What does the concept of entropy mean?
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One way to think about entropy is from statistical point of view. This basically says that if there are more ways of arranging things which result in the same outcome, the entropy is higher. So for example you have 10 balls, 5 identical black and 5 identical white. You arrange them in a row. There are exactly 2 ways to arrange them in an alternating way. Also only 2 ways of having 5 of the same color touching. But let’s say I want 5 black balls always grouped and the white balls wherever. There are exactly 5 ways to arrange that, therefore the state of “5 black balls touching” has higher entropy than “balls alternating”. And so on.
Another example is 2 die system. When you roll them, you can achieve combined result of 7 in many ways, while for results of 2 and 12 there is only one way for each of them.
In a physical world, imagine a perfect crystal. So the atoms are ideally arranged where they should be. There is only 1 way of doing that therefore the lowest entropy. Nature does not like low entropy, so in real world this is hard or impossible to achieve, depending on the scale. Therefore, there are always some defects to that structure which introduce some entropy, which in turn lowers the overall energy of the system. What I am trying to describe here is more or less thermodynamic potential, called Gibbs free energy if you want more reading.
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