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It took me 10 years to understand entropy

cantorsparadise.com

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Re: It took me 10 years to understand entropy

#211

but is it not hubris to think that we really know much about the origin and outcome of the universe? is it wise to make decisions based on this modicum of knowledge that we currently have regarding thermodynamics and the universe? I suspect that the scientists of a trillion years from now will know a lot more than we do know...so, I don't really much that much confidence in current pronouncements regarding the beginn…

As the old quote runs...

"[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." -- Asimov

It isn't wise to say you're ignorant, it's wise to know how ignorant you are. If I see a coin come up HHH and have to bet on the next 2 flips, you can be damn sure I'll bet HH. You can bet HT, TH, or whatever else at equal probability, but I suspect I'll come out the winner more frequently than you.

Re: It took me 10 years to understand entropy

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright. I agree we seem to be stuck in a weird loop where we agree about all the observable facts but somehow are on different wavelengths in spite of that. And I totally agree, entropy is a property of a macrostate. The information step comes inseparably in when you go from a system description to a macrostate. And you might just shuffle the confusion from not knowing what entropy is to not knowing what a macrostat…

Why shd the entropy of a brick not be an objective property (apart from a constant). I mean you can measure it, isnt it basically the integral of C/T dt?

That would be a circular calculation, because the foundational definition of temperature is rooted in entropy: T = 1/(dS/dQ).

You can measure the temperature of a brick with a thermometer, but then you should understand what that thermometer is really telling you: https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/theory.1.pdf

And when you do that, you'll see why a thermometer doesn't do a good job of measuring the effective temperature of, say, a pumped laser crystal.

Re: It took me 10 years to understand entropy

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is subjective. We just only have such blunt instruments for practically measuring states, relative to the gargantuan amount of entropy in most real systems, that the subjective nature of entropy is easy to miss. But in a world where the frontiers of thermodynamics have moved from steam engines to lasers, computers, DNA, and black holes, the difference is increasingly obvious and important. With steam engines,…

Very few people know this but. Information entropy and statistical mechanical entropy are two different things. They share the same equation and the same name but they are two unrelated concepts. You have conflated the two. The person you are responding to is referring to statistical entropy. Basically in this entire thread nobody, including you, is fully grasping the situation.

If you think there is no relation between the different things called entropy apart from the name maybe you're not fully grasping the situation either.

Re: It took me 10 years to understand entropy

#214
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

U, the internal energy is objective. The free energy F = U - TS is the maximum amount of work you can extract from the system. This depends on how much you know about the system. S does indeed depend on what you know about the system. See the Gibbs Paradox for more information.

If two people disagree on the maximum amount of work that could be extracted from a given system (with both of them basing their figure on their own evaluation of S), are there any cases where it would it be impossible to empirically demonstrate that at least the proponent of the lower figure was wrong? If only changes in S (and F) have measurable consequences, would that not merely mean that assigning an absolute va…

> are there any cases where it would it be impossible to empirically demonstrate that at least the proponent of the lower figure was wrong?

Isn't it more interesting to examine a situation where it would be possible to empirically demonstrate that the proponent of the lower figure was wrong?

Re: It took me 10 years to understand entropy

#215
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This adds a lot more microstates that wasn't available before, and none of the old microstates are now possible since all old microstates had a total energy level half of what each new microstate has. As I'm sure you know, the microstates of that sample of gas at some fixed temperature don't have all the same energy. For each temperature there will be a distribution of possible energies. If the temperatures are clo…

> As I'm sure you know, the microstates of that sample of gas at some fixed temperature don't have all the same energy. Depends if you do classical statistical physics or quantum. If you do classical they all have the same energy. If you do quantum you have to weight the states according to their probability densities, and the probabilities that the energy deviates are very small which is why classical works fine eve…

> Depends if you do classical statistical physics or quantum. If you do classical they all have the same energy.

That's just completely wrong. With all due respect, you should (re?)learn the classical statistical physics :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_distribution

Re: It took me 10 years to understand entropy

#217
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As I'm sure you know, the microstates of that sample of gas at some fixed temperature don't have all the same energy. Depends if you do classical statistical physics or quantum. If you do classical they all have the same energy. If you do quantum you have to weight the states according to their probability densities, and the probabilities that the energy deviates are very small which is why classical works fine eve…

> Depends if you do classical statistical physics or quantum. If you do classical they all have the same energy. That's just completely wrong. With all due respect, you should (re?)learn the classical statistical physics :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_distribution

That is for a subset of a larger system, not for a closed system. A closed system has fixed energy in classical.

So for example, if you have a gas as a closed system, takes a part of that, then you can measure that parts energy distribution by just accumulating the different micro states, yes. But if you view that part as a closed system, then if it has higher energy then it has higher temperature (if it is in the same phase) and thus energy will on average flow out of it to the other parts, if it didn't have higher temperature then it would be a stable system and that part would just have higher energy, which we know doesn't happen in for example gasses, (but it can happen with phase transitions, like an ice cube in water).

Edit: And it doesn't make sense to talk about temperature of subsets of systems. Temperature only deals with what happens when you connect two large systems, it is a macroscopic property, so when you calculate temperature you always deal with calculate that via entropy of closed systems.

So Boltzmann distribution happens when you have calculated the temperature for a macroscopic system as if it was closed, and then you start to calculate properties of some subsystem of that, that is how you get Boltzmann distribution. Not sure how you think these things were derived, have you tried reading a physics book on the subject and gone through how the formulas are derived?

Also, in these calculations you never ever mix two temperatures in a single system, as that isn't stable. The formulas only works for stable states. So if you have two different temperatures you have two different systems.

Edit Edit: I can't post more since I sometimes post stupid political stuff. Anyway, I answered your post already, the formulas we are talking about here doesn't deal with the case where systems of different temperatures interact. They only work for closed systems. If you heat a subset of a room to a higher temperature, then you now have a dynamic system where energy flows out of that subset, none of the formulas we have discussed here applies in that scenario. You can use them to calculate approximate properties of the systems by treating them as if they were closed though, still the Boltzmann distribution doesn't apply there for the entirety of those subsystems, since it assumes that everything surrounding it has the same temperature, which in your scenario the surroundings do not.

Anyway, all of these formulas are derived based on completely closed systems with no transfer of energy or particles. that is the source of entropy calculations, if you want to understand entropy you have to deal with such systems. Boltzmann's law is an example of a formula derived from entropy calculations, you can't use that to talk about entropy.

(Note, I learned these things in another language than English, so I might use the wrong words for some things, but I know how statistical physics, temperature and entropy works, are derived etc)

Re: It took me 10 years to understand entropy

#218
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Depends if you do classical statistical physics or quantum. If you do classical they all have the same energy. That's just completely wrong. With all due respect, you should (re?)learn the classical statistical physics :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_distribution

That is for a subset of a larger system, not for a closed system. A closed system has fixed energy in classical. So for example, if you have a gas as a closed system, takes a part of that, then you can measure that parts energy distribution by just accumulating the different micro states, yes. But if you view that part as a closed system, then if it has higher energy then it has higher temperature (if it is in the sa…

[deleted]

Re: It took me 10 years to understand entropy

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is my mental model, yes. More bits are needed to capture more detailed (or micro-states as you called it elsewhere in this thread, or finer-grained) information. Let's say there's a stone, we want to know its details. If all we want to know is whether it weighs more than 100KG or not then one bit will do. 1 means > 100KG and 0 means This is just for the storage though; in order to gain the information we need to…

The article does say that some crystalline structures can have more entropy (information) than their fluid state. How could that be? Any ideas on what that fluid state might be? The information content in a crystal is really low.

Unfortunately the author doesn't explain it beyond sharing a reference to this paper[1] which is way beyond my competence.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08641

Re: It took me 10 years to understand entropy

#220

I don't understand entropy and this article did not change it. The issue I take is with the definition of "the most likely state". Think of a series of random bits that can be either 0 or 1 with equal probability. How likely is it that they are all 0 or all 1? Not very likely. There is exactly one configuration. How likely is it that they have a specific configuration of 0 and 1? Equally likely. All states are equall…

A specific string of bits has zero entropy. It may be a sample from a distribution which has some entropy.

Unless you are selecting a random single bit from that string, in which the entropy of that selection process is -p1log p1 - p0log p0.

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