In layman's terms, what is entropy

Question

Thanks for the answers!

Answer 1

it simply means randomness of a system

Answer 2

In layman's terms, as you asked....it's a measure of the amount of disorder in a system. 'System' being almost anything.

For example: Say you take a clear, small container and fill it half way with salt, and then fill the rest with pepper. This would be zero entropy.

Now, give it one shake.....the measure of entropy will increase. Also you will see mixing starting to happen in the salt and pepper.

Shake it again....entropy would again increase, and again you'd see still more mixing.

If you continue this until the salt and pepper are pretty much evenly mixed you'd have a maximum in your entropy measure, which, if memory serves is the natural logarithm of, in this case, the number of combinations of possible orientations of your salt-pepper system.

There are ways to deal with this kind of a large-number scenario, but using statistics-related functions and other mathematics that can help approximate systems with very large numbers of combinations.

At any rate...this is the idea behind entropy.

Answer 3

chaos to put it simply

Answer 4

Entropy is the rate of the development of chaos in a system.

Answer 5

Entropy is not chaos or disorder. Entropy is the possible number of states given a bulk quantity. In other words, we often describe complicated situations with simple words. The more situations that are covered by a single word, the more entropy that word represents.

For instance, you can say that your bedroom is tidy or messy. Neither of these words communicate the exact position of each and every of your possessions. However, there are more ways your possessions can be distributed that make the room messy than make it tidy. So "messiness" has a higher entropy than "tidiness."

So entropy does not, at the root level, have anything to do with disorder or chaos, but disordered systems to tend to have more of it.

Answer 6

Entropy literally means "chaos" or "randomness". Things in nature automatically are assumed to constantly attempt to increase randomness. This is why hot flows to cold, instead of cold to hot (hotter particles have more energy and move a lot more than colder ones)