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!

[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...

[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)?

[7veils]

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