Dear Many, Many Authors...

[branchandroot]

...Entropy is not destruction. Entropy is gridlock.

Now, if that's your idea of the ultimate undesirable, which must be fought by all living beings with the utmost of their hearts and souls, fine! Go for it, write your little heart out, I'll probably even buy it just to see it. But the little physicist in the back of my head is crying pathetically into her beer over the sheer inaccuracy with which "entropy" is too often used, and every time she thinks about how widespread this bad press is getting she wails in a truly heartrending fashion.

Gridlock, got it?

Only slightly sarcastic love and kisses,
Branch

Comments

[seagull2eagle]

Great summary. I like that way to describe it!

[branchandroot]

*hearts* It's honestly the best way I ever found to think of the concept.

[stormyseasons]

....Gridlock... Still not a bad metaphor for the sort of discussion that entropy gets pigeonholed in as source of evil for, I guess. Just need to shuffle some of those desciptors and offshoot ideas...

[branchandroot]

*wry* Yeah, at least this might make people more likely to admit the sheer anthropocentrism at the heart of "entropy = evil". It totally sucks for the people trying to get to work!

[taithe]

*baffled* I've never heard that entropy is evil/destructive. The only definition of entropy I know of is that it's a measure of disorder in a system/availability of energy to do work. More disorder = greater entropy. At least that's what was taught in AP Chemistry. >.> I can see how people could jump from disorder/chaos to evil/destructive, but that's adding a moralistic value onto something that's a scientific measurement. Which.. erm, okay.

I'm a little confused on your analogy to gridlock. Is there a decrease in the availability of energy to do work (aka move in traffic)?

[branchandroot]

*snorts* I'm tempted to blame Diane Duane, but I don't know if she's the one who actually started it. I am reasonably sure she's the one who's popularized it the most. It's a deeply anthropic take on the whole concept, based on the essential idea that it's bad /for people/ if the universe "runs down".

The corollary concept most often mentioned is the "heat death" of the universe, and since that pretty much involves all energy being too equalized across any given volume to 'move' in any kind of reaction... gridlock. The ultimate equilibrium, and only frustrating from the point of view of an entity that really, really wants to move.

[7veils]

I always understood entropy to mean stagnation or inertia. I guess that would be a way of describing gridlock.

[branchandroot]

Hmm. In any dis-equal system, it's a tendency to dispersion, to increased variety of interactions; so not so much the early stages. The ultimate end of entropy, though, is (theoretically) perfect equilibrium across the entire system with no further movement of energy or alteration of state possible. There's no "downhill" or "open" energetic state available any more, unless more of something is added from outside the system. I suppose you could call that stagnation, though the connotation doesn't quite /feel/ right to me.