4 ms·

This may be correct but its useless to make any engineering sense out of it. For engineering and practical intuition, use the following definition that we used

This may be correct but its useless to make any engineering sense out of it. For engineering and practical intuition, use the following definition that we used at an Ivy-league college in US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(energy_dispersal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(energy_dispersal) Quoting the article: > Even though courses emphasised microstates and energy levels, most students could not get beyond simplistic notions of randomness or disorder. Many of those who learned by practising calculations did not understand well the intrinsic meanings of equations, and there was a need for qualitative explanations of thermodynamic relationships.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
NotSammyHagar 7y ago
Trust the formula you used at an ivy league college? Come on, that's a laughable call to some unknown expert! I don't care if your ideas come from an ivy league college. I care about the ideas and their quality. I distrust people that think because something came from a prestigious school I should trust them.
- spectramax 7y ago
  That's extreme and I am sorry you feel that way. I didn't realize that mentioning Ivy-League college would be seen as ego-inflating thing. I simply wanted to say that it was used in a college level class. I definitely agree, truth matters and not the source.
  - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
    Thanks for your civilized reply to my semi-rant ;-)
foxes 7y ago
I don't mind a qualitative explanation for casual discussion, but it still must be morally correct. I think "configurations" is a pretty intuitive concept. >imagine all the ways you can stack lego together.
ajkjk 7y ago
It's the physicist's definition, for whose purposes it is quite useful. And yeah, the physics students at your ivy league school learned H = log|microstates| also. Anyway, entropy as a count of microstates has to be packaged with a couple of additional ideas to give rise to the concept as used in chemistry/etc. First, that the microstates are randomly explored by the system, and second, that the number of microstates is so mind-boggling exponentially huge that the most common ones will be the only ones you ever see in practice.
steve76 7y ago
Context helped me a lot. Faraday saw pneumatic tubes. Boltzmann saw tin cans. Shannon saw switches. At their time that was the high tech of the day. All those philosophical questions tend to pop out when you get through the tech. When you have thousands of years to build, you likely ran into conceptual roadblocks. Nature does not see entropy, or thermal effects, or even atoms and EM, or cares not for how your clock ticks. Everything everywhere seeks a shortcut. Speed up my clock, and then slow it down as easy as I move. To me, that's explanation enough for the Big Bang. Nature stays the same the laziest way possible. Nature does not move the entire universe for sensibility or idealism. Nature refuses to spread out for the sake of holistic models. All those terms, that's for our benefit, to use all the work already made. There's very little left to build in industry. Astrophysics and medicine, that's about it. That tends to sober up the brain! Not to shoot down interest. Lots of potential. The next breakthrough? Human significance. We are doing more than spitting into the wind. Imaging singularities. Launching probes into and out of a star. The numbers are very large. Not a speck of dust into an ocean. More like coarse interface to a very fine system. Trying to focus a telescope by smudging a lens, and by accident precipitating a galaxy! It would be cool to turn our sun somewhat into a black hole for therapeutic medical imaging. Go through an MRI and get an immunological response. Dictate ethics by Levinthal or even the string theory landscape. It would be even cooler to do all that just for the sake of better surround sound and CGI!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

NotSammyHagar 7y ago

Trust the formula you used at an ivy league college? Come on, that's a laughable call to some unknown expert! I don't care if your ideas come from an ivy league college. I care about the ideas and their quality. I distrust people that think because something came from a prestigious school I should trust them.

spectramax 7y ago
That's extreme and I am sorry you feel that way. I didn't realize that mentioning Ivy-League college would be seen as ego-inflating thing. I simply wanted to say that it was used in a college level class. I definitely agree, truth matters and not the source.
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  Thanks for your civilized reply to my semi-rant ;-)

foxes 7y ago

I don't mind a qualitative explanation for casual discussion, but it still must be morally correct. I think "configurations" is a pretty intuitive concept. >imagine all the ways you can stack lego together.

ajkjk 7y ago

It's the physicist's definition, for whose purposes it is quite useful. And yeah, the physics students at your ivy league school learned H = log|microstates| also. Anyway, entropy as a count of microstates has to be packaged with a couple of additional ideas to give rise to the concept as used in chemistry/etc. First, that the microstates are randomly explored by the system, and second, that the number of microstates is so mind-boggling exponentially huge that the most common ones will be the only ones you ever see in practice.

steve76 7y ago

Context helped me a lot. Faraday saw pneumatic tubes. Boltzmann saw tin cans. Shannon saw switches. At their time that was the high tech of the day. All those philosophical questions tend to pop out when you get through the tech. When you have thousands of years to build, you likely ran into conceptual roadblocks. Nature does not see entropy, or thermal effects, or even atoms and EM, or cares not for how your clock ticks. Everything everywhere seeks a shortcut. Speed up my clock, and then slow it down as easy as I move. To me, that's explanation enough for the Big Bang. Nature stays the same the laziest way possible. Nature does not move the entire universe for sensibility or idealism. Nature refuses to spread out for the sake of holistic models. All those terms, that's for our benefit, to use all the work already made. There's very little left to build in industry. Astrophysics and medicine, that's about it. That tends to sober up the brain! Not to shoot down interest. Lots of potential. The next breakthrough? Human significance. We are doing more than spitting into the wind. Imaging singularities. Launching probes into and out of a star. The numbers are very large. Not a speck of dust into an ocean. More like coarse interface to a very fine system. Trying to focus a telescope by smudging a lens, and by accident precipitating a galaxy! It would be cool to turn our sun somewhat into a black hole for therapeutic medical imaging. Go through an MRI and get an immunological response. Dictate ethics by Levinthal or even the string theory landscape. It would be even cooler to do all that just for the sake of better surround sound and CGI!