eli5 What is entropy and what are its biggest implications?
In: 0
Entropy can be looked at from two angles, but I’ll take the statistics approach.
Say you’ve got a hundred coins. They’re laid flat on a table.
Now, I tell you that all of them are heads. There is only one way that they can all be heads.
What if, instead, fifty are heads? There are all sorts of different orders they can be laid out in, while still having exactly fifty coins on heads.
The fifty-heads order is “higher entropy”. There are more ways for the pennies to be laid out and have 50 heads than 100, so 50 heads is higher-entropy.
If we took the table and hit it, the pennies would bounce and maybe land differently. They will always tend to move towards the highest-entropy state, because that’s how entropy works in probability.
However, because physics and probability are related, that’s not all. We can actually calculate entropy in matter, and also change in entropy. This has a lot of important implications in our universe on *many* levels.
For something down to earth, it poses a limit on the efficiency of your car engine. Even if the gas has a lot of energy, some of that energy is wasted because the entropy of the engine must always increase.
Latest Answers