What does the concept of entropy mean?
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The most intuitive way to think of entropy is to consider it as a measure of how disordered a system is.
For example, consider a fresh pack of cards. It’s in one order and one order only, and it’s very easy to tell when the deck is no longer in that order. The fresh pack has very low entropy, because there’s only the one arrangement it can be in.
Now, if you shuffle the deck, so that the cards are completely randomized, you’ve raised the entropy of the deck. You can rearrange the individual cards very freely without damaging your ability to say “Yes, that’s a shuffled pack of cards.”
Another way to think of entropy is the ability to pull useful work out of a system. For example, you need a temperature difference to do any work with a heat engine; if there’s no gradient, nothing’s going to want to move from point A to point B. You need *low entropy*, a condition of order and being able to say “This is different than that,” in order to perform work.
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