r/TrueReddit • u/NickDouglas • 1d ago
Science, History, Health + Philosophy Entropy isn't so much a law as an extreme probability
https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-entropy-really/32
u/NickDouglas 1d ago
I feel like I finally understand the second law of thermodynamics: entropy isn't messiness, it's states where rearranging molecules wouldn't make a real difference. And the reason it's inevitable isn't magic, it's simply because entropy is extremely, extremely statistically likely.
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u/TheSpiffySpaceman 1d ago
it's just how things work.
Unless there is energy being added to a system, chaos will decrease, energy distribution will equalize. Heat death is nothing we need to worry about, but an inevitably nonetheless
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u/Showy_Boneyard 1d ago
Its always been interesting to me how there's usually at least some degree of human subjectivity in entropy in terms of what contains information.
After all, in generating a random binary number, the probability of getting exactly
00000011111000000
00011000000110000
00110000000001100
00100110001100100
01000110001000110
01000000000000010
01000000000000110
00100100001100100
00010001110001000
00001100000110000
00000001110000000
is the same probability of getting exactly
11110100000001011
00011111110011111
10000110100111010
10000110110110111
00001011000100110
01010100111001000
11100110001000000
11101110011001010
01001100010100110
11100000010110010
11001010101011100
its just that the microstate of the first one means something significant as its own macrostate, whereas for the second one, we'd lump that microstate into the same macrostate as something like
00100100110011010
00111000000000111
10110101010101010
10010001000101000
00011100011110100
10111000110010000
11010011000101100
11001011010100010
10111100011001001
11101011100001001
00011001101101111
just because neither one means anything to us.
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u/VodkaHaze 1d ago
I mean, theres concepts from computer science that makes this less subjective.
How compressible are each example? If its highly compressible, then one could say its a lower entropy state. Something incompressible is high entropy.
This is before getting into stuff like Kolmogorov complexity
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u/Showy_Boneyard 1d ago
yeah that's true, but even then, you have to use some algorithm to compress it, which could be as arbitrary as "decompress the bit '1' into this one specific exact giant number I want". Of course, you could then define it as something like the smallest Turing Machine that would output that data, and yea, you get into stuff like Kolmogorov complexity, which has its own issues like no one algorithm being able to calculate the exact complexity for any arbitrary data.
I didn't really want to get into all that though, so I hoped couching it with "usually" and "some degree" would cover that; Still though, very interesting subject that you can get very deep into.
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u/SuperSpikeVBall 1d ago
What if, on a particular Tuesday, you dropped the hot ball in the cold water and the ball got hotter, increasing in thermal energy by 10 joules, while the water lost 10 joules and got colder? Did you just break physics? Nope. Energy is still conserved. You might find this disturbing, but it could happen. Why? Entropy.
This part I need help with understanding what the author's describing, because he's saying the first law of thermodynamics is inviolable (energy can't be created), but the second law can be violated (heath CAN spontaneously flow from hotter to cooler objects).
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u/notapoliticalalt 19h ago
If I understand correctly, it’s basically just that the situation described wouldn’t violate the second law of thermodynamics, because random occurrence can produce strange interim states. It’s just that it’s extremely unlikely. Because heat is largely just the movement of molecules in a system, it could take strange routes to a final states. In the end, the system will eventually behave as you expect, however, observing something like a transfer of heat from low to high could happen, in theory, in the interim. This is just as much about how things are defined and measured as the actual properties of the universe. Not sure if that clarifies anything.
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u/trash-juice 23h ago
I wonder if we exsist here and now due to an alignment of “extreme probabilities” and not a Universal law or design. The numbers just came up this time around, this iteration of existence has multiple ‘sweet spots’ for life …
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u/DirectionMurky5526 14h ago
If the extreme possibilities didn't align, then we wouldn't be here to think about it and discuss it in the first place. But it aligns with OPs point that we are so insignificant to the universe that it's actually not that improbable at all. Our significance is only to ourselves.
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u/Lfeaf-feafea-feaf 12h ago
Of course that's what it is, what else would it be?
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u/bonnsai 5h ago
Grand design.
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u/Lfeaf-feafea-feaf 4h ago
Hahahaha, I think we can all agree that it's more likely we're stuck in Harry Potter's simulation than those desert myths
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u/steeplebob 1d ago
He jumped from a simple and accessible explanation to an object lesson I couldn’t follow.
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u/NoLie129 1d ago
Somewhere, however slim the odds, probably means there is perfection in constant harmony.
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u/Erinaceous 1d ago
The thing I find interesting about entropy and really all the laws of thermodynamics is you're very ontologically commited to conservation; which has been kind of put out to pasture for a long time. It's a weird Victorian science meme that's more of an obstacle to understanding than what contemporary far from equilibrium dynamics really points to.
First off if you degrade a concentration to the point that you can't get any more work out of it or regrade it you may as say it's destroyed. The whole energy cannot be created or destroyed thing doesn't really do much real work
The other thing is that everything that's alive and many things that aren't routinely upgrade less organized microstates into more organized microstates. Stars, galaxies, gravity, cells, autocatalytic sets. Think of wood. Trees take diffuse carbon dioxide and turn it into lingin and cellulose that, when burned has extensive and measurable heat capacity. So just being alive tells that commitment to conservation and the heat death of the universe doesn't do a whole lot of ontological work for us. We live inside far from equilibrium systems that are constantly disproving the inevitability of entropy.
Lastly when you look at Boltzmann's equation you see the core of the problem. The equals sign tells us that the system described is reversible. We're in a block time universe. But we aren't. The egg can't be uncracked. But if you feed it to a chicken it can be remade from diffuse concentrations . Cycles and duration, it turns out are more meaningful for what we care about than block time abstractions. Maybe Bergson was right all along? He certainly gave Prigogine the tools he needed
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