Entropy
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He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust.
Entropy
/ˈɛntrəpi/ (n.)
A warm, tepid place, rather like a recently-sat-upon lavatory seat. Also, where we are all going. The challenge is to create and defend systems that preserve or enhance signal in defiance of our inevitable slide into noise.
Could refer to:
- Any of the Jolly Contrarian’s:
- first law of worker entropy.
- second law of worker entropy.
- third law of worker entropy.
- fourth law of worker entropy.
- fifth law of worker entropy.
- sixth law of worker entropy.
- seventh law of worker entropy.
- eighth law of worker entropy.
- ninth law of worker entropy.
- tenth law of worker entropy.
- eleventh law of worker entropy.
- twelfth law of worker entropy.
- thirteenth law of worker entropy.
- fourteenth law of worker entropy.
- fifteenth law of worker entropy.
- sixteenth law of worker entropy.
- seventeenth law of worker entropy.
- The boredom heat death of the universe.
- The place betwixt an executing broker and a clearing member.
Real entropy
Entropy is a measure of the number of possible “microscopic arrangements” that could produce a given “macroscopic state” of a system. The more possible arrangements that can create a state, the higher the entropy. A random distribution has maximum entropy.
Take a tower of nine Jenga blocks, conventionally stacked, three-by three. This is a “state”. There is a countable number of ways to arrange those nine blocks to get that exact same state – by re-arranging the blocks.
The “tower” here is the “macroscopic state”, and each permutation of the nine blocks to produce it is a “microscopic arrangement”. There are 362,880 different ways to arrange nine blocks to make that one tower. [1]
By contrast, if you scatter the same nine Jenga blocks across the floor, their “macroscopic state” is simply “blocks on the floor”. There are vastly more arrangements that can create this state, including all 362,880 “tower” arrangements as they are also ways of arranging blocks on the floor. And a tower a millimetre to the left or right is a different set of arrangements of state “blocks on the floor”.
As each block can be in countless positions and orientations on the floor, and any variation in position or angle counts as a different arrangement, there are a vastly more arrangements of the “blocks on the floor” state than the “tower” state.
In the sense there are far fewer ways you can produce it, the “tower arrangement” has much less entropy than “nine blocks on the floor”. It has higher degree of order.
Since there are many more ways to be in a “high-entropy state” than a “low-entropy state”, if you upset a Jenga tower, you are likely to wind up with nine blocks scattered on the floor. If you interrupt some blocks that are already scattered on the floor, you are not likely to wind up with a Jenga tower: the blocks will just be scattered even more randomly on the floor.
Over time, therefore, any system tends strongly towards disorder. This is not because of systemic degeneracy, but because of the law of large numbers.
To increase order, you must inject energy into the system. Your fridge will not tidy itself. A careful agent can clean out the fridge, or take some scattered Jenga blocks and organise them back into a tower, by exerting effort, the byproducts of which are heat, noise and light: highly entropic forms of energy. While that agent has created some local order, overall, the system is still more disordered than it was.
Thus — and I don’t want to be too much of a downer, but hey — the heat death of the universe is our ultimate destiny.
Entropy as a giveaway for conspiracy theories
JC has a theory that entropy is a good way of deciding whether something is a conspiracy theory.
It is also a justification for Occam’s razor
See also
References
- ↑ Assuming we ignore the possible rotation of individual blocks. This is the factorial 9! — 9*8*7*6*5*4*3*2*1. It is more than I was expecting, but it is still, relatively, a tiny number. If we factor in the possible horizontal or vertical flipping of each block, there are more than 95 billion arrangements of a 3x3 Jenga tower!