Nice to see the list is still alive :-) Entropy as
information in disguise. Interesting. Isn't Entropy
related to disorder, that is to say lack of information?
-J.
On 10/11/2013 11:10 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
I'd say bollocks to that. Entropy is clearly information in
disguise. That changes in it can also be related to the amount of heat
processed at a given temperature is also something that comes out of
considering rearrangements of kinetic molecular motion, and ultimately
gives rise to the well known Landauer limit on computing.
On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 02:00:35PM -0600, Nick Thompson wrote:
At Friam today, we had our first discussion of entropy in a while. It was
like old times. I really enjoyed it.
But the following disagreement came up. I am, I think, a bit of what
philosophers call an essentialist. In other words, I assume that when
people use the same words for two things, it aint for nothing, that there is
something underlying the surface that makes those two things the same. So,
underlying all the uses of the word “entropy” is a common core, and ….
Here’s the tricky bit … that that common core could be expressed
mathematically. However, I thought my fellow discussants disagreed with
this naïve intuition and agreed that the physical and the information
theoretical uses of the word “entropy” were “not mathematically equivalent”,
which I take to mean that, no mathematical operation could be devised that
would turn one into the other. That the uses of the word entropy were more
like members of a family then they were like expressions of some essence.
I wonder what you-all think about that.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
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