✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

What is Entropy? | Azimuth

johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com · 5,803 words · saved by 1 readers

An alternative title would be 91 Tweets on Entropy, but people convinced me that title wouldn’t age well: in decade or two few people may remember what ‘tweets’ were. Here is the foreword, which explains the basic idea. Once there was a thing called Twitter, where people exchanged short messages called ‘tweets’. While it had its flaws, I came to like it and eventually decided to teach a short course on entropy in the form of tweets. This little book is a slightly expanded version of that course. It’s easy to wax poetic about entropy, but what is it? I claim it’s the amount of information we don’t know about a situation, which in principle we could learn. But how can we make this idea precise and quantitative? To focus the discussion I decided to tackle a specific puzzle: why does hydrogen gas at room temperature and pressure have an entropy corresponding to about 23 unknown bits of information per molecule? This gave me an excuse to explain these subjects: • information • Shannon entro

What is Entropy? | Azimuth Azimuth Home About What is Entropy? I wrote a little book about entropy; here’s the current draft: • What is Entropy? If you see typos and other mistakes, or have trouble understanding things, please let me know! An alternative title would be 92 Tweets on Entropy , but people convinced me that title wouldn’t age well: in decade or two few people may remember what ‘tweets’ were. Here is the foreword, which explains the basic idea. Foreword Once there was a thing called Twitter, where people exchanged short messages called ‘tweets&#82

Explore this link on the map →

related reading