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It took me 10 years to understand entropy

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Re: It took me 10 years to understand entropy

#11

Post by hexxagone »

effie wrote: post #8
javajosh wrote: post #2

Nice writeup! BTW statistical thermodynamics has a name for that set of possible microstates, perhaps the most pretentious sounding name in all of physics, the "canonical ensemble".

> the most pretentious sounding name in all of physics Also, "the free will theorem" and "the god particle".

the "god particle" was actually the "goddamn particle" https://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-higgs-is-called-the-...

Re: It took me 10 years to understand entropy

#12

Post by l33t2328 »

Like the great Von Neuman once quipped, “ Why don't you call it entropy”, von Neumann suggested. “In the first place, a mathematical development very much like yours already exists in Boltzmann's statistical mechanics, and in the second place, no one understands entropy very well, so in any discussion you will be in a position of advantage.”

Re: It took me 10 years to understand entropy

#13

Post by SnowHill9902 »

Statistical mechanics is one way of representing entropy but you don’t need it. The second law of thermodynamics can be expressed in other much more general terms. Also it requires that the system be isolated not “thermally isolated”. There’s other types of interactions such as gravitational and electromagnetic.

Re: It took me 10 years to understand entropy

#14

Post by shannifin »

> "Entropy is not Disorder One of the most popular belief about entropy is that it represents disorder."

This is what confused me the most about entropy in high school, the "order / disorder" lingo. Isn't "order" a metaphysical concept, something a conscious entity thinks about a system? How would nature know the difference? It took me some years to understand that that lingo is indeed misleading. (Still definitely not an expert of course.)

Re: It took me 10 years to understand entropy

#15

Post by raven105x »

Entropy: "to describe energy loss in irreversible processes". We have no clue about what is or is not reversible. Complex systems exhibit self-organizing behavior for no reason (that we understand), and we continue to identify more conditions under which this occurs. How does a Nobel Prize get handed out for identifying/quantifying "self-organization" http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/COMPNATS.html without bringing everything we think we know about entropy under scrutiny? Self-organization does not consume energy any more than entropic decay emits it. Irreversibility is a poor assumption.

Re: It took me 10 years to understand entropy

#16

Post by hackernewds »

shannifin wrote: post #14

> "Entropy is not Disorder One of the most popular belief about entropy is that it represents disorder." This is what confused me the most about entropy in high school, the "order / disorder" lingo. Isn't "order" a metaphysical concept, something a conscious entity thinks about a system? How would nature know the difference? It took me some years to understand that that lingo is indeed misleading. (Still definitely n…

What is a way to articulate it then?

Re: It took me 10 years to understand entropy

#17

Post by 7speter »

Of all places, it was a conversation about the Socratic Forms in a Political Theory course I took in college that really brought the weight of the concept home to me. It went something like "Unlike the realm Socratic forms exist in, everything in our universe is subject to entropy; it is in everything's nature to degrade or decay over time."

Maybe there's more to that? I'm all ears.

Re: It took me 10 years to understand entropy

#18

Post by andrewflnr »

hackernewds wrote: post #16
shannifin wrote: post #14

> "Entropy is not Disorder One of the most popular belief about entropy is that it represents disorder." This is what confused me the most about entropy in high school, the "order / disorder" lingo. Isn't "order" a metaphysical concept, something a conscious entity thinks about a system? How would nature know the difference? It took me some years to understand that that lingo is indeed misleading. (Still definitely n…

What is a way to articulate it then?

OP is about as good as any explanation I've seen.

Re: It took me 10 years to understand entropy

#19

Post by nfc »

I enjoyed the article but have a very minor nitpick. I didn't understand why the author added this sentence.

"However, the timescales involved in these calculation are so unreasonably large and abstract that one could wonder if these makes any sense at all."

Apart from the fact that we could wonder about anything and everything I think the author does not state what evidence do we have to suspect that large enough timescales would change the laws of physics.

It could be the case of course, and it would be great to talk about them if they exist but without further justification I feel that this sentence is an unjustified opinion in what is otherwise a very nice article that helps better understand enthropy.

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