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Entropy Explained, with Sheep (2016)
- xtrapol8 2y ago> entropy is just a fancy word for ‘number of possible arrangements’ It isn’t though. Entropy is a fancy word for potential distribution over negative potential. Negative potential is the “surface area” over which potential may distribute. The “number of possible arrangements” casually fits into this, yet misses some unintuitive possibilities, like the resistive variance or other characteristics not preempted by who ever constructed the intellectual model. Idealists insist entropy is a scalar state resolve of delta probability in their model. They are self deceived. Entropy is the existential tendency for potential to distribute toward equilibrium. As long as boffins can throw away results that do not correlate, they can insist it is anything they like.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago>Entropy is a fancy word for potential distribution over negative potential. Negative potential is the “surface area” over which potential may distribute. I don't understand this. Please elucidate.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoConsider that if you Google for `"resistive variance" entropy`, the only hit is for the hn comment. It doesn't make sense because what they wrote makes no sense. Probably some looney with their own definition of entropy.
- xtrapol8 2y agoWell, this looney likes to point out that the manifold surface area (which is not always uniform) determines the rate of or density of distribution. All this is accounted for in the math selected for whichever for instance (“number of possible states” would count them) though a superior definition is one which is the most general technically correct without enumerating exceptions or extraneous clauses. Resistance controls the rate of flow of any potential. That you cannot parse English without an exact match of phrase is kind of ironic. I guess when arguing convention I shouldn’t be too casual with my own language. Entropy is the distribution of potential over negative potential. In every case. Period. All the other words we use describe how this happens in a specific context (thermal or information). Can you find an established definition that can be more succinctly regarded as this? Also I like insisting it is a phenomenon of existential reality, not a conceptual tool of the human mind.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoI'm not interested in reading your word salad.
- ninetyninenine 2y agoCan you explain exactly what potential is and what it means to have negative potential in very fundamental terms? Like explain it to me if I’m 8. Use real world examples. Then explain what is and how this relates to a manifold surface area?
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- xtrapol8 2y agoEntropy is not enumerated states 1 point by xtrapol8 1 day ago | hide | past | favorite Entropy is an existential property describing the distribution of potential. Popularly leading minds in physics, math, and information theory have long upheld a number of standing definitions which do not consistently coincide with observable or functional Truth (causing enumerations and conditions.) These have represented the best of our ideas, and have been accepted among you generationally as immutable and foundational. These definitions are imperfect and addressing it as such has triggered a blowback of condescension revealing hypocrisy within the cult of science. I contended this monumental revelation as substantial, edging forward the understanding of all human kind. Entropy is an existential force, not an abstract idea. Entropy is the distribution of potential toward equilibrium. Our Universe IS NOT COMPOSED OF STATES. States are momentary values taken under measurement (as extolled by a recent Nobel Prize.) If science can say “the universe is not locally real”, it is time to say entropy is not a number of states, it is potential distributing. The conceptual resistance this idea has provoked reveals an intellectually brittle character among the very ideas of discovery and understanding. This inflexibility demonstrates a blindness towards one’s own learned misconceptions, the antithesis of advanced learning (which resolves our simple truths.) Entropy is not a construct of the mind, and it is not limited to known states of a modeled problem, in existential reality it includes all possibilities even those breaking intellectual models.
- kelnos 2y agoYour post is a good primer on bullshit detection: if you read something on the internet that sounds confidently authoritative, but you yourself are not well-versed in the subject, find what seems to be some key phrases and search the web for them. If you find lots of other hits on seemingly-reputable sources, then what you've read may be correct. If you only find the thing that you've just read, it's bullshit, with high probability.
- xtrapol8 2y agoEntropy is not the number of possible states in a system. Entropy includes outcomes not predicted by the mental model. Convention teaches this incorrectly. I’m the black sheep, bhaaaa.
- xtrapol8 2y agoPlease refer to the comment of this comment!
- lisper 2y ago> I don't understand this. That's because it's nonsense.
- xtrapol8 2y agoThe inverse square law is an example of potential distribution, not number of states.
- NewsaHackO 2y agoAlso, one should check out Tenet, it's a pretty authoritative resource about this as well.
- ruthmarx 2y agoHow so? That film is a narrative mess with some good action scenes an not much more. If you want to reference a relevant sci-fi, I'd say Asimov's The Last Question is a better fit.
- kaonwarb 2y agoI appreciate the explanation, but the very first example doesn't sit well with me. Water forming into ice cubes spontaneously looks weird simply because we’re not used to seeing it. Consider a time-lapse of an icicle forming as a sort of counter-example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mmHQft7-iSU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mmHQft7-iSU (Not refuting entropy as the order of time at all, just noting a visual example is not great evidence.)
- throwuxiytayq 2y agoAh, but the icicle isn’t really equivalent to water undripping and refreezing back into a nice cube-shaped object, at presumed room temperature (since our point of reference is the first gif). That would be weird to see IRL always, no matter what. You could watch that gif a million times and you’d still shit your pants if that happened to the glass of water on your desk.
- LaundroMat 2y agoSo if I get this right, there is an infinitely small possibility that a cracked egg returns to its initial state. Imagine that happening and being put on video. We'd all believe we're living in a simulation and witnessed a glitch. No-one would believe the scientists explaining that although highly improbable, the uncracked egg does make scientific sense.
- speakeron 2y agoIt's not really whether it makes scientific sense or not, it's just that it's so very highly improbable (really, really improbable) that other explanations make more sense: the video's a fake, it's mass hysteria, or even that we're living in a simulation.
- markhahn 2y agoI think your question mainly demonstrates how much trouble most people have about reasoning about exponentials. Not intending any personal insult, but unless you do it regularly (ie, probably are a physicist), you will use a term like "highly improbable" when referring to quantities that can only be expressed in scientific notation. In other words, most humans have bad intuition about large numbers. And I'm not talking about "small" large numbers like "how many Teslas could Elon buy". I mean "how many atoms are in a chicken egg" (and what are their statistical properties at room temperature)
- Maro 2y agoI've written a few articles about Entropy (I'm a physicist working in DS). Almost all of them have Python code to illustrate concepts. - 1. Entropy of a fair coin toss - https://bytepawn.com/what-is-the-entropy-of-a-fair-coin-toss.html https://bytepawn.com/what-is-the-entropy-of-a-fair-coin-toss... 2. Cross entropy, joint entropy, conditional entropy and relative entropy - https://bytepawn.com/cross-entropy-joint-entropy-conditional-entropy-and-relative-entropy.html https://bytepawn.com/cross-entropy-joint-entropy-conditional... 3. Entropy in Data Science - https://bytepawn.com/entropy-in-data-science.html https://bytepawn.com/entropy-in-data-science.html 4. Entropy of a [monoatomic] ideal gas with coarse-graining - https://bytepawn.com/entropy-of-an-ideal-gas-with-coarse-graining.html https://bytepawn.com/entropy-of-an-ideal-gas-with-coarse-gra... 5. All entropy related posts - https://bytepawn.com/tag/entropy.html https://bytepawn.com/tag/entropy.html
- dr_dshiv 2y agoWhat’s the difference between information entropy and physical entropy?
- dr_dshiv 2y agoI did a deep dive on entropy a couple years ago. I found the concept to be much harder to understand than I expected! Specifically, it was confusing to shift from the intuitive but wrong “entropy is disorder” to “entropy is about the number of possible microstates in a macrostate” (Boltzmann Entropy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann%27s_entropy_formula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann%27s_entropy_formula I was extra confused when I discovered that a spread out cloud of hydrogen is lower entropy than the same cloud gravitationally bound together in a star. So entropy isn’t just about “spreading out,” either. I found that Legos provide a really nice example to illustrate entropy, so I’ll share that here. Consider a big pile of Legos, the detritus of many past projects. Intuitively, a pile of Legos is high entropy because it is disordered—but if we are trying to move beyond order/disorder, we need to relate it to micro states and macro states. Therefore, a pile of Legos is high entropy because if you randomly swap positions of the pieces it will all be the same macrostate—ie a big pile of Legos. Nevertheless, each of the Lego pieces is still in a very specific position— and if we could clearly snapshot all those positions, that would be the specific microstate. That means that the macrostate of the pile has an astronomical number of possible microstates — there are many ways to reorganize the pieces that still look like a pile. On the other hand, consider a freshly built Lego Death Star. This is clearly low entropy. But to understand why in terms of microstates, it is because very few Legos can be swapped or moved without it not really being a Death Star anymore. The low entropy is because there are very few microstates (specific Lego positions) that correspond to the given macro state (being a Death Star). This specific case helped me grok Boltzmann entropy. To extend it, consider a box with a small ice crystal in it: this has many fewer possible microstates than the same box filled with steam. In the steam, molecules can pretty much we swapped and moved anywhere and the macrostate is the same. With the crystal, if you start randomly swapping molecules to different microstates, it stops being an ice crystal quickly. So an ice crystal is low entropy. Now, the definition of what counts as a macrostate is very important in this… but this comment is long enough and I still haven’t gotten to the gym…
- kitd 2y agoHelpful post nonetheless!
- xtiansimon 2y agoI like my entropy story with more steam engines, “The most misunderstood concept in physics", by Veritasium (YouTube, 2023) (https://youtu.be/DxL2HoqLbyA?si=5a_4lCnuv85lRb57 https://youtu.be/DxL2HoqLbyA?si=5a_4lCnuv85lRb57)
- markhahn 2y agoNow imagine that this was in gradeschool curricula! I really think education is mostly about providing higher-level intuitions - making correct thought habitual and thus easy. Part of what's so attractive about this particular article is how it would mesh with related fields (chemistry, statistics, politics, evolution, astophysics, climate science, etc)