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An equivalent definition of entropy is the expected value of the self-information of a variable. [1] Two bits of entropy: In the case of two fair coin tosses, the information entropy in bits is the base-2 logarithm of the number of possible outcomes — with two coins there are four possible outcomes, and two bits of entropy. Generally ...
Despite the foregoing, there is a difference between the two quantities. The information entropy Η can be calculated for any probability distribution (if the "message" is taken to be that the event i which had probability p i occurred, out of the space of the events possible), while the thermodynamic entropy S refers to thermodynamic probabilities p i specifically.
The definition of information entropy is expressed in terms of a discrete set of probabilities so that: = = where the base of the logarithm determines the units (for example, the binary logarithm corresponds to bits).
Boltzmann's equation—carved on his gravestone. [1]In statistical mechanics, Boltzmann's equation (also known as the Boltzmann–Planck equation) is a probability equation relating the entropy, also written as , of an ideal gas to the multiplicity (commonly denoted as or ), the number of real microstates corresponding to the gas's macrostate:
Owing to these early developments, the typical example of entropy change ΔS is that associated with phase change. In solids, for example, which are typically ordered on the molecular scale, usually have smaller entropy than liquids, and liquids have smaller entropy than gases and colder gases have smaller entropy than hotter gases.
In the coin example, if you start out with a very unlikely macrostate (like all heads, for example with zero entropy) and begin flipping one coin at a time, the entropy of the macrostate will start increasing, just as thermodynamic entropy does, and after a while, the coins will most likely be at or near that 50–50 macrostate, which has the ...
In this context, either an information-theoretical measure, such as functional clusters (Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi's functional clustering model and dynamic core hypothesis (DCH) [47]) or effective information (Tononi's integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness [48] [49] [50]), is defined (on the basis of a reentrant process ...
However, the entropy can only be a constant if the system is in the highest possible state of disorder, such as a gas that always was, and always will be, uniformly spread out in its container. The existence of a thermodynamic arrow of time implies that the system is highly ordered in one time direction only, which would by definition be the ...