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Entropy
Entropy is a measure of the amount of disorder
in a system. If a system is highly ordered, it has
low entropy, while is a system is very randomly
ordered, it has high entropy. Entropy can also be
thought of as the probability that a specific,
macroscopic state will occur in a system. So a
less ordered state is more likely to occur than a
highly ordered state.
Thanks to entropy, we have a very important law of
physics that describes nature at large.
The Second Law of
Thermodynamics: The entropy of an isolated
system will either stay the same or increase,
but never decrease.
So basically this means that without outside
forces acting on a system, order will move towards
disorder and the macroscopic state will become
more random.
[Image from cattime.com]
The probability
that disorder will occur in an isolated
system is intuitively much higher than the
probability that order will randomly
occur. Unless the system is at an
equilibrium, in which entropy would stay
the same, the system will "run down" in
order.
[Image from themetapicture.com]
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