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Entropy is one of the few quantities in the physical sciences that require a particular direction for time, sometimes called an arrow of time. As one goes "forward" in time, the second law of thermodynamics says, the entropy of an isolated system can increase, but not decrease. Thus, entropy measurement is a way of distinguishing the past from ...
The term entropy is often used in popular language to denote a variety of unrelated phenomena. One example is the concept of corporate entropy as put forward somewhat humorously by authors Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister in their 1987 classic publication Peopleware, a book on growing and managing productive teams and successful software projects ...
This is because the increase of entropy is thought to be related to increase of both correlations between a system and its surroundings [4] and of the overall complexity, under an appropriate definition; [5] thus all increase together with time. Past and future are also psychologically associated with additional notions.
The low- or medium-entropy state would have appeared as a "statistical fluctuation" amid a higher-entropy past and a higher-entropy future. [5] Common theoretical frameworks have been developed in order to explain the origin of the past hypothesis based on inflationary models or the anthropic principle.
Price takes a time-symmetric view and comes to the conclusion that the mystery of the second law is not the question of the why entropy increases, but why entropy was low at the beginning of the universe. Taking a time-symmetric view, he then speculates that entropy may decrease again, reaching a minimum at the end of the universe.
Entropy is a scientific concept, most commonly associated with states of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty. The term and the concept are used in diverse fields, ...
It is in this sense that entropy is a measure of the energy in a system that cannot be used to do work. An irreversible process degrades the performance of a thermodynamic system, designed to do work or produce cooling, and results in entropy production. The entropy generation during a reversible process is zero. Thus entropy production is a ...
The relationship between entropy, order, and disorder in the Boltzmann equation is so clear among physicists that according to the views of thermodynamic ecologists Sven Jorgensen and Yuri Svirezhev, "it is obvious that entropy is a measure of order or, most likely, disorder in the system."