Richard Feynman gives the best analogy:

Imagine you have been swimming. You pick up a towel to dry yourself, but the towel is wet. You try other towels but they are all wet. To start with, some of them are more wet than you and some are less wet.

Eventually the wetness gets evenly distributed around you and the towels, so the share of wetness is now evenly spread around and you cannot get any drier.

Similarly, energy can get evenly spread around such that it is not available to do work anymore.

Entropy is a measure of the even-spread of energy, the "disorder" of having it all spread about evenly.

It also corresponds to "area" somehow in Stephen Hawking's analysis of blackholes.

In the mind of a Chess player; there is an analogy to this. A particular game-plan may be achieved by a variety of move-sequences. But at some stage in the game that plan may disintegrate, as the various moves have all got "spread about" other game-plans that distracted him along the way.

O.K.?

-dolphin

• Disorder a misnomer - yanniru - March 22, 2002 - 14:18 UTC
  • fair enough - dolphin - March 23, 2002 - 03:29 UTC
  • he's deconstructing physics - carefuluniverse - March 23, 2002 - 04:03 UTC
    • Can't believe he said that. Even my reply was dumb - carefuluniverse - March 23, 2002 - 04:17 UTC
      • You have a low entropy mind - yanniru - March 23, 2002 - 19:44 UTC
        • You are becoming evil - occupant - March 24, 2002 - 06:38 UTC
          • Evil is the reverse of live - yanniru - March 25, 2002 - 14:35 UTC
    • equality is more orderly than inequality of distribution. - yanniru - March 23, 2002 - 19:59 UTC
      • try modelling a brain or computer chip with "equal distibution" - occupant - March 23, 2002 - 20:42 UTC
        • Brains require low entropy - yanniru - March 25, 2002 - 14:17 UTC
          • I just said that a couple of posts ago. - occupant - March 25, 2002 - 16:43 UTC
• regarding chess....I have a dopey point to make - occupant - March 23, 2002 - 05:43 UTC