What does the concept of entropy mean?
In: 96
At a high level, entropy is a measure of randomness. What it really means is how many different ways can the parts of something be arranged while still looking the same as a whole.
For example, if you have a ball pit, but sort all of the balls into clumps of each color, ie all the red ones in the top left, all the blue ones in the top right etc. there are only so many ways you can rearrange the balls in that pit until a casual observer can tell that someone came by and changed the arrangement in the ball pit.
If you have the balls all mixed together, there are more ways you can shuffle the balls before an observer can tell that the arrangement was changed, meaning it has a higher entropy.
In the field of thermodynamics, we would be talking about the arrangement of atoms and molecules, and what we would be observing would be things like temperature, and density. Even though the molecules in a glass of water are constantly moving around and breaking apart and coming together, from our perspective all of these different arrangements are effectively the same overall system to us since bulk properties like the temperature and density are still the same.
Latest Answers