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Feb 23, 2008 21:24

8:21:47 PM Ziggy: There ( Read more... )

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spoonless February 24 2008, 20:42:42 UTC
Entropy, disorder, and simplicity are all different concepts. Sometimes the word "disorder" is used as a an analogy to get some notion of what entropy is across to non-scientists. But the real definition of entropy is mathematically rigorous (the log of the number of microstates corresponding to each macrostate in a system) and does not always conform to common sense intuitions about what is "ordered" or "disordered".

For example, systems at higher temperatures tend to have a greater degree of symmetry... so they will look smoother and more uniform whereas colder things can look lumpy and haphazard... but they also tend to have more entropy and have less correlations between the individual degrees of freedom (everything is independent of everything else). So you could call them "more ordered" or "more disordered" depending on what aspect you chose to emphasize. But whether something has more or less entropy is perfectly well defined.

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