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

quantamagazine.org

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

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others in this thread do believe that entropy is a subjective measure, or more precisely a measurement of the information that an observer has about a system instead of a measurement about the state of the system itself. Information theory easily leads to this interpretation, since for example the informational content of a stream of bytes can very much be observer-dependent. For example, a perfectly encrypted stream…

I feel that my careful distinction between "information theory" entropy and "physical" entropy seems to vanish in your first sentence.

As far as I understand it, the original thread was about whether this distinction exists at all. That is, my understanding is that the whole thread is about opposition to the Quanta article's assertion, which suggests that thermodynamic entropy is the same thing as information-theory entropy and that it is not a "physical" property of a system, but a quantity which measures the information that an observer has about said system.

If you already agree that the two are distinct measures, I believe there is no disagreement in the sub-thread.

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

#142
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a very weird thought experiment, and one that is either missing a lot of context or mostly just wrong. In particular, if two people had access to the same gas tank, and one knew that there were two types of argon and the other didn't, so they would compute different entropies, one of them would still be wrong about how much work could be extracted out of the system. If whifnium did exist, but it was c…

> unless of course you tautologically define entropy as the amount of work the experimenter/humanity can extract from the system Do you have a different definition? (By the way the entropy is the energy that _cannot_ be extracted as work.) The entropy of the system is a function of the particular choice of state variables - those that the experimenters can manipulate and use to extract work. It’s not a property of th…

Yes, the more regular statistical mechanics theory of entropy doesn't make any reference to an observer, and definitely not to a human observer. In that definition, the entropy of a thermodynamic system is proportional to the amount of microstates (positions, types, momentum, etc. of individual particles) that would lead to the same macrostate (temperature, volume, pressure, etc.). It doesn't matter if an observer is aware of any of this, it's an objective property of the system.

Now sure, you could choose to describe a gas (or any other system) in other terms and compute a different value for entropy with the same generalized definition. But you will not get different results from this operation - the second law of thermodynamics will still apply, and your system will be just as able or unable to produce work regardless of how you choose to represent it. You won't get better efficiency out of an engine by choosing to measure something other than the temperature/volume/pressure of the gases involved, for example.

Even if you described the system in terms its specific microstate, and thus by the definition above your computed entropy would be the minimum possible, you still wouldn't be able to do anything that a more regular model couldn't do. Maxwell's demon is not a physically possible being/machine.

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

#144

Why has Quanta degenerated into a mad combination of ineffective science communication and breathless, and slightly envious references to yoga retreats in the North of England. It's become a lifestyle magazine for the self-important, science-adjacent middlebrows. Most obviously, it's nerd-sniping for HN. And before you _instinctively_ (it will be instinctive) downvote me to oblivion, please read the piece and assure…

This is an example of better writing on the same subject. Clear and concise, and with less extraneous material. It doesn't have the nice animations, but the writing is just better.

https://adamilab.blogspot.com/2014/06/whose-entropy-is-it-an...

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

#145
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only true if one assumes that (a) physical processes are fundamentally completely deterministic, and that (b) it is possible to measure the initial state of a system to at least the same level of precision as the factors that influence the outcome. Assumption (a) is currently believed to be false in the case of measuring a quantum system: to the best of our current knowledge, the result of measuring a quantum…

The idea that entropy represents the uncertainty in our description of a system works perfectly well in quantum statistical mechanics (actually better than in classical statistical mechanics where the entropy of a system diverges to minus infinity as the precision of the description increases). The entropy is zero when we have a pure state, a state perfectly defined by a wave function, and greater than zero when we h…

The post I was replying to claims that probability is not a physical property of an observed system, that it is a property of an observer trying to observe a system. The examples given in the quoted link all talk about experiments like rolling dice or tossing coins, and explain that knowledge of mechanics shows that these things are perfectly predictable mechanical processes, and so any "probability" we assign to them is only a measure of our own lack of knowledge of the result, which is ultimately a measure of our lack of knowledge of the initial state.

So, the link says, there's no such thing as a "fair coin" or a "fair coin toss", only questions of whether observers can predict the state or not (this is mostly used to argue for Bayesian statistics as the correct way to view statistics, while frequentist statistics is considered ultimately incoherent if looked at in enough detail).

I was pointing out however that much of this uncertainty in actual physics is in fact fundamental, not observer dependent. Of course, an observer may have much less information than physically possible, but it can't have more information about some system than a physical limit.

So, even an observer that has the most possible information about the initial state of a system, and who knows the relevant laws of physics perfectly, and has enough compute power to compute the output state in a reasonable amount of time, can still only express that state as a probability. This probability is what I would consider a physical property of that system, and not observer-dependent. It is also clearly measurable by such an observer, using simple frequentist techniques, assuming the observer is able to prepare the same initial state with the required level of precision.

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

#146
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unless of course you tautologically define entropy as the amount of work the experimenter/humanity can extract from the system Do you have a different definition? (By the way the entropy is the energy that _cannot_ be extracted as work.) The entropy of the system is a function of the particular choice of state variables - those that the experimenters can manipulate and use to extract work. It’s not a property of th…

Yes, the more regular statistical mechanics theory of entropy doesn't make any reference to an observer, and definitely not to a human observer. In that definition, the entropy of a thermodynamic system is proportional to the amount of microstates (positions, types, momentum, etc. of individual particles) that would lead to the same macrostate (temperature, volume, pressure, etc.). It doesn't matter if an observer is…

> the entropy of a thermodynamic system is proportional to the amount of microstates (positions, types, momentum, etc. of individual particles) that would lead to the same macrostate (temperature, volume, pressure, etc.). It doesn't matter if an observer is aware of any of this, it's an objective property of the system.

The meaning of "would lead to the same macrostate" (and therefore the entropy) is not an "objective" property of the system (positions, types, momentum, etc. of individual particles). At least not in the way that the energy is an "objective" property of the system.

The entropy is an "objective" property of the pair formed by the system (which can be described by a microstate) and some particular way of defining macrostates for that system.

That's what people mean when they say that the entropy is not an "objective" property of a physical system: that it depends on how we choose to describe that physical system (and that description is external to the physical system itself).

Of course, if you define "system" as "the underlying microscopical system plus this thermodynamical system description that takes into account some derived state variables only" the situation is not the same as if you define "system" as "the underlying microscopical system alone".

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

#147
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that entropy represents the uncertainty in our description of a system works perfectly well in quantum statistical mechanics (actually better than in classical statistical mechanics where the entropy of a system diverges to minus infinity as the precision of the description increases). The entropy is zero when we have a pure state, a state perfectly defined by a wave function, and greater than zero when we h…

The post I was replying to claims that probability is not a physical property of an observed system, that it is a property of an observer trying to observe a system. The examples given in the quoted link all talk about experiments like rolling dice or tossing coins, and explain that knowledge of mechanics shows that these things are perfectly predictable mechanical processes, and so any "probability" we assign to the…

> an observer may have much less information than physically possible, but it can't have more information about some system than a physical limit.

Still the probability represents the uncertainty of the observer. You say that "the most possible information" is still not enough because "measurement is a time-consuming process" and it's not "possible to measure" with infinite precision. I'd say that you're just confirming that "the lack of knowledge" happens but that doesn't mean the physical state is undefined.

You call that uncertainty a property of the system but that doesn't seem right. The evolution of the system will happen according to what the initial state was - not according to what we thought it could have been. Maybe we don't know if A or B will happen because we don't know if the initial state is a or b. But if later we observe A we will know that the initial state was a. (Maybe you would say that at t=0 the physical state is not well-defined but at t=1 the physical state at t=0 becomes well-defined retrospectively?)

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

#148
post #129

Entropy got a lot more exciting to me after hearing Sean Carroll talk about it. He has a foundational/philosophical bent and likes to point out that there are competing definitions of entropy set on different philosophical foundations, one of them seemingly observer dependent: - https://youtu.be/x9COqqqsFtc?si=cQkfV5IpLC039Cl5 - https://youtu.be/XJ14ZO-e9NY?si=xi8idD5JmQbT5zxN Leonard Susskind has lots of great talks…

why is it exciting at all? it is the most depressing concept i have ever heard.

I’ll wait for the GUT before I declare something the most depressing concept

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

#149
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the more regular statistical mechanics theory of entropy doesn't make any reference to an observer, and definitely not to a human observer. In that definition, the entropy of a thermodynamic system is proportional to the amount of microstates (positions, types, momentum, etc. of individual particles) that would lead to the same macrostate (temperature, volume, pressure, etc.). It doesn't matter if an observer is…

> the entropy of a thermodynamic system is proportional to the amount of microstates (positions, types, momentum, etc. of individual particles) that would lead to the same macrostate (temperature, volume, pressure, etc.). It doesn't matter if an observer is aware of any of this, it's an objective property of the system. The meaning of "would lead to the same macrostate" (and therefore the entropy) is not an "objectiv…

> That's what people mean when they say that the entropy is not an "objective" property of a physical system: that it depends on how we choose to describe that physical system (and that description is external to the physical system itself).

I understand that's what they mean, but this is the part that I think is either trivial or wrong. That is, depending on your choice you'll of course get different values, but it won't change anything about the system. It's basically like choosing to measure speed in meters per second or in furlongs per fortnight, or choosing the coordinate system and reference frame: you get radically different values, but relative results are always the same.

If a system has high entropy in the traditional sense, and another one has lower entropy, and the difference is high enough that you can run an engine by transferring heat from one to the other, then this difference and this fact will remain true whatever valid choice you make for how you describe the system's macrostates. This is the sense in which the entropy is an objective, observer-independent property of the system itself: same as energy, position, momentum, and anything else we care to measure.

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

#150
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…

>> The classification of several microstates into the same macrostate, is this not a distinctly observer-centred function?

> It seems that way if we consider only our neat models, but it fails to explain why 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, entropy depends on the probability distribution, not the observer.

I am not sure that I agree with this -- it feels a little too "neat and tidy" to me. One could argue, for example, that these seemingly-emergent agglomerations of states into these cohesive "macro" units are an emergent property limitations of modelling based of the physical properties of the universe -- but there's no way to necessarily easily tell if this set of behaviors comes from an underlying limitation of _dynamics_ of the underlying state of the system(s) based on the rules or this universe or the limitations of our _capacity to model_ the underlying system based on constraints imposed by the rules of this universe.

Entropy by definition involves a relationship (generally at least) between two quantities -- even if implicitly, and oftentimes this is some amount of data and a model used to describe this data. In some senses, being unable to model what we don't know (the unknown unknowns) about this particular kind of emergent state (agglomeration into apparent macrostates) is in some form a necessary and complete requirement for modelling the whole system of possible systems as a whole.

As a general rule, I tend to consider all discretizations of things that can be described as apparently-continuous processes inherently "wrong", but still useful. This goes for any kind of definition -- the explicit definitions we use for determining the relationship of entropy between quantities, how we define integers, words we use when relating concepts with seemingly different characteristics (different kinds of uncertainty, for example).

We induce a form of loss over the original quantity when doing so -- entropy w.r.t. the underlying model, but this loss is the very thing that also allows us to reason over seemingly previously-unreasonable-about things (for example -- mathematical axioms, etc). These forms of "informational straightjackets" offer tradeoffs in how much we can do with them, vs how much we comprehend them. So, even in this light, the very idea of modelling a thing will always induce some form of loss over what we are working with, meaning that said system can never be used to reason about the properties of itself in a larger form -- never verifiably, ever.

Using this induction, we can extend it to attempt to reason then about this meta-level of analysis, showing that because it is indeed a form of model sub-selected from the larger possible space of models, that there is some form of inherent measurable loss, and it cannot be trusted to reason even about itself. And therein lies a contradiction!

However, one could postulate that this form of loss results in any model necessarily has some form of "collision" or inherent contradiction in it -- theories like Borsuk-Ulam come to mind, and so we must eventually come to the naked depravity of picking some flawed model to analyze our understanding of the world, and hope to realize along the way that we find a sense of comfort and security in the knowledge that it is built on sand and strings, and its validity may unwind and slip away at any minute.

A very curious ideal, indeed.

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