> Anyway I like to consider entropy as the amount of usable energy in a system. A whole glass has more energy to release (e.g. by shattering) than a shattered o

> Anyway I like to consider entropy as the amount of usable energy in a system. A whole glass has more energy to release (e.g. by shattering) than a shattered one does. Maybe this is the formal definition of order vs. disorder? I think this is correct. Like the sand castle example: there are very few ways the grains can be arranged in order to be a sand castle, but orders of magnitude more ways of being re-arranged into a pile of sand. It could then be said that the sand castle has less entropy, and left to nature, will slowly but surely move towards the predictable high entropy state of being a pile of sand. The reverse is not true. Without work the low entropy state will struggle to reach the orderly state of the sand castle. Someone else mentioned the big bang, which I guess would be the work that created the orderly universe as we see it. But that work was expressed a long time ago and without more work matter will just move to an un-orderly state again.