The gift of entropy

🌐 Tricky transitions + new opportunities.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

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Have I not talked about entropy yet?

I just searched through the archives to confirm: zero hits.

That is surprising. It’s one of my favourite concepts, and has been since I first laid the proverbial eyes on it in a high-school chemistry class. One of those words that gift you new understanding by virtue of naming.

“A measure of randomness or disorder in a system”—that’s the simple definition, sans laws of thermodynamics.

But what interests me about entropy is how it relates to change. Entropy rises, we learned—which means molecules become more disordered—when matter changes from one state to another, like from solid to a liquid.