WHAT DOES ENTROPY MEAN CRACK

Today's modern understanding of entropy is twofold. Entropy gave all of science's processes a veritable direction. It explained why balloons popped when filled with too much air (at least qualitatively) and it paved the way towards a more sophisticated understanding of everything from balancing a needle upright to describing why proteins fold the very specific ways they do. Entropy explained why heat flowed from warm objects to cold ones. Imagine if you dropped your cards and they went flying at the ceiling - that just doesn't make any sense.ДЄ long time ago scientists (or one in particular, Rudolf Clausis) began to recognize this natural trend towards lower energy and sought to quantify it, sparking the idea of entropy. In fact, the cards fall to the floor in the first place because they would naturally rather go with gravity than oppose it. You've got to repeat this process over and over until all 52 of the cards have been compared and arranged, and that demands a lot of energy. Think about the energy that it takes to arrange cards by value and suit: you've got to look at a card, compare it to others, classify it and then arrange it.

The reason a deck of cards doesn't reorganize itself when you drop it is because it's naturally easier for it to remain unordered. So what gives? Why does your desk always get dirty, you ask?Д®ntropy is a tendency for systems to move towards disorder and a quantification of that disorder. You can't throw a broken egg at the wall and cause it to come back together into its original form, just like your office desk is bound to get messier and messier if you never clean it up. Similarly, when you drop a deck of cards onto the floor they don't arrange themselves by suit or by number (though that would be a nifty trick). Leaves don't fall into neat piles or stack nicely into towers, they just fall. Entropy is even said to be responsible for human life.Д®very fall when the leaves change colour and spill from the trees, they do so randomly. In college, scientists and engineers deal with a similar epiphany when they learn that entropy is the reason that reactions happen, the reason ice melts, the reason that people have to rake up leaves every autumn. How do you describe it? What does it even mean? Who in their right mind would want to quantify a phantom concept that's impossible to see or touch?ДЄs kids we're usually stunned when we learn that Santa Claus doesn't really exist or that you can't actually bounce around on fluffy white clouds. They hope to put our understanding of the universeвЂ™s mystifying directionality on firmer footing вЂ“ or nudge it off a wall.Entropy is a term that draws both fear and reverence from the greatest physicists and mathematicians. Now, Aguirre and others are going back to the drawing board in search of a universally valid version of entropy anchored in our most fundamental theory: quantum mechanics. вЂњItвЂ™s all very confusing,вЂќ says Anthony Aguirre at the University of California, Santa Cruz. But even if we understand it broadly as a measurement or quantity, our current conception of entropy doesnвЂ™t work to describe the things it purports to, not least the universe.

WHAT DOES ENTROPY MEAN CRACK

And yet just like Humpty, entropy gets messy as soon as you crack its surface.ДЇor a start, there is no single definition. Its propensity to increase forever has granted it exalted status as the pithiest answer to some deep questions, from what life is to how the universe evolved and why time moves ever forward like an arrow. So perhaps Carroll deserves to shoulder a share of the blame for scrambling our ideas about entropy.Д®ntropy is typically thought of as a measure of disorder or randomness, and it is bound up with thermodynamics вЂ“ the branch of physics that deals with heat and mechanical work.

Everyone knows the sorry tale of Humpty Dumpty, but have you ever noticed that the rhyme makes no mention of an egg? In fact, the ill-fated protagonist only assumed egg-man form when he met Alice in Lewis CarrollвЂ™s Through the Looking Glass, after which broken eggs became indelibly associated with irreversible damage. ALL the KingвЂ™s horses and all the KingвЂ™s men couldnвЂ™t put Humpty together again.

What does entropy mean