I saw a social scientist refer to the Law of Entropy. I know it comes from physics and have a loose idea of what it means, but I have the feeling someone is going to be quizzing me on whether the social scientist used it correctly as a metaphor, so I’d like a solid definition.
And use plain English. Remember, I’m a natural blonde.
Entropy wins.
All dynamic systems tend to increase in disorder, over time.
So, you have a glass of ice, and water, in a room at seventy degrees, eventually you have seventy degree water, and no ice. It just doesn’t happen that the random exchange of heat leaves you with water and ice where you once had water.
Large systems can have small areas where it appears that entropy is reversed, but the overall system is always increases in entropy. A machine that uses heat energy to produce work must have fuel, an energy rich material, which is broken down into energy poor material to produce concentrations of heat. After time, the fuel is expended, and no more heat is available.
Solar energy may seem not to be affected, but that depends on the continued output of energy of the Sun, which is not infinite, although from our frame of reference it is very long. Nuclear energy is simply the energy of a Supernova harvested billions of years later. Once it is released, and dissipates, it takes another supernova to make more.
Over time, (cosmic time) everything “runs down” to a state of greatest randomness.
Think of it as the ultimate carnival booth law. “You can’t win. You can’t break even, and you can’t not play.”
Tris
Things naturally tend to become more disordered, and you have to make an effort to prevent that. Some examples: Roads get cracks and potholes, and they have to be patched. Things get dusty or dirty, and need to be washed. You desk gets messy unless you put everything away. (I see you’re nearby. You can come look at my desk for a nice visual ;)).
Entropy is a measure of the degree of disorder in a system.
Meaning: things get mixed up and become messy with time and energy is required to force order on a system.
I suppose you could consider tidying up to be reversal of entropy.
In my area, I see entropy working in front of my eyes, try to do a chemical reaction where two molecules produce (eg a Diels-Alder reaction) and you find they’re very slow…they’re entropically disfavoured.
The only thing you can’t ask about entropy is why it only goes one way ie going back in time, entropy doesn’t reverse.
Some might argue that more negative entropy is indeed the way to measure the direction of time…
I’m waffling…
Strictly speaking, there is no “Law of Entropy.” Entropy is just a concept arising from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which basically says that a system can’t receive heat, perform work, and remain at the same temperature at which it started.
For more information, try M.C. Steven Hawking
Perhaps if someone could describe the logarithmic equation describing physical entropy? That helped me when I was introduced to it, but I don’t recall it anymore.
LOL. Yes, I’m sure that the logarithmic equation will clear it up nicely!
The clearest example of entropy I heard in college was this:
If you drop a VCR out a 10-story window, you expect it smash into a million pieces. But you would never drop a million VCR pieces out the same window and expect them to smash and form into a VCR.
aka
Nature tends towards disorder.
Hear it here.
NP: Pantera - Far Beyond Driven
Entropy:
The sum of the quantum states for a system tends to the single minimum energy state (this depends on the total energy contained in the system) or the total area of black holes increases in a closed system. Where the transformations from the current states of the system to those lower would not involve transformations through higher states.
Simple really.
What does it mean.
It is not really a measure of disorder as much a measure of coherent differentiation.
Entropy is tendency for closed systems to homogenize. The quantum number comes up when the system has a number of homogenous states, which it can reach and desides, which one is most likely. Black holes come in cause we physicists like them and everything beyond the event horizon is treated the same to us anyway - beyond reach, OK there are some nifty bits of Math that show this all works out as well.
The effect is that each part of the system tends to become randomly independent of all the rest, thus at all points in the system the rest of the system just appears as chaotic noise. This tends to be observed as disorder within most macroscopic system that the everyday person is likely to encounter.
http://www.nmsea.org/Curriculum/Primer/what_is_entropy.htm
A similar definition is given in information theory.
How did the social scientist use entropy?
The second law of thermodynamics states that heat, or energy, always flows spontaneously from a high to a low temperature. So in a universe where there are locales at different temperatures the energy is going from hot to cold thus raising the temperature of the cold and lowering the temperature of the hot. Eventually everything will be at the same temperature and all flow of energy will stop. There is plenty of energy left, unless the final temperature is absolute zero, but it is all unavailable, in other words it is all entropy.
Another example. Energy can be pushed from a cold object to a warm one if you supply an external energy source to do the pushing. You refrigerator constantly removes heat from the cold interior and puts it into the warm room. This heat that is put into the room could be used to do work. But, careful measurement will show that the amount of work that was done to push the heat out of the refrigerator is greater than the amount of work that you can recover from that heat. The difference is unavailable energy, or entropy.
In information theory, entropy is a measure of the disorder, or uncertainty, that occurs when sending a message from one place and receiving it at another.