

A similar phenomonon is one of the main drivers for protein folding (burial of hydrophobic regions in the solvent-inaccessible interior, while hydrophillic regions are on the outside).