Quanta Magazine recently had a nice illustration of entropy https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-entropy-a-measure-of-just-how-little-we-really-know-20241213/I would say addition of heat increases disorder/entropy in general because in a typical thermodynamic system which is isolated from the environment * Heat increases the kinetic energy of particles which start to move faster * Faster movement leads to more collisions and diverging paths. In effect this means small changes in one state of the system can result in large differences in later states, i.e. to random motion * More random motion increases the disorder/entropy of the system-J. -------- Original message --------From: Nicholas Thompson <thompnicks...@gmail.com> Date: 12/29/24 12:15 AM (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> Subject: [FRIAM] Boltzmann Distribution FWIW, I have been struggling with the concept of entropy for the last month. One of the puzzles was why entropy increased with addition of heat. I bullied George for a few hours and he finally admitted not only that the mean and variance of the B-distribution are correlated, but that its variance is the square of its mean. Why that is the case is beyond both of us.He also coughed up eventually the reason that adiabatic compression and decompression don't alter entropy: there is a trade off between spatial constraint and kinetic energy such that as the gas is confined its kinetic energy goes up and with that a compensating increase in the variance of the KE. Yeah. I know. Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread. N-- Nicholas S. ThompsonEmeritus Professor of Psychology and EthologyClark Universitynthompson@clarku.eduhttps://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson
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