Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Entropy and Order meet in a bar...

Listening to the Joy of Science on CD again, and there was talk of Entropy and how it increases.  The "latest" thinking is that the amount of order must be taken into account for a process.  The example used was a deck of cards just out of the box has a higher order than a shuffled deck.  And no matter how much one shuffles the deck, there is almost no chance that it will end up ordered again, hence Entropy increases.  But there is a problem with this.

Each state is just a state - there is no bias.  A deck of cards just out of the pack is in no better order than a shuffled deck.  Shuffling a deck of cards doesn't increase the entropy, it puts it in another unique state.  It is only the human mind that sees a deck out of the box as "in order."  Are the cards sorted by atomic thickness?  Number of atoms of carbon?  Number of photons bouncing off of them?  Even if one chooses that the face of card be used to determine order, which order?  What if the order I want is all cards of like type be together?  So, instead of by suit, it is by value?  In that case the cards coming out of the box are not sorted.  At each and every shuffle, the cards are sorted by some criteria, and shuffling them again will make it so that they will never exist in that order again.  Each order is unique, it is just that we have such limited rules on what is ordered.

If we can define Order with one rule, we consider it ordered:  all suits together.  The Universe does care about our definition of Order, and so us creating a set of rules for how the Universe acts based on what we label Entropy seems very silly.

The Edward

2 comments:

Samantha said...

I agree. Who set the parameters of what "order" is. My sense of orderliness does not match the general population's. And no one sees the same thing as we are all unique, so there really is no one "order" but the power-hungry people and finicky scientists have to come up with something that keeps us all in line with their order.

The Edward said...

Here, here! I couldn't agree with you more! Thank you!