I don't think either one is false. To me, 2 looks false if you consider the "system" in question to be the entire glass of water. But my interpretation is that in this case the glass of water is really many very small systems (pockets of unequal amounts of energy) all interacting with each other.
Let's say you're given a few hot potatoes and have to cool them down as fast as possible. You have a refrigerator but you can only keep one of them in it at a time. How do you decide which one to put in at any given time so they all reach temp the fastest? When the "system" involves many possible pairings of temperature differentials it feels very intuitive that some configurations would be better than others. So it removes the mind-bending thermodynamics law breaking aspect of it.
Admittedly, this isn't really what the article says! I honestly don't get how my above intuition squares with the whole energy minima thing, and so while useful as a thought exercise to at least help me entertain the idea, I'm not really sure it's correct?
Let's say you're given a few hot potatoes and have to cool them down as fast as possible. You have a refrigerator but you can only keep one of them in it at a time. How do you decide which one to put in at any given time so they all reach temp the fastest? When the "system" involves many possible pairings of temperature differentials it feels very intuitive that some configurations would be better than others. So it removes the mind-bending thermodynamics law breaking aspect of it.
Admittedly, this isn't really what the article says! I honestly don't get how my above intuition squares with the whole energy minima thing, and so while useful as a thought exercise to at least help me entertain the idea, I'm not really sure it's correct?