\n<\/p>\n
Entropy<\/em> is one of those fearsomely deep concepts that form the core of entire fields of physics (in this case, thermodynamics) that is unfortunately so mathematical that it\u2019s difficult to explain in plain language. But we will give it a try. Whenever I see the word entropy, I like to replace it with the phrase \u201ccounting the number of ways that I can rearrange a scenario while leaving it largely the same.\u201d That\u2019s a bit of a mouthful, I agree, and so entropy<\/em> will have to do.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You get up on weekend morning and decide to finally tackle the monumental task of cleaning your bedroom. You pick up, clean, fold, and put away your clothes. You straighten your sheets. You fluff your pillows. You organize your underwear drawer. After hours of effort you stand back to admire your handiwork, but already you can feel the sense of spooling unease in your stomach. Before long, you just know it will be messy again.<\/p>\n You instinctively know this because there is but one singular way to have a perfectly orderly room, with a place for everything and everything in its place. There is only one way to have this precise scenario. Since you\u2019re now familiar with the word, you can feel free to use it: you might say that a perfectly clean room has very low entropy.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s introduce some disorder. You take one unpaired sock and toss it in your room. It is now messy. And you can place a quantifiable measure<\/em> on this messiness. Your lonely sock can be on the floor. It can be on the bed. It can be sticking half out of a drawer. There are a number of ways that you can rearrange this scenario \u2013 the appearance of one untidy sock in your room \u2013 while keeping the general picture the same. The entropy is higher.<\/p>\n And then your dog, or your kids, or your dog and kids come crashing into the room. Chaos ensues. Nothing is where it\u2019s supposed to be, and there are almost and finite number of ways to achieve the same level of disarray. The entropy \u2013 and the frustration \u2013 is very high indeed.<\/p>\n Physicists like using entropy because it also serves as a handy way to encode the information in a system. So by measuring the entropy \u2013 a quantity physicists are very comfortable with handling \u2013 they can also get a grip on the amount of information in a system.<\/p>\n This applies to any system in the universe, like black holes.<\/p>\n \n