
Scientific Concepts We All Ought to Know - betolink
https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/03/scientific-concepts-know/
======
nercht12
The idea of "entropy" always seemed to me as a misrepresentation of the actual
underlying principle, given a half-dozen other names in scientific literature.
Everything reaches the lowest equilibrium state. It's like pouring water into
a glass: eventually, all the waves will be gone and it will all settle into
the lowest state on the ground. That doesn't really say anything about "order"
at all - from the perspective of the atoms, all the "order" is still there.
The "messy" vs "useful" analogy also is poor since you can use more energy to
make a completely useless contraption (a "messy state") and construct it in a
way such that it degrades into a useful one (a bit of a contrived Rube-
Goldberg, but still...). Heck, does throwing water into the air and letting it
fall into a pond make it "orderly" against the Second Law? That's what the
analogies imply. The more analogies that try to compare the Second Law to
common experiences like a dirty room, etc., the less people get an idea of
what Joules per Kelvin is supposed to mean when they finally meet it in their
chemistry book.

