Saturday, May 10, 2014

Confusion about entropy

In thermodynamics, entropy (usual symbol S) is a measure of the number of specific ways in which a thermodynamic system may be arranged, often taken to be a measure of disorder, or a measure of progressing towards thermodynamic equilibrium. The entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium, the maximum entropy.

The boldface definition is the important one. A system in equilibrium equalizes energy flow in units of maximum disorder, there are no redundant parts.  When a signal is 'encoded' the encoded signals have maximum disorder, they are most compact and utilize band width to the greatest extent.  'Particles' in the standard model provide the most compact measure of the curvature of the vacuum. So their size and motion will appear disordered. 

No comments: