Entropy and disorder (rated sexually explicit)

Everyone is trying to persuade me that decline in newspaper readership is making society at large more dis-informed. I don’t think so. Perhaps if you are not a proficient user of available tools (and I am not) you may find yourself wasting important amounts of time trying to retrieve information from irrelevant sources. But it’s fair to say that in the information age we are all struggling with relevance.

I try to find the explanation to this, rather, in the principles of entropy. Entropy assumes that nature tends from order to disorder in isolated systems. Let’s say your throw a pile of books on the ground, disorder is more likely to occur.

A more precise way to characterize entropy is to say that it is a measure of the “multiplicity” associated with the state of the objects. If a given state can be accomplished in many more ways, then it is more probable than one which can be accomplished in only a few ways

The above is a time-arrow vision of entropy. But here is another take on it as disorder, illustration included, thanks to hyper-physics

For a glass of water the number of molecules is astronomical. The jumble of ice chips may look more disordered in comparison to the glass of water which looks uniform and homogeneous. But the ice chips place limits on the number of ways the molecules can be arranged. The water molecules in the glass of water can be arranged in many more ways; they have greater “multiplicity” and therefore greater entropy

More on sister topic information entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, a key to grasping entropy

Tags: chaos, circulation loss, disinformation, disorder, entropy, information entropy, newspaper readership collapse, thermodynamics