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What is entropy? A measure of just how little we know

quantamagazine.org

111–120 of 169 posts

Re: What is entropy? A measure of just how little we know

#111
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But entropy is also something that we can get from experimental measurements. In this case, the experimental setup does not care about microstates and macrostates, it just has properties like enthalpy, heat capacity and temperature. […] experimental measurements of the entropy of a given materials are consistent and independent of whatever model the people doing the experiment were operating on. Fundamentally, entr…

Temperature is not just an anthropomorphic concept, and temperature and entropy are directly linked concept you can't have one without the other.

Temperature and entropy are directly linked; it follows that temperature is also anthropomorphic. Although I think "observer-dependent" would be a better way to put it; it doesn't have to specifically be relative to a human.

Re: What is entropy? A measure of just how little we know

#112
post #20

The interactive graphic that tries to show entropy is subjective doesn't sit right for me. They fail to properly define the macrostate of the system under consideration, then show two different observed entropies for two different macrostates (Colors for Alice and Shapes for Bob). That doesn't show entropy is subjective, it shows that defining the system is subjective. The same two macrostates would still have the sa…

Thank you for articulating what was bothering me about this. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but you're right. They are confusing defining the system with defining the entropy of a system and then saying it's the entropy that is subjective. That isn't the case at all. Entropy is just a measurement.

That can't be right, because the arrow of time depends on the universe being in a high entropy state when the Big Bang happened. There were no observers then. Also, the 2nd law of thermodynamics doesn't depend on observers. The universe overall will continue to evolve into a higher entropy state without any intelligent observers making measurements. As in stars will burn out and blackholes will evaporate, and the temperature of the universe will get close to absolute zero.

Re: What is entropy? A measure of just how little we know

#113
post #107
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5) there is no every system, there is only the universe in which all systems increase in entropy even if individual objects (block of ice) do not. You're bleeding off entropy into the universe you can never get back.

In classical thermodynamics, the entropy of a system is defined if and only if it is in a thermodynamic equilibrium.

The universe isn't in thermodynamic equilibrium, thus the arrow of time.

Re: What is entropy? A measure of just how little we know

#114
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. A theory of everything does not imply either the computability of a future state or determinism. Even if our ToE is deterministic the universe may be computationally irreducible, meaning it cannot be computed accurately at lower resolution in all cases. Note that such a universe could contain within it regions that are computationally reducible, just not the whole and not all regions. I would expect…

"cannot be computed accurately at lower resolution" The Map is not the Territory. Our universe is the lowest resolution. So to compute the next instant in our Universe, would need another entire Universe. We could be the computation occurring.

The entire universe could be the quantum many worlds (branches in higher dimensional Hilbert space), and you would have to compute the wave function of the universe.

Re: What is entropy? A measure of just how little we know

#115
post #20

The interactive graphic that tries to show entropy is subjective doesn't sit right for me. They fail to properly define the macrostate of the system under consideration, then show two different observed entropies for two different macrostates (Colors for Alice and Shapes for Bob). That doesn't show entropy is subjective, it shows that defining the system is subjective. The same two macrostates would still have the sa…

I had a lot of questions about similar issues, mostly surrounding the question of "what is the nature of 'subjective'?"

The article deals with this a bit but not as much as I would like — maybe because of the state of the literature?

The linked paper by Safranek et al on observational entropy was sort of interesting, noting how a choice of coarse graining in to macrostates could lead to different entropies, but it doesn't really address the question of why you'd choose a coarse graining or macrostate to begin with, which seems critical in all of this?

In the information theory literature, there's a certain information cost (in a Kolmogorov complexity sense) associated with choosing a given coarse graining or macrostate to begin with — in their example, choosing shape or color to define entropy against. So my intuition is that the observational entropy is kind of part of a larger entropy or informational cost including that of the coarse graining that's chosen.

This kind of loops back to what they discuss later about costs of observation and information bottlenecks, but it (and the articles it links to) don't really seem to address this issue of differential macrostate costs explicitly in detail? It's a bit unclear to me; it seems like there's discussion that there is a thermodynamic cost but not how that cost accrues, or why you'd adopt one macrostate vs another (note Alice and Bob in their subjectivity example are defined by different physical constraints, and can be thought of two observational systems with different constraints).

It's also interesting to me to think about it from another perspective, which is let's say you have a box full of a large number of particles that are "purely random". In that scenario it doesn't really matter what Alice and Bob see, only the number of particles etc. The entropy with regard to say, color, will depend on the number of colors, not the position of the particles because they're maximally entropic. In reorganizing the particles with reference to a certain property, they're each decreasing the entropy from that purely random state by a certain amount that I can think be related in some way to the information involved in returning the particles to a purely random state?

A lot of the article has links to other scientific and mathematical domains. Some of the stuff about information costs of observation has ties in the math and computer science literature through Wolpert (2008) who approaches it from a computational perspective, and later Rukavicka. There's similar ideas in the neuroscience literature about entropy reduction efficiency (the names of some of the people involved there I'm forgetting).

I really liked this Quanta piece but there's a lot of fuzziness around certain areas and I couldn't tell if that was just due to fuzzy writing,fuzzy state of the literature, or my poor understanding of things.

Re: What is entropy? A measure of just how little we know

#116
post #2

> As physicists have worked to unite seemingly disparate fields over the past century, they have cast entropy in a new light — turning the microscope back on the seer and shifting the notion of disorder to one of ignorance. Entropy is seen not as a property intrinsic to a system but as one that’s relative to an observer who interacts with that system. Maybe I have the benefit of giant shoulders, but this seems like a…

> Maybe I have the benefit of giant shoulders, but this seems like a fairly mundane observation. It is not mundane, and it is also not right, at least for entropy in Physics and Thermodynamics. > High-entropy states are those macrostates which have many corresponding microstates. That is how you deduce entropy form a given model. But entropy is also something that we can get from experimental measurements. In this ca…

> Fundamentally, entropy depends on the probability distribution, not the observer.

Right but a probability distribution represents the uncertainty in an observer so there is no inconsistency here (else you're falling for the Mind Projection Fallacy http://www-biba.inrialpes.fr/Jaynes/cc10k.pdf).

Re: What is entropy? A measure of just how little we know

#117
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But entropy is also something that we can get from experimental measurements. In this case, the experimental setup does not care about microstates and macrostates, it just has properties like enthalpy, heat capacity and temperature. […] experimental measurements of the entropy of a given materials are consistent and independent of whatever model the people doing the experiment were operating on. Fundamentally, entr…

Temperature is not just an anthropomorphic concept, and temperature and entropy are directly linked concept you can't have one without the other.

It is though. Temperature is an aggregate summary statistic used when the observer doesn't know the details of individual particles. If you did know their position, speed and velocities, you could violate the laws of entropy as Maxwell's thought experiment demonstrated in 1867 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon

Re: What is entropy? A measure of just how little we know

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Temperature is not just an anthropomorphic concept, and temperature and entropy are directly linked concept you can't have one without the other.

It is though. Temperature is an aggregate summary statistic used when the observer doesn't know the details of individual particles. If you did know their position, speed and velocities, you could violate the laws of entropy as Maxwell's thought experiment demonstrated in 1867 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon

Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment that involves a magical being. It's an interesting thought experiment, and it provides some insights about the relationship between macro states and micro states, but it's not actually a refutation of anything, and it doesn't describe any physically realizable system, even in theory. There is no way to build a physical system that can act as the demon, and so it follows that entropy is not actually dependent on the information actually available to physical systems.

This is obviously visible in the observer-independence of many phenomena linked to temperature. A piece of ice will melt in a large enough bath of hot water regardless of whether you know the microstates of every atom in the bath and the ice crystal.

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