| >> | >>4923258
>>4923262
I don't get why people still think "entropy" basically means "everything runs down and gets dirty and gross and broken eventually". It's sort of a false definition that just gained traction.
A glass box full of highly energized (hot) air molecules would have a high entropy, the air molecules are bouncing around like mad, and are harder to predict than a box of cold air where the molecules are just basically sitting there. It may be more "chaotic" on a human level, but is it actually "disorderly"? I wouldn't think so, order is a human construct, thus seems fallacious to define entropy in terms of order or disorder. Entropy instead seems to mean something like "the amount of choices of movement an object or system can take". So, a car has higher entropy than a very regular train.
Even with this definition, I can't agree with OP's statement: The trend of any system is chaos. Well, have you ever looked at the evolution of life on Earth, or cosmological evolution into atoms, stars and planets? These seem to be "orderings of complex systems", and could only really be deemed "chaotic" if you look at the more realistic definition of entropy, as in, well, at the start of the universe you could say "the quantum foam is only really doing this and this, thus order" and now it's "well humans have evolved on earth and they want to go to the moon and mars but maybe they will maybe they won't and also they may destroy the planet lol" ok, there's a bit of unpredictability there, but it is still a more complex system than at the start if the universe, and if you take the well known definition of entropy, the evolution of life and planets and stars and the development of technology all seem to throw this old definition out the window.
Systems don't tend towards chaos, they tend towards energetic equilibrium, they actually TEND towards lower energy states, so, states with very little "disorder" and "chaos".
So, is your table gathering dust, is that chaos? IS that disorder? The dust fall is natural, your definition of an orderly table is one without a layer of dust. You can't define scientific laws based on human preference. You really shouldn't.
Now, That same table, it will eventually get so old that someone will throw it away, or maybe it gets so old it just falls apart. Ok, I guess that is a bit of chaos and unpredictability, where exactly the molecules of the table will go from there. I can agree that the "death" of an object or person seems to be the best indicator of the concept of entropy, but this only really can be used when you look at an individual [object or system]. The greater system as a whole it is embedded within, seems to be trending towards evolutionary complexity, whether that is the universe or the tree of life or the evolution of technology.
For further reading, I suggest my favorite sci-fi shot story, by Isaac Asimov. It's about entropy: https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html |
